Moving countries: Belongings as central for realizing the affective relation between international shifts and localized micro movements

Transitions as a particular concrete practice across countries have been extensively studied from a sociological perspective, revealing that children who live mobile lives grow up between cultures and may have issues with identity formation, belonging, rootlessness and unresolved issues of loss and grief. However, we know very little about the small day to day movements of families in everyday life as important micro movements, where the demands of moving countries are realized as emotionally charged events. The focus of this paper is on the multiple transitions of an Australian expatriate family moving from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia. In drawing upon the concept of perezhivanie, this paper presents new understandings of transitions as a dialectical relation between international and micro movements where children's belongings act as an important cultural tool for supporting the international move. A new perspective on transitions as emotionally charged events is theorized, contributing to understandings of the concept of transition as an affective relation between an international shift and a micro movement during the process of embedding personal belongings into the new local context.