This book places family at the centre of discussions about migration and migrant life, seeing migrants not as isolated individuals, but as relational beings whose familial connections influence their migration decisions and trajectories.
Particularly prioritising the voices of children and young people, the book investigates everyday family practices to illuminate how migrants and their significant others do family, parenting or being a child within a family, both transnationally and locally. Themes covered include undocumented status, unaccompanied children’s asylum seeking, adolescents” « dark sides », second generation return migration, home-making, belonging, nationality/citizenship, peer relations and kinship, and good mothering. The book deploys a wide range of methodological approaches and tools (multi-sited ethnographies, participant observation, interviews and creative methods) to capture the ordinary, spatially extended and interpersonal dynamics of migrant family lives.
Drawing on a range of cross-cutting disciplines, geographical areas and diversity of levels and types of experiences on part of the editors and authors, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of migration, childhood, youth and family studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction : Family practices in migration : Everyday lives and relationships
Martha Montero-Sieburth and Rosa Mas Giralt
Part I : Personal communities of migrant children and youth
1. Experiences of childhood ‘illegality’ for 1.5 generation Latinx youth in Texas : ‘Never tell anyone about your status’
Cynthia V. Cueva-Luna, Proteknôn
2.Case studies across national boundaries : underscoring nuanced factors in migrant peer youth groups
Martha Montero-Sieburth and Domiziana Turcatti
3.: Honduran children’s views on migrating to Barcelona : Narratives of violence, hardship and family strategies
Miquel Martorell-Faus and Silvia Carrasco
4. Portuguese migrant descendant returnees from Canada : the role of family in processes of return
João Sardinha
Part II : Doing family in migration : fluid practices, affiliations and intimacy roles
5.: Home without family, family without home : Young migrants’ experiences of home and relationships in the city of Brussels
Shannon Damery
6. My mother’s country : Relational nationality and transnational family ties
Betty de Hart
7. Mothers who cross borders : Family care networks in the homes of immigrant mothers
Ana Lucía Hernández Cordero
8. Family narratives and moving intimacies in an Indian diaspora
Sara Bonfanti
Part III : Participant-centred and relational approaches in researching migrants’ personal lives
9. Narratives of motherhood : Seeking asylum
Kate Smith and Kelly Lockwood
10. Reflections on a community based participatory research project with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children
Sam Carr, Justin Rogers and Caroline Hickman
11. The researcher as a shapeshifter in the field : Challenges in doing fieldwork with transnational migrant families
Esra Demirkol Colosio
12.Transforming the Pause of Life for Female Asylum Seekers into Action : Empowerment through Dance and Movement
Hana Alhadi
Concluding thoughts on family practices in migration
Rosa Mas Giralt, Noemi Garcia-Arjona and Martha Montero-Sieburth
Index