Between Privilege and PovertyAccepted Version.pdf (493.73 kB)
Between privilege and poverty: the affordances of mobility among aid worker children
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 JournalISSN
0117-1968Publisher
SAGE PublicationsExternal DOI
Issue
4Volume
25Page range
489-506Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Sussex Centre for Migration Research Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2016-11-09First Open Access (FOA) Date
2017-02-23First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2016-11-09Usage metrics
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