Digital media are widely recognised as essential to the maintenance of transnational families. To date, most accounts have focused on the role of digital media practices as producing and sustaining transnational relationships, through, for example, the practices of ‘digital kinning’. In this article, we extend that body of work by drawing attention to the specific role of the emotions that are circulated through digital media interactions and practices. We use data from ethnographic interviews with older migrant adults to consider how people who fled civil wars and resettled in Australia bridge the distances between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our analysis draws attention to the circulation of affect, arguing that it is the capacity of digital media to circulate emotions and support affective economies that gives substance to and defines the surfaces and boundaries of transnational families, and constitutes the mutuality of being that underpins familyhood at a distance.

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To date, older adults have received little attention in the newly emerging technological narratives of transnational religion. This is surprising, given the strong association of later life with spiritual and religious engagement, but it likely reflects the ongoing assumption that older adults are technophobic or technologically incompetent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with older Sinhalese Buddhist migrants from Sri Lanka, living in Melbourne, this paper explores the digital articulations of transnational religion that arise from older migrants' uses of digital media. We focus on how engagements with digital media enable older Sinhalese to respond to an urgent need to accumulate merit in later life, facilitating their temporal strategies for ageing as migrants. We argue that these digital articulations transform both the religious imaginary and the religious practices that validate and legitimize a life well-lived.