Project Details
Projekt
The mediatization of parent-child-relations in transnational migration. A comparative study of the articulation of embodied and mediated care and education practices
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Heike Greschke
Subject Area
Sociological Theory
Term
from 2014 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260200149
How are intimate relationships and everyday life maintained in families when geographical distances and national borders separate children from their parents? What is the meaning of communication technologies in remote parenting? This research aims at reconstructing the techno-social constituents of the social worlds of transnational families from a comparative perspective. The interactions between the logics of technological and social processes are considered to be particularly interesting, with regard to the transformation of interaction patterns, routines and care practices. The project starts from the assumption that not only daily life, social relations and practices become increasingly mediatized, but also communication technologies become increasingly socialized, in the sense that they are being appropriated as social media. When regarding the question what social changes do the advancing integration of the media into everyday life and the increasing mediatization of interpersonal communication bring with, and how the mediatization of social relations is carried and designed by the transnational families members, we can see that transnational families are some kind of avant-garde, because they have to rely specially on communicative resources in order to compensate the limitations of physical mobility. This project connects to an exploratory study of the applicant, which is currently being carried out in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and which evaluates the connection between communicative, physical and social mobility. For a comparative follow-up study a sample should be collected. This sample should include appropriate comparison and contrast cases, different space-time patterns, border regimes and familial situations. According to its subject the study is designed as a transnational collaborative ethnography combining participant observation in various field sites and genre analysis of embodied and mediated patterns of family communication. The study assigns to the research field action and interaction forms of the priority program mediatized worlds. It connects empirically to multi local and transnational family studies and links them to mediatization and interaction theory.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
