Although there is a great degree of heterogeneity across and within regions, the last three decades have been characterized by delays in women’s age at first marriage as well as increases in cohabitation, separation or divorce, and non-marriage. New educational, economic, and social opportunities for women across the world partly explain this global trend, as do other shifts and reordering of norms under late capitalism that deemphasize the centrality of marriage in many places. One arena in which marriage continues to be centered and emphasized, however, is in migration policy. Drawing from her current ethnographic research on declining marriage rates in contemporary Italy and her ongoing research on the intersection of marriage and international migration, Dr. Dinah Hannaford examines conflicting perceptions around marriage in the contemporary context of perceived heightened precarity. Marriage is seen by some as preventing the flexibility necessitated by precarity and at the same time, by others, as a strategic hedge against precarity. In unpacking the complex entanglement of marriage, security, flexibility, and mobility, she asks what these apparent contradictions suggest about the future of marriage as a social institution.  

Dr. Dinah Hannaford is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston, in Texas. Her ethnographic work approaches macro-scale political and economic topics through the intimate stories of the domestic and affective lives of individuals. She is the author of Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care (Stanford University Press, 2023), and she is the co-editor, with Dr. Joanna Davidson, of Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World (Rutgers University Press, 2022).