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This chapter examines the lifestyles of upper-middle- and upper-class return migrant parents and youth living in Bangalore, a city in southwest India. It does so by addressing the following questions: What benefits do return migrant parents see in raising their children within their country of ethnic origin? What are the experiences of youth who grow up within their country of ethnic origin? I answer these questions by analysing 95 conversations with return migrant parents and their children, as well as alumni of Bangalore-based high schools. Building upon literature related to parenting, social class and racial-ethnic socialisation, I discuss parents' efforts to produce children who have the skills needed to succeed within the twenty-first-century global economy, and how the youth experience these child-rearing practices.

Purpose – Informed by an intersectional perspective, this chapter examines how middle-class, immigrant Tamil (an Indian regional group) Brahmin (upper-caste) profess/ional women organize motherhood in the U.S., by identifying the arrangements of mothering they develop, and the conditions under which these emerge.Methodology/approach – Data is based on a year-long ethnography among Tamils in Atlanta, and multi-part, feminist life-history interviews with 33 first-generation, Tamil professional women, analyzed within a constructivist grounded theory method.Findings – Tamil immigrant motherhood emerges from the interplay of Tamil women's social location as an immigrant community of color in the U.S. and their agency. Paradoxically racialized as model minorities who are also culturally incommensurable with American society, Tamil women rework motherhood around breadwinning and cultural nurturing to mother for class and ethnicity respectively. They expand the hegemonic model of Tamil Brahmin motherhood beyond domesticity positioning their professional work as complementary to mothering, while simultaneously reinforcing hegemonic elements of mothers as keepers of culture, responsible for ethnic socialization of children. Mothering then enables them to engender integration into American society by positioning families as upwardly mobile, model minorities who are ethnic. This, however, exacts a personal toll: their limited professional mobility and reduced personal leisure time.Originality/value – By uncovering Tamil immigrant motherhood as structural and agentic, a site of power contestation between spouses and among Tamil women, and its salience in adaptation to America, this chapter advances scholarship on South Asians that under-theorizes mothering and that on immigrant parenting in which South Asians are invisible.

There is a long history of school failure for Aboriginals¹ in the U.S. educational system. Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy affords opportunities for Aboriginal students to achieve academic success through building upon their cultural heritages and Native ways of knowing. School systems adopting this pedagogy empower Indigenous students to connect with essential knowledge for academic success in today’s world. This enhanced pedagogy creates classrooms of involvement that promote Aboriginal students’ achievement. Preservice teachers employing this pedagogy will experience success with their Indigenous students and learn about Aboriginal communities, lifeways, and values. Mutual respect is engendered as long-perpetuated negative stereotypes of Native Americans are undone. Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy can be tailored to specific populations by incorporating their own Aboriginal knowledge, languages, and practices into teaching praxis.

Educational leaders in schools serving Native American students must understand, communicate, and apply state and federal education policies along with specific federal Indian policies relating to tribal self-determination and the education of these students. Tribal peoples residing in native communities typically view revitalization of indigenous language as a crucial first step in achieving the cross-cultural goal of school success for all tribal children. Inclusion of indigenous languages serves multiple purposes such as transmitting traditional cultural values, supporting overall academic achievement, and fostering self-determination and independence for native communities. Title III and Title VII of the No Child Left Behind Act are the designated policy “homes” for indigenous language inclusion and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act addresses indigenous language as an obstacle to overcome, giving the unintended impression that native languages are somehow situated within a deficit framework of poverty and special education. This chapter explores the foundations of the inclusion of native languages into current federal policy and argues that the placement might be better suited as stand-alone legislation in order to more effectively promote community development and self-determination for Native American peoples.

This chapter derives from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a town close to Delhi, India. The research focused on schooling experiences of children from communities that are traditionally considered underprivileged. It required shadowing children throughout the day. This chapter reports on the experiences of researching with children and the ways in which child participation and research ethics emerged during the year of fieldwork. The idea of ‘child participation’ in the research process – within the Indian context is explored. The discourse around ethics in the current literature is primarily concerned with ideas of consent, gatekeeping and respecting children's rights. This chapter discusses the significance of the cultural contexts of the field in shaping the research ethics and developing what ‘child participation’ meant for children and their parents within this specific cultural context. It does so by elaborating on contradictions that existed between the way the ethnographer positioned the child and the way children are positioned in families and schools, where children's participation, opinion and consent are often silently presumed by the parents much more so than in a Euro-American context. Children are viewed as active agents, knowledgeable about their own positions in the research process.

While the issue of “Blackness” has long pervaded American society, it has rarely been problematized in social science literature and treated as a taken-for-granted. This article utilizes in-depth interviews with second generation West Indian adults in New York City to examine the ways in which they conceive of their Blackness, both racially and ethnically. New York City is viewed as an important urban context that in many ways facilitates the formation of identity for this population. The assimilation process, or not, of second generation West Indians is also considered in terms of socioeconomic status and gender. The results indicate that second generation West Indians strongly identify with both their racial and ethnic identities, which in turn calls for a reconceptualization of “Blackness”. There is also evidence that points to New York City as a space of cross-cultural integration where identity formation is significantly impacted by the presence of other immigrants (and their children) that leads to a pan-immigrant or pan-ethnic identity among young New Yorkers.

In this chapter, we examine how the media in India constructed the lives, needs, and desires of disabled children in India during the tumultuous pandemic.

Through critical discourse analysis, we address how children's bodies and needs have been explicitly discursively constructed as “excessive,” while implicitly drawing upon neoliberal, ableist logics of loss and productivity.

We foreground how the framing of COVID-19 as a disaster in the Indian context obscures state neglect, suggesting that inequality has been the result of the pandemic rather than the limits of state care under neoliberal ableism. Despite the recognition of gaps in the care received by disabled children, neoliberal, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged as a new, widely touted form of care during the pandemic.

Through our analysis, we highlight how disabled children have been neglected by the state and constructed as burdensome and vulnerable. We argue that this occurs when disabled children's bodyminds do not conform to an ideal of the self-reliant, independent citizen under the logics of neoliberal ableism. Our work demonstrates how children with disabilities are discursively rendered absent from conceptualizations of normate citizenship, unless seen as contributing to current or future aspirations for state productivity and growth.

During early childhood, Indians and non-Indians learn a definition of “Indianness” (Merskin, 1998, p. 159). Around 18 months of age, human beings begin to recognize themselves as distinct and separate from their mothers and others (Lacan, 1977). By age 6, most attributes of personality formation are already established (Biber, 1984). The content of the information that consciously and unconsciously reaches children is critical for the formation of a healthy, grounded sense of self and respect for others. Today, in the absence of personal interaction with an indigenous person, non-Indian perceptions inevitably come from other sources. These mental images, the “pictures in our heads” as Lippmann (1922/1961, p. 33) calls them, come from parents, teachers, textbooks, movies, television programs, cartoons, songs, commercials, art, and product logos. American Indian images, music, and names have, since the beginning of the 20th century, been incorporated into many American advertising campaigns and marketing efforts, demarcating and consuming Indian as exotic “Other” in the popular imagination (Merskin, 1998). Whereas a century ago sheet music covers and patent medicine bottles featured “coppery, feather-topped visage of the Indian” (Larson, 1937, p. 338), today's Land O’ Lake's butter boxes display a doe-eyed, buckskin-clad Indian “princess.” The fact that there never were Indian “princesses” (a European concept), and most Indians do not have the kind of European features and social “availability” that trade characters do, goes largely unquestioned. These stereotypes are pervasive, but not necessarily consistent, varying over time and place from the “artificially idealistic” (noble savage) to images of “mystical environmentalists or uneducated, alcoholic bingo-players confined to reservations” (Mihesuah, 1996, p. 9). Today, a trip down the grocery store aisle still reveals ice cream bars, beef jerky, corn meal, baking powder, malt liquor, butter, honey, sugar, sour cream, chewing tobacco packages, and a plethora of other products emblazoned with images of American Indians. To discern how labels on products and brand names reinforce long-held stereotypical beliefs, we must consider embedded ideological beliefs that perpetuate and reinforce this process.