Families in Migration: The Significance of Educational Institutions for Transnational Family Biographies

Families who arrive in Europe after fleeing their home country do not only have to deal with the processes that the individual family members go through, but also to find a balance as a family between continuity and change that allows them to be able to act in the new context and at the same time maintain their self-image as a family. The planned contribution centres on the question of the significance of educational institutions in the narrated family biographies in the context of the challenges in the field of tension between continuity and change. This question is particularly important against the background of power and inequality relations in migration society and the role of educational institutions in the context of Multilingualism and the reproduction of social inequalities for research interested in inequality theory.

The project on which this contribution is based involves participant observation of family practices of storytelling and remembering. In addition, family biographies are collected in family interviews in which family members from different generations are present. Methodologically, the project adopts a reconstructive perspective that focuses on situational logics as well as the biographical processing of situational experiences and analyses negotiations of meanings in the context of a multilingual migration society in a differentiated manner.

The following questions are raised: How is the significance of educational institutions negotiatedd in narrated family biographies? What everyday challenges can be reconstructed for families with regard to educational institutions and multilingualism in the ‘arrival context’? How do families deal with these challenges? And to what extent are these challenges an expression of inequalities in migration society?