Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change shows how arranged marriage practices have been undergoing transformation as a result of global and other processes such as the revolution of digital technology, democratization of transnational mobility, or shifting significance of patriarchal power structures. The ethnographically informed chapters not only highlight how the gendered and intergenerational politics of agency, autonomy, choice, consent, and intimacy work in the contexts of partner choice and management of marriage, but also point out that arranged marriages are increasingly varied and they can be reshaped, reinvented, and reinterpreted flexibly in response to individual, family, religious, class, ethnic, and other desires, needs, and constraints. The authors convincingly demonstrate that a nuanced investigation of the reasons, complex dynamics, and consequences of arranged marriages offers a refreshing analytical lens that can significantly contribute to a deeper understanding of other phenomena such as globalization, modernization, and international migration as well as patriarchal value regimes, intergenerational power imbalances, and gendered subordination and vulnerability of women. 

Between Care and Criminality examines social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in a period of intensified border control in Melbourne, Australia. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the effort to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law that criminalized the practice. Disproportionately targeted toward Muslim migrant communities, prevention efforts were tasked with making the family relations and marital practices of migrants objects of policy knowledge in the name of care and community empowerment. Through tracing the everyday ways that direct service providers, police, and advocates learned to identify imminent marriages and at-risk individuals, this book reveals how the domain of social welfare becomes the new frontier where the settler colonial state judges good citizenship. In doing so, it invites social welfare to reflect on how migrant conceptions of familial care, personhood, and mutual obligation become structured by the violence of displacement, borders, and conditional citizenship.