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This paper explores the practice of sending children ‘back home’ for stints of schooling in the Nigerian diaspora in the UK and the USA, from intergenerational perspectives. It illustrates that intergenerational relations and values in migrant families are not just discursively debated, but negotiated through embodied, material transnational practices, and always mediated by structural contexts. Nigerian diaspora parents use ‘homeland’ education when they face structurally situated crises in socialising their children into normative values around education and respect at the critical juncture of adolescence. Young people respond strategically to their Nigerian sojourns to express congruence with (but not replication of) their parents’ values. Retrospective perspectives highlight intergenerational negotiation around ‘homeland’ education, and that mobility experiences have long afterlives, as people return to them as touchstones when they consider reproducing or transforming the values they pass on. Where ‘homeland’ education can all-too-easily be read as a doubling down by migrant parents around the reproduction of tradition, the paper argues that it is in fact a pragmatic future-oriented response to the way downward social mobility can threaten broader family migration projects. Intergenerational perspectives uncover nuance, and underscore that youth mobilities are always situated in (infra)structurally mediated family dynamics and life course temporalities.
Ruth Cheung Judge (Fri,) studied this question.