This new special issue was guest edited by Emilia Araujo, Mieke Schrooten and Carlos Barros and it is published in the Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies.
In this issue, the editors present eight contributions that engage with the analytical concerns outlined above in different but complementary ways. Instead of approaching transnationality from a single disciplinary or methodological angle, these articles collectively explore the intersection between culture, politics, and lived experience, showing how transnational configurations are articulated through everyday practices, mediated representations, and institutional structures. These experiences unfold through memory and imagined futures, and are rooted in histories that continue to shape contemporary forms of life. As such, the contributions gathered here intersect with the concepts of transnationality, vulnerability, and care, while also addressing the role of temporality in these different domains, as something given, negotiated, deferred, and returned through relationships and contexts. Taken together, these contributions can be read through various analytical entry points.
These contributions show that transnational lives are produced and negotiated at the intersection of relational dynamics, temporal structures, cultural representations, and institutional frameworks. They also show that vulnerability is not a marginal or exceptional condition, but a constitutive dimension of living between places, emerging from the tensions and misalignments that characterise these configurations (Walsh, 2020).
This special issue advances an analytical understanding of transnational life that transcends strictly spatial approaches and foregrounds the interaction among culture, vulnerability, temporality, relationality, and power. It invites readers to engage with the complexity of lives lived between places and to consider how such experiences challenge and reconfigure existing conceptual frameworks. It should contribute to ongoing debates in transnational, cultural, and migration studies and opens new avenues of research on vulnerability, temporality, and cultural forms of life across borders.
TRANSNATIONAL LIVES: CULTURE, VULNERABILITY, AND CARE ACROSS BORDERS
Emilia Araujo, Mieke Schrooten, Carlos Barros
Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais / Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2026, e026011