Full Description
What does it mean to a family when parents go abroad for economic gains while leaving their children behind? How do they maintain a family when living in different areas, separated for years? How do emerging digital media like instant messaging, social media, and webcam calls impact the everyday lives of today's transnational families? Drawing on immersive ethnography conducted among UK-based Chinese labour migrants, their left-behind children and caregivers, this book explores how they employ digital media to negotiate family roles and maintain kinship ties. While virtual connections are indispensable, they are not a panacea for physical separation; rather, they introduce complexity to family dynamics. Probing the bittersweet experiences of various family members, it portrays how mediated familial communications intertwine with transnational socio-economic asymmetries and intra-familial dynamics. This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective for general publics and academics interested in migration studies, family and gender studies, and media and communications.
Contents
Chapter 1: Living Together Across Borders: Digital media, Overseas Labour Migration, and the Chinese Context
Chapter 2: Leaving Family for the Family: Overseas Labour Migration and Chinese Transnational Families
Chapter 3: Towards Traditional or Atypical Parenting? Gendered "Blessings and Burdens"
Chapter 4: Left-Behind Children as Mediated Actors: Beyond Receiving Care and Countering Surveillance
Chapter 5: The "Connected" Caregivers: The Bumpy Road to Collaborative Childrearing
Chapter 6: Techno-Familial Scape: Socio-Techno Family Practice, Mediated Socio-Structural Relationship, and Bottom-Up Transnationalism
Methodological Appendix: The Fieldwork
Bibliography
Index
