Sondra Cuban

Transnational families, ICTs and mobile learning

This article focuses on findings from an Economic and Social Research Council study in England about the uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among 15 highly mobile migrant workers within their transnational families. Using an extended case study approach including ethnographic methods and a thematic analysis, patterns appeared about learning within transnational families using ICTs. The findings were that their mobile learning was: (1) infused with caring; (2) multi-directional and involved multiple members; (3) translated tacit knowledge; and (4) enabled linguistic gifting. Implications for lifelong education centre on practice and policies that build on how transnational families communicate using ICTs. The study conclusions focus on the complexities of mobile learning within these families, showing that they are difficult to capture, but nonetheless important.

A stratified analysis of the ICT-based communicative practices and networks of migrant women

This paper reports on a study of 60 women migrants in the US and their information and communication technology (ICT) based communication practices within their networks. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and the extended case method, differences amongst the participants emerged. Those participants who migrated with abundant human, social and cultural capital reserves used their greater online presence, technological resources, and digital aptitudes to connect to their families from a far through ICTs, which had the effect of widening their networks. Their intensive and widespread use of ICTs with family and friends fueled their aspirations to move onwards or return to their countries with greater leverage. Those participants with marginal levels were not online and they used domestic landlines to contact their away-families. They connected more with local co-ethnics and institutions on a face-to-face basis, thereby strengthening their community bonds. They concentrated their few resources on making social and economic investments for the next generation, and therefore could afford little in-depth contact with their families abroad. The findings have implications for expanding education initiatives and communication infrastructures, as well as relaxing restrictive immigration policies that keep families physically apart.

Considering Immigrant Women and Equitable Communication

This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book and discusses the politics and policies undergirding transnational family communication with questions this study brings up for further investigation. The constraints women immigrants experience in communicating with their transnational families are summarized with relation to the model to focus on global equity issues. ICTs have to be viewed first in the migratory context. Yet the ICTs proved to be problematic mechanisms for transnational family communication especially for women. Next, the communication infrastructures proved to be highly inequitable. Finally, the participants’ education levels, which are normally not accounted for in studies, appeared to be important proxies of their ICT access and use. The chapter ends with a discussion about the problematic aspects of ICT-based transnational family communication.

My Methodological Approach: “It Reminds Me of Lots of Things”

This chapter spotlights the data, methods, sample, and issues associated with conducting an exploratory study on transnational family communication among immigrants within an ICT-based context. A critical reflexive approach highlights the issues involved in the author being an immigrant and communicating with her transnational family and what that was like in comparison to the participants. Alternative methods of data collecting and analysis are specified that clarify the perspectives of the informants and participants and their interpretations of the research, in terms of their sensory understandings. The site and participant sample are introduced and discussed in terms of their characteristics. Gender, race, social class, nationality, and language as well as other important factors that bear on the research are detailed in terms of strengths and limitations.

Framing Transnational Family Communication: “It Feels like a Contradiction, Close and Far”

This chapter outlines the frameworks surrounding ICT-based communication and their gaps—global care chains, migration chains, and sensory extensions. A new framework focusing on the mechanism that drives transnational family communication is presented: Transnational ICT-based Communication Chains (TICCs). The participants and their families develop and operate these chains within complex conditions of distance and separation. Next, the conditions of distance and separation are deconstructed, using the data together with the literature. After that, the different ways that families respond to these conditions through numerous means is proposed. These responses form a system of transnational family communication that was previously invisible and emphasizes human actions that are mediated through an ICT environment. In formulating this new model, a deeper and broader analysis of this phenomenon emerges.

Care Talk Within Transnational Families: “I Hold Myself so I Don’t Cry”

This chapter looks closely at the communication surrounding the exchanges of care within both local and transnational families, including how members re-organized and interacted around health issues and medical problems. The focus is mainly on the care talk that both left-behind and local families engaged in when struggling to cope with health and medical problems and how their identities and relationships formed around these conversations. The families communicated about a type of care that was characterized by protecting the person experiencing a crisis, providing material goods, and then, checking on the effects of the support given. The tensions that the participants experienced in making emotional and ethical decisions are highlighted.

Introduction: “I Wish I Was a Bird”

This chapter follows the debates surrounding transnational family communication, with questions regarding the degree to which the ICTs bond families from afar. Two women’s stories represent the struggles all of the participants experienced in communicating with their families through ICTs. Each woman’s experience reflects the new female migration to the U.S.; one which is diverse rather than homogenous. They use ICTs in accordance with their gender but also their affordances to communicate. It becomes clear that their families’ sense of place and intimacy are destabilized. They reconstruct the family through their communication, which is embedded in ICTs and this has consequences for their relations, emotions, and identities. Terms are defined and problematized and the chapter ends with a summary of chapters.

Cars and Schools and Heart Is in Canada: Divergent Communication Pathways of Immigrant Women

This chapter focuses on the different backgrounds, situations, and trajectories of the participants, which influenced their technological affordances and, subsequently, their ICT-based communicative practices. I show that the participants divided neatly into two groups that reflected their different patterned responses to the distance and separation of family migration. Two distinct groups emerge within the sample with social class as a major factor, those who would be considered highly skilled and those with low skills. Their family backgrounds produced in them different levels of capital—human, social, and cultural—which further affected their transnational ICT-based communication within their networks. Resultantly, the two groups bonded and bridged differently within their networks.

The ICT-Based Networks of Highly Skilled Immigrant Women: “I Had Bigger Ambitions”

This chapter draws attention to the highly skilled participants and their persistence in becoming upwardly mobile through their ICT-based communication. They were strategic in moving from one visa to another, staying in the U.S. and getting married, moving onward, or returning to their countries. They adopted goals and perspectives to further their aspirations, by attending American colleges and acquiring English to bolster their upward trajectories and drawing on their mother’s support to persist. They developed network capital in the sense that they established new networks. However, their capacities to broker actual opportunities did not necessarily occur at the level that they desired and they believed they had to work harder and persist longer to achieve their aspirations.