Transnational practices and children’s local lives in times of economic crisis

Boampong, Michael (2019). Transnational practices and children’s local lives in times of economic crisis. In: Von Benzon, Nadia and Wilkinson, Catherine eds. Intersectionality and Difference in Childhood and Youth : Global Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 198–212.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429466588

Abstract

This chapter discusses transnationalism by focusing on the everyday life of families through the lens of young people’s mobilities and transnational practices – the broad migration patterns that emerge including rural-urban and return mobilities. It explains fieldwork data on the everyday lives of Ghanaian transnational households, with relations living in Ghana and the United Kingdom to explain the role and meaning of family. Transnational social fields, a theory utilised by scholars to better understand transitional migration, defines fields as a network of relationships through which people sustain ties, organise, exchange and transform ideas, practices, and resources. The family experience of communication and togetherness underscore children’s roles in transnational ways of being and ways of belonging from everyday life experience. Thus, children are considered economic dependents and ‘the luggage’ of parental migrants. The chapter outlines the children’s distinctive role as social actors in process of forming ‘new’ networks and doing family as a way of navigating the effects of economic crisis.

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