ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

Family practices in migration: everyday lives and relationships

part I|75 pages

Personal communities of migrant children and youth

chapter 1|18 pages

Experiences of childhood ‘illegality’ for 1.5 generation Latinx youth in Texas

‘Never tell anyone about your status’

chapter 2|18 pages

Case studies across national boundaries

Underscoring nuanced factors in migrant peer youth groups

chapter 3|20 pages

Honduran children’s views on migrating to Barcelona

Narratives of violence, hardship and family strategies

chapter 4|17 pages

Portuguese migrant descendant returnees from Canada

The role of family in processes of return

part II|71 pages

Doing family in migration: fluid practices, affiliations and intimacy roles

chapter 5|18 pages

Home without family, family without home

Young migrants’ experiences of home and relationships in the city of Brussels

chapter 6|17 pages

My mother’s country

Relational nationality and transnational family ties

chapter 7|16 pages

Mothers who cross borders

Family care networks in the homes of immigrant mothers

part III|85 pages

Participant-centred and relational approaches in researching migrants’ personal lives