Migration and Families: Critical Perspectives on Social and Cultural Issues

Abstract

Writing about the consequences of modernity, Bauman, Wasted Lives: The Outcasts of Modernity (2003) notes that raw materials and goods flow freely around the “globalized world”, but movements of peoples, whether individuals, families or groups, are more circumscribed. Migration is constructed positively when required by the demands of capitalism in receiving nations; negatively when it is not required or when refuge is being sought (Bauman, Consuming life. Cambridge 2007; Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citali Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2009). Migration is the major social, political and cultural issue of this century, both for the northern and the southern countries (Abdelmoneum, Policy and Practice: Non-governmental Organisations and the Health Delivery System for Displaced Children in Khartoum, Sudan. 2010; Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World 4th ed. 2009; Geisen et al. Migration, Mobility and Borders: Issues of Theory and Policy 2004). Families and their evolving forms and roles also are a significant social, cultural and political issue (Durrschmidt et al. Families, Social Capital and Migration in Time and Space 2010; Gillies and Edwards, An historical comparative analysis of family and parenting: A feasibility study across sources and timeframes, 2011), and both “migration” and “families” are influenced by social, legal, political and economic changes; they engender interest and concern across political and social policy divisions and in much public and political discourse. Both families and migration are the subjects of research studies and reports in the northern and in the southern nations. “Forced migration” (Betts, Forced Migration and Global Politics 2009) is this study’s background; refugee and asylum-seeking peoples are “forced migrants”.