Alexandra König and Jessica Schwittek , together with Viorela Telegdi-Csetri, are pleased to be editing a Special Issue in the British journal Families, Relationships and Societies. The Special Issue, “Living apart together: Growing up in Transnational Families”, will be published in February 2025.

Transnational family life has become both a growing empirical phenomenon and a conceptual lens through which families’ multilocal spaces and relations become visible. The reasons for families to “live apart together” are based on a multitude of individual and collective motives. Depending on the economic, social and cultural capital of the families, their transnational arrangements and practices play out differently. Research so far has mostly focused on the alleged decision-makers, namely adults, who are usually considered the key figures in migration processes. Children and youth in transnational families are often viewed as more passive or vulnerable and subject to their parents’ choices. In a current German-Polish research project funded by DFG and NCN, König/Schwittek apply a child-centered perspective to grasp how they perceive and evaluate transnational family arrangements. As part of this project, Schwittek organized a conference which took place at the University of Essen, Germany in April 2023, bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers whose contributions offered fresh perspectives on transnational arrangements.

Based on selected papers presented and discussed during the conference, our Special Issue for FRS offers current research on (growing up in) transnational families, based on innovative methodological approaches. The selected studies focus on new, changing or persisting conditions, figurations, practices, and discursive representations of transnational families in different societies, considering both mobile and “left-behind” or immobile actors, inspiring a theoretical discussion around the normative concepts of childhood and family. The extent to which societies consider transnational or mobile families as being at odds with normative patterns of family, childhood, and parenthood differs, both within societies and between them. Our Special Issue therefore highlights the variability of intergenerational solidarity and evaluation of transnational families on individual, local and global dimensions, allowing us to explore the potential of research on transnational families for the analysis of society and social order more broadly.

A report, written by Adrienne Lee Atterberry (Union College, New York), on our international conference „Living apart together: Growing up in Transnational Families“ was published in the Journal for Sociology of Education and Socialization (ZSE), issue 4/2023. We are pleased to have such a nice review of the three-day conference in April 2023.

You can download Atterberry's report (see below).

The complete ZSE issue can be found here.

"The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies: Generations Between Local and
Global Dynamics“ is dedicated to the empirical analysis and established theorization of childhood and youth in the context of the social, cultural, and economic realities in Asian societies. The handbook not only describes the diversity of growing up on a continent where the majority of the world's young people live, but also questions and expands on established concepts and analytical frameworks in existing childhood and youth research, most of which have been formulated by northern institutions.

The handbook is edited by a team of researchers from Asia and Europe, including Jessica Schwittek from the Work Group Socialization Research / IfE. Schwittek also contributes an article on the growing up of Vietnamese Germans.

A book launch with further editors and authors of the handbook is planned at the UDE in January, with support from the IZfB. Further information will be announced soon!

The handbook is available for download at the following link:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781803822839

The open access publication was co-financed by the University Library of Duisburg-Essen
co-financed.

Katarzyna Jendrzey will present again in September in Prague, this time on the topic "The Child as an Agent in Transnational Families - Methodological and Theoretical Considerations Using the Example of a Polish-German Research Project."

More details will follow as the conference draws closer.

Conference link

As promised, the two keynote presentations have been uploaded to the DoDzi website. Thank you again to our wonderful speakers!

Prof. Dr. Doris Bühler-Niederberger from the University of Wuppertal

Prof. Dr. Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik from The Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences.

Living apart together: Growing up in Transnational Families

As part of the DoDzi project, we are pleased to announce our upcoming international conference: “Living apart together: Growing up in Transnational Families.” The workshop will take place from April 27-29, 2023, in Essen, Germany.

The Call for Papers is now out, and we are welcoming proposals until November 20, 2022.

For more information, please visit our international conference page.

Jessica Schwittek and Katarzyna Jendrzey will present our project, DoDzi, at the DeZIM conference in Berlin. The conference will take place from October 5-7, 2022.

In the presentation, we will sketch out our methodological framework – which draws from the sociology of childhood and migration research – and present material from our first field phase. The focus will be on group discussions with children (both with and without transnational experience), through which we aim to reconstruct children’s conjunctive knowledge about normative and non-normative family arrangements.

For further information about the conference, follow the link:

https://www.dezim-institut.de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungen-detail/call-for-papers-and-panels-dezim-tagung-2022-dezim-annual-conference-2022/