Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA)

An interdisciplinary understanding of attachment and love migration

The unfolding European migration crises illustrates the urgent need for new conceptualizations and discursive frameworks to qualify our understandings of how and to what effect different forms of migration are conceptually and politically governed. While the con­cept of attach­ment functions as an esta­bli­shed organizing tool for love migration to Den­mark, we know very little about the ef­fects of this form of political and social regulation. Likewise, there is a lack of research into the psychological, juridical, and discursive understandings of attachment upon which these re­gu­lations rest. LOVA establishes such know­ledge through the overall research question:

How and to what effect has the concept of attach­ment been operationalized to regulate different forms of love migration in a Danish context from 2000-2020?

Attachment required: Danish migration legislation 2000-2018

Associate professor Mons Bissenbakker (PI)

The project investigates the introduction of the attachment requirement (“tilknytningskravet”) in Danish immigration law and how the lawmakers have defined and ar­gued for the use of attachment as a migra­tion-regulating mechanism. The projects em­piri­cal archive consists of material collected through The Danish Parliament’s publicly ac­ces­­sible web ar­chive and is analy­sed through dis­course analysis and af­fect theory. Reading law proposals addressing the attachment requirement from 2000-2015 the project asks: What changes discursively in the immigration law with the introduction of the attachment requirement and how are we to understand this change? How is national attachment defined by the lawmakers? How is it ones national attachment thought to be (dis)proven? In other words: What does attachment do as a biopolitical tool?

Securing love: The turn to attachment within transnational adoption

Professor Lene Myong

In the past 20 years efforts to secure circuits of attachment within the adoptive family have become central to adoption legislation, post-adoption programs, and adoptive kinship in Denmark. The project explores attachment as a mode of governmentality that construes the adoptee as an exceptional migrant who is imagined to embody a strong potentiality for attachment and assimilation to her white adoptive family and the Danish nation. The project is guided by questions such as: How and to what effect does attachment theory function as a knowledge regime within a Danish context of transnational adoption? And to what extent can normative notions of attachment be said to (un)make relations between adopters, adoptees, and first families? The empirical material consists of Danish governmental reports, educational material, public debates as well as popular science literature addressing attachment (disorder) in relation to adoption.

Mediated love: Attachment in media debates on transnational marriages

Postdoc Asta Smedegaard Nielsen

The project examines media representations of attachment relative to marriage-based family reunifications from 2000 to 2015. The aim is to investigate the specific forms in which media discourses on attachment fold subjects into relations of love and belonging. The empirical material will consist of personalized stories about individuals who have been denied family reunification on the grounds of the attachment requirement, allowing for an investigation into the kinds of love relations that are represented as unjustly hindered by the attachment requirement. In order to uphold analytical sensitivity to differences across media, cases from different media platforms (newspaper, television, online), scopes (national, local), and genres (news, features, media events) will be chosen.

Justify my love: The affective governing of the attachment requirement

PhD-student Sofie Jeholm

The project investigates how the concept of attachment is put into practice in legal decisions concerning family reunification cases and focuses on how the applicants’ attachment to Denmark has been evaluated from the implementation of the attachment requirement in 2000 up until 2015. Through a discursive analysis, the project investigates how attachment is conceptualized and evaluated by the Danish immigration system. The project’s empirical material consists of documented decisions on family reunification applications and the case material related to them collected through the Danish Immigration Service.