Telling Family Stories in Migration: Transgenerational Remembrance Practices in Transnational Families

This paper focuses on families with a migration history and the negotiation of their family story (Schnitzer 2023) around the experience of (flight) migration: Memory and remembrance are playing a significant role in constituting communality and as biographical capital in families (Delcroix, 2013). They find different ways to tell their story and thereby claim their place in a new society as well as construct themselves as a family. This paper draws on a study conducted in the German speaking part of Switzerland that accompanied families migrated from different parts of the world from one to three years doing participant observation as well as conducting family interviews. The paper explores transgenerational remembrance practices in the families and how a family story can be told on the basis of negotiations within the family as well as within a society that shapes their lives in a significant way, especially by regulations of legal status and access to the labour market. The analysis based on fieldnotes and transcripts of family interviews (Phoenix et al. 2021) will focus on one family and their transgenerational transmission of family memories in the context of migration. Thereby also an autobiographic book of the family telling their story comes into play, published and written with the aid of a journalist.

References

Schnitzer, Anna. 2023. “Negotiations of language(s) and inequalities in transnational family biographies.” European Educational Research Journal 22 (4): 496–516, https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221147970.

Delcroix, Catherine. 2013. Ombres et lumières de la famille Nour: Comment certains résistent face à la précarité, Third Edition. Paris: Payot & Rivages.

Phoenix, Ann, Corinne Squire, Julia Brannen, and Molly Andrews. 2021. “Family Lives, Everyday Practices and Narrative Research.” In Researching Family Narratives, edited by Ann Phoenix, Julia Brannen, and Corinne Squire, 1–14. Los Angeles: Sage.