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What can we learn from children traversing the liminal and transient time-space of migration? How do migrant children and their caretakers navigate educational systems in Europe today? How is it to be captive in an inner city classroom? How do children's body language and verbal dominant languages interface? How does a child become mediator between their family and the educational institutions? This anthropologically grounded study, integrated by ethnographic film excerpts and based on a culturally-reflexive approach to the use of media in the research practices, explores the transcultural experience of migrant children between 6 and 13 years, by closely analysing the particular codes, rhythms and practices of educational systems in Ireland and France. The children's experiences are represented in both the film sequences and the written text, in the form of their personal, shared viewpoints about cultural diversity, biographical accounts and social practices in the family and at school. These are experiences which they have worked through, from a time preceding migration and to the present. The film captures the sensibilities of migrant children and invites the reader/viewer to embark on these somewhat uneven paths.
List of contents
Contents: Framing Migration and Childhood: An Anthropological Film Approach - The Intercultural Classroom in Paris - In the Migrant Family Home: The Intergenerational Performance of Cultural Identity - The Agency of Migrant Children: Five Narratives.
About the author
The Author: Rossella Ragazzi (1965) is currently Research Fellow in Visual Culture Studies and Media applied to Anthropology at the University Museum of Tromsø University, Norway. She is also a filmmaker and worked in Italy, France, Cameroon, Bolivia, Norway and Ireland. Her main fields of research through media practice and interpretative anthropology are minorities, cultural practices in everyday life, migration and childhood, storytelling, and transcultural cinema.
Report
«I recommend this book strongly not only to researchers focusing on multicultural and transcultural learning, but to everyone who is interested in learning about the migration of people from the developing countries to the north.» (Birgit Brock-Utne, International Review of Education)
