ABSTRACT
This paper explores the life narratives of young migrants to the UK from Bangladesh who live with distant relatives and 'strangers'. This practice, known in law as 'private fostering', is thought to be relatively widespread in the UK. In this paper I argue that private fostering overseas can be understood as a stretching of long-standing local practices of moving children between families to secure new networks, to avoid social shame, or to extend a child's education or training. Through these practices we can see the care of children as multi-dimensional, involving not only love or nurture, but also forging their sociality in broader terms. I suggest that this stretching is an effect of globalisation which has extended familial and ‘fictive’ kin networks of care over time and across space. While many young migrants form translocal or transcultural identities in which they feel a simultaneous belonging to 'here' and 'there', the young migrants in this study repudiated an attachment to their country of origin, expressing complex psycho-social motivations for this. Their gratitude to their new families in London erased, at least in their life history narratives, their attachment to their birth families and by extension their old country. These stretched networks can also be understood as an effect of a global Islamic diaspora or ummah in which some families in London feel a religious obligation to care for children who have been given up by their parents.
