Crespi Isabella. - Making Multicultural Families in Europe: Gender and Intergenerational Relations

The Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series is impressive and contemporary in its themes and approaches

Professor Deborah Chambers, Newcastle University, UK, and author of New Social Ties

The remit of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series is to publish major texts, monographs and edited collections focusing broadly on the sociological exploration of intimate relationships and family organization. The series covers a wide range of topics such as partnership, marriage, parenting, domestic arrangements, kinship, demographic change, intergenerational ties, life course transitions, step-families, gay and lesbian relationships, lone-parent households, and also non-familial intimate relationships such as friendships and includes works by leading figures in the field, in the UK and internationally, and aims to contribute to continue publishing influential and prize-winning research.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14676

Cover design by Tjaa Krivec

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Current popular and political discourse in much of Europe and in the USA frequently constructs migrants and natives as living parallel lives. The negative effects on social cohesion and the challenges for national security that supposedly ensue are widely lamented by the same voices, which also advocate legislation and policies targeted on migrant communities. This volume is a timely reminder, however, that micro-level multi-cultural practices in traditional countries of immigration in Europe render such a discourse a myth in the case of many people. The starting point of this volume rather, is that intimate relationships are commonly forged across ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries, producing so-called multi-ethnic or mixed families.

How do people make family, especially in terms of gender and intergenerational relations, in the context of cultural plurality? How are different childrearing practices negotiated? What strategies are developed to manage divergent norms around childrens obligations to parents in old age? How are competing notions of the appropriate gender division of labour reconciled? Are family relationships different in these multi-cultural families compared with mono-cultural families? Part 1 of this book provides answers to those questions, drawing on empirically rich studies employing a range of methodologies and spanning diverse circumstances, which include: Thai women living in Belgium and married to non-Thai men; European bi-national couples in the UK; marriage between first-generation Turkish men and third-generation Turkish women in Germany; and couples living in the UK composed of Persians and non-Persians.

In Part 2, this volume considers another type of family being made in contemporary landscapes of migration and (im)mobility, although having antecedents of various forms in previous eras. These are so-called transnational families, whose members are dispersed across borders as they are pushed or pulled out of homelands in search of asylum, better economic futures, or improved lifestyles. While their separation is sometimes by choice, it is often enforced by restrictive migration laws based on utilitarian principles, which may permit the entry of a worker deemed instrumental to the economic needs of the country, but not allow (all) his or her dependants entry, or impose strict conditions on their entry, which migrant workers find impossible to meet. In such cases, migrants and their families have little or no choice but to live apart.

While traditional understandings of family assumed that proximity was a pre-requisite for successful family functioning, research on transnational families has revealed the ways in which family-life can be sustained across distance. The contributions to Part 2 of this volume invite us to consider the centrality of gender and generational relations in transnational family processes in multiple contexts, and offer reflections on important questions, including: is the effect of spatial distance inevitably negative for kinship relationships?; how are gender norms and relations within families re-worked across distance?; how does family solidarity stand up over sustained periods of separation?; what new roles for children, parents, and grandparents emerge in scenarios of transnational family living?; how are family values challenged and renegotiated for families situated in multi-local contexts that are characterized by different care regimes?

In bringing together in one place research on multi-ethnic families and research on transnational families, the editors of this volume challenge the silo, common in UK scholarship at least, between race and ethnicity studies on the one hand and migration studies on the other hand. In doing so, they illuminate the reflexivity that is required by different actors within families to make family work in the context of both pluriculturalism and mobility. This is an important contribution with potential to inform wider debates about the reflexive skills required to forge societal solidarity in an increasingly diverse and mobile Europe.