The Memories of Displaced Children: Flight Experience in the Life Stories of Exiled Latvians

This article explores how Latvian children who were displaced during the Second World War came across their displacement and how they compose the narratives of this childhood experience. Their life story interviews have been preserved in the Latvian National Oral History Archive. Recorded testimonies convey the migration experience in an intense way by vividly depicting the psychological, emotional, and material circumstances that children faced and by revealing common themes relevant to them at the time of the displacement.

Adolescence Outside the Restricted Zone: A Narrative Study of Nuclear Disaster Response Trajectories intertwining with Life (TiL)

Responses to trauma can involve complex meaning-making processes and the perception of ambiguous threats. This study sought to explore response trajectories to a nuclear disaster and their intertwining courses with ecological factors (Trajectories intertwining with Life—TiL) from adolescence onward among a non-evacuated population. Four women and four men (mean age 20) who were adolescents during the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima (mean age 14), and who grew up outside the restricted zone participated in the study. Semi-structured life story interviews were conducted in the form of in-depth qualitative inquiries. A holistic analysis was employed to identify the TiL patterns following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the overall context of the stories and to reveal important themes throughout adolescence. Four TiL patterns were found: three trajectories corresponding with those identified in prior research and one newly identified trajectory. The perceived, distal, and continuous threat of radiation played a central role in all patterns and exerted secondary impacts throughout the lives of non-evacuated adolescents. The study’s implications shed light on rarely studied response trajectories to ambiguous Potentially Traumatic Events (PTEs) throughout adolescence and point out the benefits of using a life story approach to this end for the first time.

Spanisch in Afrika/Afrika in Spanien. Sprachliche Charakteristika von Spanischsprecherinnen und Spanischsprechern aus Äquatorialguinea in Madrid

In this paper, from the perspective of the migration context in Madrid, we look at the only officially Hispanophone country in Africa: Equatorial Guinea. After a detailed introduction to Equatorial Guinea’s history and languages, we offer an overview of the Equatoguinean migration to Spain and its current situation. In the main part of the article, we discuss three linguistic characteristics of Spanish spoken by people of Equatoguinean origin. In order to do so, we use a corpus of 24 sociolinguistic life-story interviews, conducted in Madrid in 2017 and 2018. The selected features represent different linguistic levels: syntax (variable use of prepositions in the construction ir ‘to go’ + preposition a or en + destination), semantics (use of the verbs oír ‘to hear’ and escuchar ‘to listen’), and pragmatics (discursive use of tío/tía ‘[literally:] uncle/aunt’). To gain a better understanding, we consider the sociolinguistic context of Equatorial Guinea and compare our results with other contact varieties of Spanish. Altogether, this study offers an insight into the Equatoguinean diaspora in Madrid and at the same time makes a contribution to the modern description of Equatoguinean Spanish.

Everyday Intimacies and Inter-Ethnic Relationships: Tracing Entanglements of Gender and Race in Multicultural Singapore

Through the proposed frame of ‘everyday intimacies’, this article explores the entanglements of race and gender in inter-ethnic relationships. ‘Everyday intimacies’ brings together the minority experiences of everyday racism, the state practices and policies of multiculturalism, and their inflections in intimate relationships of marriage, friendship, and dating. This approach demonstrates not just how the state regulates people’s intimate life through policies of marriage and family, but also how other indirect processes of multicultural governance mediate intimate life. Drawing on biographical narratives of mainly Indian women from in-depth life story interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, the article brings the literature on intimacies in conversation with the scholarship on race and ethnic relations in Singapore. Through a focus on intimacy, the article illustrates how tacit knowledge and embodied effects of everyday racism relate to larger trends of intermarriages, rising singlehood among Indian women and possibilities of co-ethnic friendships and solidarities. In doing so, the article presents novel insight into race and gender relations in Singapore.

The construction of the racialized Other in the educational sphere: The stories of students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of social relations from a critical race theory perspective crossed with the sociology of the life course. The objective of our study was to understand how social relations in Quebec’s educational sphere, specifically in high school, construct fixed categories of racialized students in university. With the aim of discovering the underlying process of racialization of the students of racial backgrounds in educative sphere, the study analyzes the self-reported relational experiences of 10 university students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal. Based on a narrative inquiry, the analysis of the retrospective life story interviews allowed to explain the complexity of the process of racialization in two categories of “complete racialization” and “incomplete racialization.” In the “completed racialization” category, negotiating domination relationships results in the construction of a racialized Other. In the “incomplete racialization” category, the construction process is in progress. Our study has shown that social relations in high school contribute to the construction of fixed Black and Latinx racialized groups. Interpersonal relationships at school play a role in the racialization of students with immigrant backgrounds, and, although limited in scope, persistence in school may be a reversal strategy for their experiences of racism.

Ageing Activisms: A Narrative Exploration of Older Adults’ Experiences of Political Participation

Studies on older adults’ political participation have been scarce. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence concerning the experience and meaning of this participation from the perspective of those involved. This study aimed at exploring older adults’ personal narratives of political participation episodes. We conducted 40 life-story interviews with Spanish lifetime activists. Their narrative accounts of positive participation experiences were analysed; thematic analysis was used for the content and Christopher Booker’s plotline classification was used for the structure. The participants’ stories revolved around political successes, leaving a legacy to younger generations, and personal growth processes. Generativity emerged as a key element of the positive political participation experiences. Although the emplotment strategies they used varied, most incorporated redemption sequences in which negative events were transformed by the protagonist’s action into positive events.

Recalled Positive Influences within Life-Story Interviews and Self-Reported Generative Concern in German Older Adults: The Moderating Role of Extraversion

Previous research has shown that recalling positive influences in one’s life story correlates with generative concern. Given findings that not everyone benefits from generative efforts uniformly, however, the present study tested if extraversion moderates this relation. In total, 147 older German adults (59 through 83 years) recalled positive influences in their lives in an interview session and provided self-report questionnaire data on their generative concern (Loyola Generativity Scale), generative behavior (Generative Behavior Checklist), and extraversion (Mini-IPIP scales). Results from a moderated mediation model indicate that recalled positive influences related to generative concern but not generative behavior. Moreover, extraversion did indeed moderate between recalled positive influences and generative concern in that the relation was significantly positive for medium and high extraversion. The findings suggest that what people learn from generative role models is generative concern rather than generative behavior. They also suggest a twofold role of extraversion for generativity: It has been found to be a predictor of generativity but also affects what people gain from others’ generative efforts.

In Search of Waves: A Life Course Analysis of the Mobile Lifestyle of Finnish Surfer-travellers

Surfing is often a mobile lifestyle, centred around the search for waves. This article analyses Finnish surfer-travellers through a life course perspective. The data consists of 20 thematic life story interviews, conducted in 2016–2017. Surfer-travellers are representative of highly mobile cosmopolitan youth. This analysis focuses on how they have engaged with surf-travelling, what networks and capital they have utilized in doing so, and how their active agency and choices have influenced their lifestyles. Through their individual agency, surfer-travellers organize their lives to prioritize their travels. For surfer-travellers, mobility is a goal in itself, and this leads to a life ‘lived differently’. The results are connected to wider discussions on lifestyle mobilities, youth mobilities, mobile transitions, and changing conceptions of adulthood.

Self-initiated expatriation and older women: composing a further life

PurposeResearch into self-initiated expatriation (SIE) has increased exponentially, although the focus of these investigations has been on professional workers, and little has been gender specific. The purpose of this research therefore is to explore the career and personal motivations for SIE through the novel lens of older women. In this exploratory study, SIE and socio-emotional selectivity motivation theories (SSTs) are used, in addition to the Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM), to understand the reasons these women have taken this path.Design/methodology/approachThe paper employs a qualitative methodology, drawing on in-depth life story interviews with 21 women aged 50 or more who had taken a SIE. A five-step narrative process using a story-telling approach was the method of analysis.FindingsThe findings show important contradictions to the extant literature. Career dissatisfaction and escape are key motivations for these women. Further, contrary to SST, these women were seeking novelty–new places and new experiences. These women were also seeking authenticity as suggested by KCM, but also challenge was to the fore–not in the career domain, but in the personal domain. Their motivations for SIE extend beyond the current evidence base and understanding of the phenomena.Originality/valueThe contributions include new insights into the motivational drivers for SIE for these older women and the importance of timing as facilitators of SIE. The SIE nomenclature is broadened through the inclusion of older women and beyond professional spheres. An initial framework of a more integrated model is developed from this exploratory study and presented as a basis for beginning to understand the phenomenon of older women undertaking SIE.

An Existential Anthropological Study of Selfhood, Uncertainty and Resilience Among Youth of Tando Ghulam Ali, Sindh

This study combines three orientations, namely existential thought about the meaning of ‘being’ and ‘existence,’ phenomenological insights into ‘lived experience,’ and anthropological endeavor at what it means to be human. It attempts to focus on the human conditions by directly engaging with human beings. Specifically guiding itself with the questions such as how young people engage in the meaning-making of their lived experiences in their life course’s ever-changing process. Taking its theoretical insights and inspiration from existential and phenomenological anthropology, by zooming in on lived experiences, the research was conducted using life story interviews to collect the narratives to gain understandings into the life-worlds as it is lived and made sense of by young people of Tando Ghulam Ali, a rural town of District Badin, Sindh. Based on the ethnographic data and observations, it is argued that the meaning-making of lived experiences was different among research participants with a strong presence of selfhood and self-consciousness temporally and affectively; the difference in orientation towards life is entangled with personal history as well. This research went beyond the horizons of culture and society to put existence, life, and being, which are silhouetted at meta-level, at the heart of anthropological focus. This research is an experimental research project in anthropology, which has attempted to step its foot into the human condition's terra incognita, which calls for anthropologists’ further exploration.