Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

McKay

Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child-rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents' countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood’. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child-raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left-behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long-distance parenting.

Citation

McKay. (2017). Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia. Global Networks, 133-150. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12174

Acceptance Date Sep 21, 2017
Publication Date Oct 24, 2017
Journal Global Networks
Print ISSN 1470-2266
Publisher Wiley
Pages 133-150
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12174
Keywords children, icts, social networks, transnational citizenship, transnational families, transnational urbanism
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/glob.12174

Files






You might also like



Downloadable Citations