Search results

In transnational families worldwide, different family members have varying degrees of mobility, as well as different physical and emotional experiences with relatives and places throughout their lives. For this reason, in recent decades, increasing attention has been placed upon the experiences of migrants' descendants growing up across borders.

Based on data from a multi-sited ethnography and a survey, this chapter explores the experiences of children growing up in Chinese transnational families split between Zhejiang province and their parents' immigration countries, located mainly in Europe. First, it introduces the migration context and methods, presenting the profiles and basic information of the 77 Chinese migrants' descendants who participated in a ‘Roots-seeking Journey’ summer camp held in their family area of origin in China, in 2018. Second, it explores their heterogeneous early childhood paths and conditions, paying particular attention to mobility, care strategies, intergenerational relations and transnational ties. Finally, this chapter introduces the concept of fluid childhoods, and reflects on the key role of care-related mobility and communication technologies in shaping their early life paths and experiences as well as further transnational engagement.

This chapter presents an exploratory study of specific experiences among Central Asian grandparents who adopt and raise their firstborn grandchild as their own youngest child. The practice, referred to as ‘nebere aluu’, is deemed an ethnonational tradition of the Kyrgyz and Kazakh people and appears to be widely accepted among men and women, young and old. Drawing on in-depth interviews with grandparents themselves, I describe this phenomenon as situated within and dynamically responding to the shifting social, economic and political context of contemporary Central Asia. Drastic transformations in the everyday lives, while destabilizing and disorienting, may have supplanted nebere aluu with unique significance. Contemporary expressions of nebere aluu point to it being a complex social system of intergenerational reciprocal care, continuity and responsibility that provides a meaningful space for reconciling conflicting ideas about family, marriage, love and child-rearing. This discursive space is open for debate and negotiations and raises important questions about power and gender politics inherent to it.

In this chapter, I take a symbolic interactionist look at the anthropomorphic projections of 38 people in four large Canadian cities who report having encountered ghosts. As part of a larger project on perceived encounters with ghosts, I interviewed these people using audiotape, transcribed the interviews, and identified themes within them. Together, they mentioned 195 ghosts and described their appearances and actions. I identified anthropomorphic projections in four areas: (1) Physicality – pertaining to the bodies of the ghosts, (2) Relational – pertaining to kinship ties, e.g., mothers, fathers, grandmothers, (3) Rational – the ghosts' motivations and justifications, and (4) Affective – pertaining to the ghosts' emotions. These anthropomorphic projections were the respondents' efforts at sense making after having encountered what they believed to be phantasmal.

Our contribution to ISATT's 40th Anniversary Yearbook focusing on Studying Teaching and Teacher Education grows out of our experiences across time in diverse Lands/Place, situations, and relationships. The knowledge we center have grown through relationships and experiences of great violence and harm alongside experiences and relationships where we have experienced abiding commitments to wholeness and healing. Our individual and collective attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions in the stories we live, tell, retell, and relive about striving to live in good ways, in ethically relational ways, has connected us over time. Living alongside and thinking with one another has shaped our movements beyond the colonial and human-centric understandings of stories of/as experience and thinking with stories that often dominate in (research for) teacher education and development. Attending the spiritual dimensions of stories of experience expands the educative potential of thinking with stories. As humans who are composing lives as educators on Indigenous lands where the colonial project continues to be genocidal for Indigenous peoples and Lands/Place, attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions of experience feels imperative if the next generations of children and youth in schools, and adults in teacher education and development, are to experience these places as educative and non-violent, and as opening potential to interrupt the pervasive colonial narratives that continue to dominate.

This article reflects on the adaption of Sarah Pink's video re-enactment methodology for exploring children's out-of-school lifeworlds.

Video re-enactments originate in the work of Sarah Pink who developed the methodology to study everyday routines, including activities associated with people's energy consumption at home. This article discusses the adaption of this methodology for exploring 9–10-year-old children's out-of-school lifeworlds in their homes in the global cities of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore.

The article reflects on the practical ways in which the video re-enactment methodology was adapted to explore children's out-of-school activities in the three different locations. In terms of activities, the findings highlight that children's out-of-school lifeworlds included regular routines across a week that contribute to and constitute their everyday activities, with varying time spent on leisure, homework and scheduled activities.

The authors discuss and reflect on the implications of adapting a methodology in order to make it relevant and innovative in a new research context. The use of video re-enactments with children to explore their out-of-school activities gives greater insights into their lifeworlds and their engagement in various activities and the opportunity for children to reflect on their everyday lives.