Linked Life‐Course: Mapping the Intertwined Trajectories of Skilled Australian Migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACT Studies of highly‐skilled migrants have often focused on their status as privileged and hypermobile individuals widely lauded for their economic contributions. Equally deserving of attention however are the other facets of migration encompassing the imaginative, affective and emotional dimensions, its social, cultural, political and power linkages as well as obligations and frictions. Drawing on the ‘linked lives’ approach to researching migration over the life‐course, we pay close attention to the interdependent (a)synchronous relationships between events, persons and their relations across three life‐stages of 15 Australian transnational migrants in Singapore. Conducted from late 2019 to early 2020 with informal follow‐up via social media and other means post‐COVID, the study shows how highly‐skilled migration and family life are mutually constitutive. As participants negotiate migration decisions—to stay, leave, return, move again, or embark on transnational circulation—in juggling parallel careers, opportunities, family obligations and migration aspirations, (a)synchronicities and interconnections often come into play most prominently at critical junctures in the life‐course. These junctures emphasized the bidirectional effects of linked lives and manifest both conscious and/or (in)voluntary efforts to (un)link lives in pursuit of specific outcomes.