Discourses between the Public and the Private: Transnational Families at the Crossroads

Abstract

Raising a child is a challenging venture, regardless of where one lives in the world. Most children are raised in their families; however, many states have welfare services if the child’s well-being is at stake. Scandinavian countries follow a rather strict policy in placing the child’s individual rights above those of the family, and Norway has child welfare legislation that applies to all children in the country, regardless of their status, nationality or citizenship. This institutional structure has raised issues about how family life is negotiated in society. In this article, we analyze the ways in which language and culture are used to address expectations of (good) normal family life in both private and public discourses with implications for transnational families. We thus problematize the notion of the family as a private domain or space. Furthermore, by examining institutional involvement in child-rearing, we extend research on family language policy to contexts of foster care. We thereby raise the discussion to a societal level about private and public expectations towards family life in a late-modern society.

Family language policy in the public eye: raciolinguistic ideologies at play

“…Concerning the maintenance of heritage language in the context of migration, the findings suggest that the process of language socialisation in minority languages is not merely a matter of a private FLP decision that can be exercised based on individual dispositions and beliefs; rather, it needs to be understood against the broader backdrop of prevailing language ideologies and identity-related discourses that circulate in a given society (Curdt-Christiansen, 2018 family as a space between the private and the public (Lanza, 2021;Purkarthofer et al, 2022) where the sociolinguistic and the sociopolitical processes shape what happens in it (Curdt-Christiansen, 2018;Mirvahedi, 2021). As Ortega (2020) noted, minority language speakers "are the likely targets of cumulative daily putdowns related to their language in intersection with other minoritized markers of identity, such as their ethnicity, race, or immigrant or otherwise minoritized status" (p. 38).…”

“…Here family can be conceptualised as "a space along the private-public continuum" (Lanza & Lomeu Gomes, 2020, p. 165), which means that what happens in the home should not be seen as an isolated event that takes place in a social vacuum (Mirvahedi, 2021). Reasoning along similar lines, Purkarthofer et al (2022) argued that research on family multilingualism should conceive the family "as a space where the private and the public meet at the crossroads ' (p. 19). The private/ public nexus has been captured in Curdt-Christiansen's (2018) model (Figure 1), which grasps the dynamic relationship between FLP and the sociolinguistic, sociocultural, sociopolitical and socioeconomic contexts in which language socialisation takes place.…”

Agencia infantil y políticas lingüísticas familiares en familias pewenche-mapuche del sur de Chile: un primer acercamiento desde las perspectivas parentales

“…Las preguntas centrales en los estudios de PLF en esta primera etapa indagaban en torno a las prácticas, creencias y condiciones que conducían a diferentes tipos de aprendizaje por parte de los niños en familias bilingües, y el objetivo era establecer relaciones causales entre, por ejemplo, determinadas ideologías lingüísticas y prácticas lingüísticas (Lanza 2021), muchas veces con el fin de determinar las estrategias exitosas conducentes al bilingüismo infantil (Wilson 2020). En las discusiones actuales en PLF, informadas por miradas noestructuralistas hacia el lenguaje (García et al 2017), reconceptualizaciones de las familias (transnacionales) como comunidades de práctica (Purkarthofer et al 2022) o como espacios sociales que se negocian y construyen a través de repertorios familiares multilingües (Lanza 2021) y las condiciones de hipermovilidad y conectividad que afectarían a las familias, el foco parece estar puesto en "la manera en que las familias se construyen a través de prácticas lingüísticas multilingües, y la forma en que el lenguaje funciona como un recurso para este proceso de creación de familia y creación de significado" (King y Wang 2021: 120; ver también King 2016; King y Lanza 2017; Lanza y Curdt-Christiansen 2018), así como en las experiencias vividas de las familias, la construcción de la identidad en ellas, y el rol de la agencia (Lanza 2021).…”