XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

134

Testing Concepts, Methods and Methodologies to Study Families Across Borders and Cultures: New/ Classical Tools and Mobility Discourses

RC06 Family Research (host committee)

Language: English

Global migration rapidly modifies family life presenting migration and family scholars with new challenges. Researchers highlight the need to revise family theories rooted in the ‘low mobility’ discourse and seek to come up with methodological tools for doing so.

By exploring the institutional contexts of family migration, shedding light on manifestation of xenophobia, discrimination and violence, and analysing how the challenges of migration re-define and re-organize the relational networks and relational dynamics, scholars rediscover classical methodologies and test newly emerging analytical tools to study family life. This session welcomes papers that illustrate methodological reflections on testing concepts, methods and methodologies with empirical research data on different realities of migrant family life (emigration, immigration, return migration, transnationalism).

We invite papers that focus on any of the following:

1. Revisiting classical tools and mobility discourses to study contemporary migrant family life. This may include papers that focus on the rediscovery and extension of classical ideas to study a globalized and mobile world.
2. Newly emerging concepts and innovative methodologies relevant to migrant family research. Application of already acknowledged analytical tools in family sociology as well as theorizing empirical research field work data emanating from different communities and cultural settings.
3. Methodologically complex studies on maintaining ‘family-hood’ across borders and cultures. Reflections on the toolboxes of concepts and ideas to form a multi-level chain of thought about doing research on families across borders and cultures. This may include both the advantages of multidimensional analysis of phenomena and the risks of eclecticism.