Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants based in four EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), this paper explores the relationship between social remittances and transnational mobility. The authors develop a new typology of social remittances as based on the principle of mobility and argue that the degree to which transnational mobility is present in social remittances depends on the agency of the sender and on the nature of the receiving community. The authors further elaborate on such mobility-related concepts as “transnational re-scaling” (in reference to directionality of social remittances) and “translocal celebrity” (in reference to sender’s role in cultural production). Based on a large qualitative dataset, this study also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the local and the global.

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