‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

Marling & Evans,King's Stanley and Ebley Mills,Gloucestershire

Abstract

The economic causes of European emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century enjoy an established historiography, which considers many aspects of the pre-industrial economy from agriculture to the collapse of traditional industries. This paper examines the link between pre-industrial home textile manufacture and emigration from the German south-west. It draws on data from communities and households in the state of Württemberg, and finds that pre-industrial textile production was not a major determinant of migration patterns in the nineteenth century; instead, the localised rise and fall of textile work was influenced by the availability of emigration pathways, an inversion of results seen elsewhere.     

THE DORKING EMIGRATION SCHEME OF 1832

Abstract

Statistical records of British emigration for the I9th century are very poor. Therefore it is important that all information that can be produced on assisted emigration should be considered to enhance our knowledge of the process of migration. In I832 the Dorking Emigration Scheme facilitated emigration of a group of poor rural labourers and their families from Surrey to make a new life in Canada. These were people dependent for support on parish relief. This article discusses this scheme in relation to British emigration policy in the years I8I5-30. Investigating assisted emigration at a local level enables an assessment of the viability of Wilmont Horton’s claim that one great cause of distress at the time was redundancy of population.It is evident in Dorking that emigration was seen as a way to alleviate the growing problem of rural unemployment. But was it just a scheme for ‘shovelling out paupers’, or are there other important factors that must be considered?     

Heritage,transnational memory and the re-diasporisation of Scotland

For a long time in Scotland, diasporic – and popular – heritage with its imaginary emphasising kinship, stylised images and ritualised practices was either overlooked or discredited. The term ‘diaspora’ itself to define Scotland’s vast overseas population has been scrutinised for its usefulness. However, since devolution, it has gained currency in public discourse and policies and has led to the ‘re-diasporisation’ of Scotland. Yet, the ‘diaspora’ had long been identified as an important niche market in relation to heritage perceived as an economic resource. This article explores the changing perception and place of diasporic heritage in Scotland since the 1970s through two case studies. Focusing on processes of remembrance of nineteenth-century Highland emigration materialised through monuments and museums, it highlights the conflicting and shifting relationships that different communities – home and diasporic – have with their past, place and the meanings ascribed to them. The transnational memories increasingly promoted in Scotland act as a means of re-energising nationhood and initiating revisions and re-reading of popular and diasporic culture.     

Furry families: making a human–dog family through home

The last fifty years have seen dogs increasingly drawn into the home as family members. While the health and social implications of these relatings have been the focus of much research, the everyday practices by which more-than-human families are constituted have received little attention. The paper draws on interviews with, and diaries recorded by, new dog owners in 2006–2007. It highlights three ways that dogs became family in and through the home. First, describing dogs as ‘furry children’, participants emphasised the time spent caring for dogs. Second, engaging with dogs as ‘pack animals’, participants discussed an inherent ‘otherness’ that shaped family relations, and reconceptualised the human-family as a pack relation. Third, the individual agency of dogs was recognised as shaping family and home. However, these familial relatings were often tenuous as humans were faced with the particular character and ‘otherness’ of dogs. While the majority experienced a strengthening of family ties following the introduction of a dog, a number of individuals discussed the divisive impact of this experience. The paper extends debates about family and home, broadening family beyond biological relations to include more-than-human relationships forged through cohabitation and interaction.     

Parents and children in Second World War Germany: an inter-generational perspective on wartime separation

This article discusses how the relationship between parents and their children were affected by the second world war in Germany. With fathers away from home for often as long as a decade, many children grew up without a father being physically present. The current historiography suggests that wartime separation caused a crisis in the family. But did the prolonged periods of time apart and the separate experiences of husbands at the Front and wives and children at home really destabilize family relationships? This article questions such a picture of families in ruin. It argues that family relationships were far more resilient in the face of wartime separation than has previously been credited. Indeed, it reveals the importance of children in keeping mothers and fathers focused on getting through the war. It further contends that, even from afar, fathers continued to play an important role in their children’s lives. And this in turn revises our understanding of the situation facing reuniting families.     

‘Astronaut families’: transnational lives of middle-class Taiwanese married women in Canada

Despite increasing interest in the study of Taiwanese migrants, the underlying concept and methodology remain gender-blind. Invisible from the Census are the women who emigrated with their husbands, leaving behind their adopted country to make a living elsewhere. Most of the ‘astronaut wives’ studied in this research are middle-class women who had careers in Taiwan prior to emigration, but became full-time home-makers upon arrival in Canada, the host country. The major questions raised for this research are: (1) What are the circumstances of migration for Taiwanese families? (2) How do Taiwanese ‘dan qi ma ma’/‘astronaut wives’ cope with the challenges of the new environment? (3) How do they relate to their husbands, children, and the Taiwanese community during the process of adaptation? Thirty women from ‘astronaut’ families were interviewed in Toronto and Vancouver in 2005 and 2006, using a semi-structured questionnaire, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation methods. It was found that migration has not liberated them from the traditional familial roles in Taiwan, but has however enabled them to build new social networks that play an important role in their new lives.     

Children’s independence: a conceptual argument for connecting the conduct of everyday life and learning in Finland

This paper discusses children’s independence as a conceptual framework for exploring how independence in children’s everyday life relates to learning in the Finnish context. The framework is articulated using the conduct of everyday life as a theoretical base and focuses on the sociocultural aspects of informal daily life such as periods when children are at home without direct adult supervision as potentially important learning environments. Independence is also linked to discourses on educational success, self-regulated learning and children’s independent mobility. Discussion is supported by results from a survey conducted in Finland exploring parental perceptions of their children’s level of independence and children’s spatial movement and routines. The conceptual arguments made and preliminary findings summarized point to children’s independence in the conduct of everyday life as an additional factor to consider when exploring the impact of sociocultural factors on the development of self-regulated learners.     

Charity and Justice in Global Poverty Relief

Peter Singer's message in One World: The Ethics of Globalisation is that we must now consider the whole of the world and all of its peoples our home. The penultimate chapter ‘One Community’ argues that there are no good reasons why those individuals who have the means should not donate to organisations that address the problems of global poverty relief. This, however, is not an adequate ethic; it does not provide the foundation we need in order to construct a sustainably just world order. Singer's recommendations may well lead to the construction of a world in which there is a significant reduction in the level of global poverty. However, Singer's route to poverty reduction is via charity, not justice. Global justice is not the same as individualist practical ethics, even if the latter is applied on a global scale. Singer's concerns for long-term global poverty relief will be better served by an agenda that promotes global institutional change, rather than one that is limited to hoping against donation fatigue among the world's affluent.     

After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.     

Where dogs,ghosts and lions roam: learning from mobile ethnographies on the journey from school

This paper draws on mobility research conducted with children in three countries: Ghana, Malawi and South Africa. It has two interlinked aims: to highlight the potential that mobile interviews can offer in research with young people, especially in research contexts where the main focus is on mobility and its impacts, and to contribute empirical evidence regarding the significance of everyday mobility to young people's lives and future life chances in sub-Saharan Africa. During the pilot phase of our research project on children, transport and mobility, the authors undertook walks home from school with teenage children1 We use the terms children and ‘young people’ interchangeably in this paper. When we asked young people aged ca. 12–18 years from the three countries at our Malawi inception workshop about terminology, they expressed no concern about the use of the term ‘child’ for people in their teens. View all notes in four different research sites: three remote rural, one peri-urban. As the children walked (usually over a distance of around 5 km) their stories of home, of school and of the environment in-between, gradually unfolded. The lived experiences narrated during these journeys offer considerable insights into the daily lives, fears and hopes of the young people concerned, and present a range of issues for further research as our study extends into its main phase.     

‘You said “home” but we don’t have a house’ – children’s lived rights and politics in an asylum centre in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This study explores children’s lived rights and articulated politics in the context of housing underpinned by their lived experiences in an asylum centre in Sweden. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the children’s articulated standpoints, where well-being is connected to having a home, and their lived experiences of lacking conditions for both house and home at the asylum centre. This discrepancy enables demonstration of the children’s articulated politics, as they criticize conditions, practices and relational aspects they experience as constraining their well-being at the asylum centre. Thereby, the children themselves identify the structural denial of their right to conditions for well-being and adequate housing. They also express what conditions for well-being should be accessible to them, which is interpreted here as their making rights claims when their formal rights are not fulfilled.     

“侨乡社会资本”解读：以当代福建跨境移民潮为例

本文以当代福建跨境移民潮为研究实例,提出并梳理"侨乡社会资本"命题的理论意义,力图赋予侨乡文化以新的理论视角.本文提出跨国民间网络是侨乡社会资本的基本载体,跨国互惠期望是侨乡社会资本的运作机制,跨国链接增殖是侨乡社会资本的效益特性.侨乡通过已定居移民、信息网络和人情互惠提高移民操作的成功率及获益率的能力,是一种社会资本.这种资本有望转化为经济资本、文化资本乃至政治资本,但这种转化只有在如愿跨境输出人力资源的条件下才能实现.侨乡社会资本的特殊性体现在它与发达国家劳动力市场的链接,其效益通过其投资对象--"移民"进入发达国家劳动力市场而实现转换与增值.当移民作为一种投资途径并且存在有效运作空间时,移民行为必然生生不息,而侨乡社会资本正是通过一次次诸如此类的跨国运作不断增殖.     

Capturing the geography of children’s active and sedentary behaviours at home: the HomeSPACE measurement tool

ABSTRACT

Children spend much of their time at home, indoors and sedentary. This study reports on the development, exploratory factor analysis, validity and reliability of the HomeSPACE Instrument. The instrument assesses features of the home physical environment that influence children’s sedentary behaviour and physical activity, and the family influences that create this environment. The space and equipment audit achieved good to excellent criterion validity and test-retest reliability for equipment, outdoor features and home design measures (Study 1, n?=?36 parents). Family influence scales showed acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability (Study 2, n?=?96 parents). Factor analysis highlighted fifteen scales to assess the importance, preferences and supportiveness of the home environment for activity. The HomeSPACE Instrument extends previous tools to provide a valid and reliable assessment of home influences on children’s sedentary behaviour and physical activity, that is adaptable for varying home physical environments.     

CHILDREN OF THE STREETS: RESCUE,REFORM AND THE FAMILY IN LEEDS, 1850-1914

Abstract

Attempts to rescue and reform destitute, orphaned and street children - the ‘waifs and strays’ of the new urban environment - led to a proliferation of children’s homes and welfare organizations in the second half of the I9th century. Local studies enable us to build up a detailed profile of the individuals involved from a grass-roots level. Using a study of Leeds, this article sketches the motives and aspirations of, on the one hand, philanthropists and, on the other, of parents and children enmeshed in what was a complex and ad hoc system. ‘Welfare’ was not simply a rigid mechanism that was imposed on the urban poor; from a local perspective it can be viewed as a relationship, albeit an unequal one. The institution of the children’s home could provide an important strategy for family survival in a world of limited choices.     

Towards transnational gender identity. A case study of Polish children growing up in Norway

This article focuses on migration experiences of Polish children living in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world – in Norway. Empirically, the article is based on 30 semi-structured interviews with children aged 6–13 who were born in Poland and migrated with their parents to Norway after Poland’s accession to the European Union. Observation of their rooms during the interview also contributed to the study. We discuss ways in which gender roles, practices and identities are shaped by mobility in the Polish-Norwegian context and how ideas about girls/women and boys/men are affected by the migration experience. The article seeks to explore children’s experiences in the two highly contrasting and differentiated contexts: one where the children were socialized and the other where they then moved, the former being highly traditional in terms of gender, the latter emphasizing gender equality. We argue that the Polish home is the most important site for the formation of the traditional gender identity, while the Norwegian school and peer group are the most important sites for the formation of the modern gender identity. This situation causes tension and ambivalence with regard to children’s gender identities across a number of different spaces and spheres of their lives.     

Spaces of safety and more-than-safety in women’s refuges in England

Many women escaping domestic violence spend time in women’s refuges (shelters) whilst they deal with practical and emotional issues in a safe space. Such spaces are therefore an important place for women’s recovery and empowerment after abuse, but are also complex spaces of displacement. In the UK, there is a wide range of refuge providers, and different models of accommodation and support provision in refuges. Differences, such as those between refuges providing self-contained flats and those with communal facilities and communal activities, can provide very different experiences for the women and their children who live there. In addition, there have been shifts in the policy context of refuges, and increasingly individualistic models of service provision. This article explores women’s refuges as spaces of safety, and of more-than-safety, drawing on interviews with women in the Midlands, South Coast and London, and on participatory creative groupwork with women in the Midlands and South Coast. Refuge spaces require, but also enable, contact and encounter between women; and communal living and group processes can enable interaction and collaboration between women. The article draws on women’s words and images to exemplify these experiences, concluding that the safe spaces of women’s refuges can enable processes of more-than-safety. These collective processes begin to counteract the isolation of abuse and to help prepare women for their lives after the refuge.     

Embodied and sensory encounters: death,bereavement and remembering in children’s family and personal lives

ABSTRACT

Whilst children’s ‘significant’ death and bereavement experiences have received considerable attention as constituting a family trouble, this article examines children’s rarely considered perspectives on encounters with death, bereavement and remembrance which are intrinsic to family and personal lives. Family homes are a site for younger children’s previously unexplored embodied, sensory and material engagements with death, bereavement and remembrance. These engagements occur through children’s treasuring and displaying of keepsakes and photographs, and through children bearing witness to dying pets and deceased bodies. Via these temporally and spatially located practices, familial and cultural values are passed on to children, family is constituted, and children are embedded in a broader kinship group. The article illuminates how children vividly recount experiences of death, bereavement and remembering, invoking ‘home’ and other private spaces as places in which death is experienced and retold.     

‘Social Exclusion’ Discourse and Chronic Poverty: A South African Case Study

This article questions the export of ‘social exclusion’ discourse to the field of development and poverty studies. It considers the findings of ongoing research into chronic poverty in the Western Cape district of Ceres, one of the centres of the South African deciduous fruit export industry. It explores the links between the livelihood options of poor people and processes of global integration, agro‐food restructuring and the modernization of paternalist farming styles. In this context the concept of ‘social exclusion’ is of only limited utility, and has significant disadvantages. Although it has the potential to focus attention on the disabling effects of poverty, its most common usage often fails to capture how poverty can flow not only from exclusion but also from processes of integration into broader economic and social networks. The author argues that these are better captured by the notion of ‘adverse incorporation’, and calls for a more cautious approach to the modernizing myths and moralizing narratives that shape policy debates.     

Children’s participation: moving from the performative to the social

The body of work on children’s participation has been valuable in asserting its importance. Nonetheless, participation is a contested concept and key challenges arise relating to its emphasis on age and voice, its focus on socialising the participative responsible citizen, and its failure to sufficiently recognise the range of participatory activities of children in their everyday lives. This article presents findings of a study on children’s experiences of participation in their homes, schools, and communities including the importance of the relational context, how everyday interactions rather than ‘performative’ formal structures for participation are valued by children and how their participation is limited by adult processes based on notions of competence and voice. It concludes with an argument for recognising and facilitating children’s informal and social participation as well as new forms of democratic processes being developed by children to address the possibility of governance and over-responsibilisation of children.