Article Mother, grandmother, migrant: Elder translocality and the renegotiation of household roles in Cambodia Sabina Lawreniuk and Laurie Parsons King’s College London, UK Abstract This paper explores the participation of elder members of Cambodian households in translocal livelihoods. Based on linked, rural–urban fieldwork rooted in a Phnom Penh garment worker enclave, it highlights three aspects of elder translocality in Cambodia. First, it shows that the logistics of older people’s migrations are not predicated directly on physical mobility or lifecycle, as often assumed in the literature, but that these are merely two amongst a variety of factors that instigate nested, longer and shorter term cycles. Secondly, it explores how older members of migrant households engage agentively in ‘supportive’ migrant roles such as childcare, as opposed to passively complying with the needs of their families. Finally, the paper demonstrates how elder members of translocal households – recognising their changing economic and ecological environment – utilise the performance of these duties as a means of retaining status in a marketising context. Keywords Elder migration, altruism, migration as protest, Cambodia Introduction Maxim Gorky’s seminal revolutionary novel ‘Mother’ (1906) is the tale of a beaten and downtrodden widow from a factory labouring community who, though the activities of her son, finds meaning and strength in the class struggles of her era. Its core message – uncharacteristically liberal in early 20th-century Russia – was that in times of social change even a society’s most marginal members have the power to effect change through altruism and sacrifice. Status, otherwise put, is not fixed by age, but earned by matching ability to circumstance. Whilst the intervening years have seen such empowering sentiments decay to platitudes in the face of structuralism, post-structuralism, and the cultural turn, the extent to which their object – the eponymous homebound mother – remains excised from the geographic and economic literature on contemporary factory work in the developing world is nevertheless Corresponding author: Laurie Parsons, 19a Stanley Road, London N15 3HB, UK. Email: laurie.parsons@kcl.ac.uk Environment and Planning A 0(0) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17704197 journals.sagepub.com/home/epn