The politics of love: Marriage migration and governance in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom

At a time when migration is increasingly reduced to an object of state security, POL-LOV focuses on the legal, political, and, most importantly, affective relationship between state institutions, especially those in charge of migration, and migrants who are married to European citizens and who seek to regularize their legal status.

Through the paired case of Spain and Italy (southern border countries in the EU) and the United Kingdom (a country that recently left the EU), POL- LOV addresses the following empirical research questions: How do state bureaucracies scrutinize, evaluate, and quantify “love” in their decision-making processes about marriage migration?

How do marriage migrants, especially women, experience these bureaucratic encounters?

By addressing these research questions, POL- LOV pursues two main objectives: 1) advancing social science theorizing about the role of emotions, especially “moral emotions” , in how state institutions operate; and 2) improving our understanding of how the everyday encounters of marriage migrants with state bureaucracies affect meanings and practices and performances of romantic love across borders.POL-LOV is highly original and ambitious in its research design as it develops an interactional perspective focused on the relationships between the state and marriage migrants .

The methodology involves capturing state moral emotions through the classic anthropological tools of ethnography: in-depth interviews, participant observation and semi- structured interviews.

In practice, this means interviewing policymakers, lawyers and officials in embassies, police headquarters and migration offices.

Since there is a methodological focus on both sides of the encounters (state bureaucrats and migrants) I will also do participant observation and in- depth interviews with marriage migrants and its partners and see how they navigate state suspicion and scrutiny.