In Transit: Sojourning and Labouring in a Transnational Catholic Mission

This article examines the transnational mobility of Catholic nuns from Kerala, India, to different regions of the world for mission work. Combining narratives from four field sites in Italy, Peru, England, and Iraq, the article explores how religious mobility can be understood as an extension of monastic labour and how transnational migration shapes the processes of religious subject formation through this labour. Delineating from frameworks that treat migration as a rupture from religious life or as a primarily economic event, the article understands mobility itself as an extension of monastic religious subjectivity. Following the frameworks of Valentina Napolitano (2015) and Andrea Muehlebach (2012), the article argues that the Catholic Church operates as a transnational infrastructure of mobility. It facilitates the circulation of religious labour through its networks, institutional affiliations, and historically established connections between mission regions. This article examines the religious subject as emerging at the intersection of religious vocation and contemporary regimes of transnational labour and how it produces effects that augment forms of immaterial labour, rooted in a neo-liberal morality. Further, the article analyses how contemporary routes of religious and labour migration are shaped by colonial missionary infrastructures. These infrastructures established continuing institutional and geographical connections while also opening pathways into the longer histories of gendered labour migration from the region.