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Between Privilege and PovertyAccepted Version.pdf (493.73 kB)

Between privilege and poverty: the affordances of mobility among aid worker children

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 03:58 authored by Anne-Meike FechterAnne-Meike Fechter
Contemporary research on children affected by migration in Southeast Asia has examined the impact of mobility on their life chances, choices and overall welfare. Extending this concern, this article seeks to address these questions in the context of privileged migration. Specifically, it asks how the mobility of children whose parents work for aid agencies in low-income countries shapes the way they understand and negotiate experiences of privilege, as well as their everyday encounters with poverty. Based on ethnographic research with young people and their families in Cambodia, the findings suggest that parents and children may envisage their international mobility as a chance for personal growth, specifically as manifest in the form of ‘open-mindedness.’ Such positive discourses are complicated, however, by a simultaneously engendered sense of superiority toward those who are less mobile. They are also intertwined with practices of ‘bracketing’ possible frictions arising from their interactions with children of local elite members. While the young people’s proximity to poverty provides opportunities for locally-based service-learning activities, connections with their parents’ work can remain abstract. The article therefore suggests that this form of international mobility may not, in itself, enable a critical engagement with poverty or with their own and others’ privilege.

Funding

Alternative Actors in Development? Understanding the Role of 'Do-It-Yourself Aid'; G1103; LEVERHULME TRUST; RF-2013-535

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Asia Pacific Migration Journal

ISSN

0117-1968

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

4

Volume

25

Page range

489-506

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Sussex Centre for Migration Research Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-11-09

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-02-23

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-11-09

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