Intergenerational language practices, linguistic capital and place: the case of Greek-Cypriot Migrant Families in the UK

Food poverty in the Global North is an urgent moral and social concern. In the UK, food banks have proliferated and the number of food parcels handed out to families has risen dramatically. In addition, welfare support has been increasingly withheld by successive UK governments as a tool for controlling immigration. Drawing on qualitative research from our study of food poverty, the chapter focuses on migrant families who are not entitled to social security benefits and are among those experiencing the most severe manifestations - going without food - in addition to psychological and social dimensions linked to precarité and social exclusion.

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Citizenship and family life in Ireland: asking the question ‘Who belongs’?

Legal Studies ◽

10.1111/j.1748-121x.2005.tb00685.x ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 25 (4) ◽

pp. 578-600 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Siobhán Mullally

Keyword(s):

Family Life ◽

Legal Status ◽

Immigration Control ◽

Migrant Families ◽

The Us ◽

Political Communities ◽

The Uk ◽

The Right ◽

Citizenship Laws ◽

Migrant Parents

Citizenship laws provide us with models of membership. They define the terms on which strangers and natives belong to political communities, allocating both the benefits of membership and the brutalities of exclusion. Recent legal changes in Ireland, restricting the right to citizenship by birth and limiting the rights of migrant families, highlight the vulnerability of children in migrant families and the limits of citizenship status. Many other states have grappled in recent times with the right to citizenship by birth and the entitlements to family life that come with such a claim. In both the UK and Australia the jus soli principle has been significantly restricted. In the US, Canada and elsewhere, while the jus soli principle continues to apply, citizen children born to undocumented migrant parents are subject to de facto deportations, their right to membership of the nation-state ‘postponed’ because of the legal status of their parents. In challenges to deportation proceedings involving such children, the perspective of the child as a bearer of rights is marginalised, with disputes turning largely on the balancing of states' interests in immigration control against the residence claims made by migrant parents.

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Linguistic (il)legitimacy in Migration Encounters

Languages ◽

10.3390/languages6020066 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 66

Author(s):

Petros Karatsareas

Keyword(s):

Social Factors ◽

Language Ideologies ◽

Debt Crisis ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Linguistic Differences ◽

Linguistic Resources ◽

Greek Cypriot ◽

The Government ◽

The Uk ◽

Greek Migrants

Linguistic differences between groups of co-ethnic and/or co-national migrants in diasporic contexts can become grounds for constructing and displaying identities that distinguish (groups of) migrants on the basis of differences in the sociohistorical circumstances of migration (provenance, time of migration) and/or social factors such as class, socioeconomic status, or level of education. In this article, I explore how language became a source of ideological conflict between Greek Cypriot and Greek migrants in the context of a complementary school in north London. Analysing a set of semi-structured interviews with teachers, which were undertaken in 2018 as part of an ethnographically oriented project on language ideologies in Greek complementary schools, I show that Greek pupils and parents, who had migrated to the UK after 2010 pushed by the government-debt crisis in Greece, positioned themselves as linguistic authorities and developed discourses that delegitimised the multilingual and multidialectal practices of Greek Cypriot migrants. Their interventions centred around the use of Cypriot Greek and English features, drawn from the linguistic resources that did not conform with the expectations that “new” Greek migrants held about complementary schools and which were based on strictly monolingual and monodialectal language ideologies. To these, teachers responded with counter-discourses that re-valued contested practices as products of different linguistic repertoires that were shaped by different life courses and trajectories of linguistic resources acquisition.

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Multilingual and Multicultural Educational Space: Creative Writing of Russian–speaking Children in the UK

KnE Social Sciences ◽

10.18502/kss.v4i2.6304 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Valentina Shatalina ◽

Nina Ivashinenko ◽

Tatiana Henderson-Stewart

Keyword(s):

New Technologies ◽

Cultural Knowledge ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Cultural Tradition ◽

Cultural Elements ◽

Migrant Families ◽

Story Writing ◽

Study Process ◽

The Uk ◽

Children's Stories

This article presents the qualitative study of bilingual children from Russian-speaking families living in the UK. Our findings offer novel insights and contribute to existing theoretical, methodological, and empirical research on multilingual and multicultural educational space through a new lens of study process of bilingual children imagination. It brings a new focus to existing work in this area through its consideration of creating writing as a reflection of complex educational space in post-literacy era. We collected the creative stories which were written by children who participated in concurs “Once it dreams for me”. The narrative and content analysis show popular topics based on specific cultural tradition and habitus of migrant families. We argued that these children stories have both cultural elements British and Russian, which were formed in the British mainstream and the Russian Saturday schools. One of the main points of children’s stories is the “Internet in their everyday life”. It shows how children learn and go through the process of acquisition of cultural knowledge in post-literacy era using new technologies. Also, the findings contribute to the discussion of the epistemology of children behaviour and motivation at a time when visual and creative reflection have begun more important that direct answer to explicit researchers questions. Expanding on the existing literature in this area, the article investigates creative story writing as a two-way process influencing both the transnational cultural and the transnational education space. Keywords: bilingual children, multicultural educational space, Russian-speaking families

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No Recourse to Social Work? Statutory Neglect, Social Exclusion and Undocumented Migrant Families in the UK

Social Inclusion ◽

10.17645/si.v6i3.1486 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 190-200 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Andy Jolly

Keyword(s):

Social Work ◽

Government Policy ◽

Undocumented Migrant ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Public Funds ◽

Immigration Control ◽

Policy Context ◽

Migrant Families ◽

The Uk ◽

The Welfare State

Families in the UK with an irregular migration status are excluded from most mainstream welfare provision through the no recourse to public funds rule, and statutory children’s social work services are one of the few welfare services available to undocumented migrant families. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with undocumented migrant families who are accessing children’s services support to illustrate the sometimes uneasy relationship between child welfare law and immigration control. Outlining the legislative and policy context for social work with undocumented migrant families in the UK, the article argues that the exclusion of migrant families from the welfare state by government policy amounts to a form of statutory neglect which is incompatible with the global social work profession’s commitment to social justice and human rights.

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The study of modern Greece in a changing world: fading allure or potential for reinvention?

Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies ◽

10.1017/byz.2015.12 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 40 (1) ◽

pp. 114-125

Author(s):

Dimitris Tziovas

Keyword(s):

Academic Discipline ◽

Subject Area ◽

Greek Language ◽

Future Directions ◽

Modern Greek ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Greek Cypriot ◽

Research Students ◽

The Uk ◽

Australian Universities

Periodically reviewing developments in a subject area and reflecting on the past and future directions of a discipline can be useful and instructive. In the case of Modern Greek Studies, this has rarely been done, and most of the reviews of the field come from USA.1So I take this opportunity to offer some thoughts on what has propelled changes in the field over the last forty years, on the fruitful (and occasionally trenchant) dialogue between Neohellenists inside and outside Greece and on the future of modern Greek studies as an academic discipline. During this period modern Greek studies have flourished with a number of new trends, debates and scholarly preoccupations emerging. At the same time many research students received their doctorates from departments of Modern Greek Studies, particularly in the United Kingdom, and were subsequently appointed to teaching posts at Greek, Cypriot or other European, American and Australian universities. Modern Greek departments in the UK have often been the driving force behind the discipline since the early 1980s. New approaches were introduced, challenging ideas were debated and influential publications emerged from those departments, which shaped the agenda for the study of modern Greek language, literature and culture. It should be noted that the influence of those departments in shaping the direction of modern Greek Studies has been out of all proportion to the number of staff teaching in them.

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