Cross-generational Perspective Research Articles

Education, youth and Islam: the growing popularity of private religious lessons in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

This article attempts to explain the growing popularity of private religious lessons in urban Tajikistan from a cross-generational perspective. By instilling discipline and good ‘morals’, religious lessons serve as a powerful tool to socialize adolescent and morally vulnerable urban youth into the established social order. The increasing demand for religious instruction on the part of Muslim parents not only reflects the growing importance of Islam in Tajikistan, but also highlights the weaknesses of state education and the constraints on family upbringing in neo-local urban households. By attending religious classes, male and female youth have found a space for negotiating religious identities and for realizing their own abilities and ambitions. Given the socio-economic hardships of everyday life in the post-Soviet city, a turn to Islam can promote integration, recognition and social mobility, and offer an alternative route for urban youth to become ‘adults’.

‘I don't think it was such an issue back then’: changing experiences of pregnancy across two generations of women in south-east England

Based upon in-depth interviews with recent mothers and their own mothers in London, England, this article uses a cross-generational perspective to examine the changing experiences/perceptions of pregnancy over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Pregnancy is a biological process, but exists within social, economic, political and cultural realms and is both spatially and temporally located. In this article we argue that advances in gender equality, maternity benefits, technological innovation and mass media have meant that pregnancy is now increasingly experienced in the ‘public’ sphere, whereas, in earlier twentieth century Britain at least, it was often relegated to the realm of private or domestic life. However with these changes have come new types of surveillance in the form of scientific ‘advice’, medical technologies and media dissemination of cultural ‘norms’ regarding appropriate dress, lifestyle and behaviour during pregnancy. Based upon the findings of our research we examine these changes from two different perspectives: firstly a Foucauldian notion of surveillance in relation to ‘medical’ advice on diet/lifestyle during pregnancy, and secondly new expectations regarding body image and clothing in the context of the emergence of ‘pregnancy chic’ and the figure of the ‘celebrity mum’.

Cross-Generational and Transnational Perspectives on Schooling in Mexican Immigrant Families' Narratives

Through an intergenerational tradition of migration and the maintenance of reciprocal ties with relatives in Mexico, immigrant families utilize multiple strategies to take advantage of educational as well as occupational options on both sides of the border. The operation of education in a transnational social field holds potential consequences for second-generation immigrants' academic performance and adaptation. Much of the work on second- and third-generation students in American schools has taken a pessimistic view of their academic and post-academic futures. However, the present study reveals a more ambiguous set of findings. Most adolescents echo their first-generation parents' goals of social mobility through education and rate their interest in school as high. However, students describe their schools as boring and report doing the minimum necessary to pass their classes. Students' declining academic performance may be associated with an educational system that stresses the credentialing role of sch...

Cross-Generational Perspectives on Educational Issues: Curriculum Implications

Since schooling and literacy are integral to culture and society, it is important to understand peoples’ perceptions of conditions affecting literacy development and how conditions of schooling change across time. The focus of the research on which this article is based was examining such perceptions of people representing different generational and literacy levels. There was greater variation in response from a generational dimension than from a literacy dimension. The study points up the importance of identifying the many stakeholders in education and in making provision for them to influence school policy and curriculum decisions.

Psychosocial perceptions of the nursing home: a comparative analysis of staff, resident, and cross-generational perspectives.

Psychosocial perceptions of the nursing home: a comparative analysis of staff, resident, and cross-generational perspectives.