Home and family

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The context of home and family is very important for understanding the process of assimilation. Immigration is a family affair. How do new media practices at home shape the assimilation trajectory? How do immigrant youth use new media at home? How does that use help them and their families to assimilate?

Focus on the practices at home, both individual and communal:

  • Parental practices: rules, control, monitoring, access, buying
  • Communal: joint consumption
  • Individual: individual consumption

However, also address how those practices are shaped by:

  • imaginaries: how do parents imagine their children’s future progression, learning, educational. (all of the parents think the computer helps with education, with homework, with school work.)
  • discourses: what is expected of parents, what institutions expect. What kind of messages from school, from the media, from the church and community organizations are receiving the parents?
  • constraints: how and why do parents differ in their approaches including culture, class, capital etc

Purchasing, acquiring new media technologies is for many of the immigrant families part of the process of assimilation. Certain technologies, such as the computer, are associated with educational goals they have for their children, the expectations and aspirations. New media can be seen as an investment in youth futures according to the institutional discourses that surround certain technologies such as computer and the internet.

Certain kind of new media technologies are directly associated with the assimilation process and to the the future of children in education and workforce. Others are more related to entertainment. However, even TV is seen as a tool for assimilation since it allows to become familiar with culture, to learn languages. In Texas and the US, TV and radio also allow to have access to content in Spanish and from MExico.


Home

Is the home a figured world? how can we describe, contextualize this sociocultural context?

  • the temporal, spatial and social relations in the family live, parents and children everyday lifes.
  • material artefacts (technology/media devices), social activities (practices) and institutional arrangements (rules) : create the context of the home.
  • different conceptions of home.
  • increasingly individualised society, late modern societies become more indivudalised.
  • conceptions of home
    • ‘households’ in terms of economic self-sufficiency
    • social stratification and inequality across households.
    • family


  • everyday life at home
  • parents economic and cultural resources
  • history of media at home