When a Child Dies Abroad: A Mother's Reflections on the Bureaucracy of Transnational Loss

Abstract

This auto-ethnographic field reflection explores the bureaucratic and biopolitical dimensions of transnational child loss. Drawing on the author's lived experience navigating medical and legal systems following her son's death abroad, the piece interrogates how institutional actors exert control over migrant families during moments of extreme vulnerability. Engaging concepts of biopower, necropolitics, and state surveillance, this narrative illustrates how grief becomes entangled in administrative violence. By centering embodied knowledge, the article challenges dominant paradigms of authority and care in humanitarian and migration regimes, offering insight into the ethics of global parenthood and loss.

Keywords

autoethnography migrant families transnational death

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