Unboxing care: Constructions of happiness and gratitude in a Brazilian transnational family’s video production in the United States

This case study examines the co-authoring of unboxing videos by one six-year-old, second-generation Brazilian immigrant child and her mother in the United States. These videos were created in response to boxes filled with gifts they received yearly from relatives in Brazil. To understand this mother-daughter dyad and their video production, this study draws on metaphors of mobility, the logics of reciprocity and obligation in gift-exchange, and the concept of care constellations. The analysis of interviews, field notes, and unboxing videos identified specific routes, rhythms, and frictions that fueled this family digital literacy practice. It also suggested that participants were implicated in a pattern of caregiving through a transnational cycle of gift-exchange. These findings disrupt typical framings of the unboxing genre as a manifestation of U.S. capitalist ethos and foreground the material and discursive production of care in a transnational family’s digital literacy practice.

Immigrant Children's Adaptation

When a person gets used to a place where he was born and grew up and adapts to people and the environment around him and becomes an integral part of them, it would be difficult if he is forced, by any means, to leave the place and abandon these people ,leaving them behind. Migration, whether voluntary or compulsory, has its negative effects. A migrant may need many years to forget the effects of the moves he did and perhaps will not forget their influence on him throughout his life, especially if he is forced to move for certain circumstances and will definitely need someone (s) to help him feel secure and safe in the new environment, and that will relieve him of his feelings of emptiness, irrelevance and isolation. It is part of human nature to live in social and communicative societies, not in isolation and detachment. Migrant children are the most affected people in these moves. Juan Felipe Herrera believes that it is the duty of the new society to which immigrants are moved to accept and help them, not to impose tough and inconsiderate laws or put other obstacles before them. These immigrants are already loaded with concerns and worries and need no more trouble to suffer. He insists that attention to these children is a human duty, which, when done, can assists them to adapt environmentally, socially and psychologically to their new societies. In The Upside Down Boy, Juanito, the immigrant child feels lost at the first days he is in the new school and that everything is upside down for him when his family moved from Mexico to San Francisco. Herrera, himself a Mexican immigrant, tells people about the situations juanito suffers and calls them to help him to set things up right once more.

Photovoice in a Vietnamese Immigrant Family: Untold Partial Stories behind the Pictures

This paper, in the form of walking meditation, sitting, drinking, eating, and traveling among spaces and times, witnesses how the author as a Vietnamese immigrant child living in the United States (U.S.) traces untold stories of their family through family photos. Further, this paper attempts to find, understand and connect the relation between personal and political, between individual and collective, for a Vietnamese re-education camp detainee and his family, situated in political, historical, and cultural context. The use of photo elicitation comes from the desire that the reader can engage with the voices of the family members as they describe events in their past history. In addition, this paper refuses the forms of “category” and “fixed results” in writing up academic research. Rather, it will appear in the form of daily conversation, collected from multiple settings. Simply speaking, this paper is a form of storytelling that invites the readers to oscillate, communicate and think with the author’s family members on this historical journey.