According to these studies, most of which are realized from a cross-cultural perspective, and which refer to children living place poligamies as Third Cul-ture Kids, repeated cross-cultural movements at a young age are considered a challenge in individuals’ identity formation (Fail et al. 2004) as children might experience difficulties attaining a solid cultural identity (Hoersting and Jenkins 2011). Therefore, children whose lives are characterized by transnational rela-tionships and frequently international movements are mainly observed as diso-riented and deprived of their sense of belonging (Pollock and Van Reken 2009).
It is important to highlight that children considered in these studies are usually children attending international schools (Mok and Saltmarsh 2014), and they are members of families that for jobs reasons are travelling worldwide or working overseas for long periods. Differences behind movement histories are important to be clarified here, not certainly because they might affect epistemically the ways in which children’s cultural identity is observed and conceptualized, but because this difference might promote further acknowledgements on how the voice of children that live certain migration history, and coming from certain countries of departure are even more rarely considered than the voices of children of families whose choice to move internationally, however hard, is sustained by more power-ful social and economically routes and conditions.
In this chapter the aim is to point out how, generally, the idea of the child as stuck amongst cultures, against which the criticism of some writers as Mannitz (2005) is addressed, is strongly bound with an understanding of these children as
defined by a problematic disadvantage that has to be compensated. But the idea of this disadvantage becomes even more overwhelming and pervasive when the child is attending specific groups for the learning of the dominant language. Their need of special assistance with language and literacy thus become a main fea-ture through which qualifying and observing their identities, with the risk that—
in school environment as well as in academic studies—they become labelled as
“disadvantaged’ groups” (Wallace 2011, p. 102).
Moreover, through this work my aim is to reflect on how these interpretations of children transnational mobility find their legitimation through, and simulta-neously reproduce, three scientific dominant discourses. The first one has been defined by Christensen et al. (2000) as a national discourse. This discourse crea-tes a connection between the identity formation process and the geographical sta-bility. According to this discourse the concepts of belonging and social identity are constrained and linked to tangible and material spaces and traditionally “the process of identity formation has been seen as tied to or reflected through particu-lar fixed geographical or spatial localities” (Christensen et al. 2000, p. 140).
A sedentary discourse is strictly related to the national one. Holloway and Valentine (2004) speak about “spatial discourse”, but I choose to use the term
“sedentary” as it better highlights how mobility is usually perceived as opposite to the norm in children’s life experiences. According to the sedentary discourse childhood is linked to an idea of residential fixity and domestication as the natural spaces for children growth (Holloway and Valentine 2004; Moosa-Mitha 2005;
Ní Laoire et al. 2010; Belotti 2013). These premises, emphasizing the condition of diversity of those children who experience migration or frequent mobility, implicitly confer them the position of victims, and again, relegate them to a con-dition of disadvantage.
This position is linked to the third discourse, the developmental discourse (Kjørholt 2007; Aitken et al. 2007): this discourse presents childhood as a bio-logically determined stage on the path to adulthood. Children thus are not fully participant in society, but incomplete subjects in becoming (Sirota 2012). They are not considered as relevant in their present participation to society but because they will be tomorrow’s adults (Baraldi and Iervese 2014). Against this backdrop, frequent mobility experience for someone who is conceived as “not fully formed”
is considered a risk for his/her sense of belonging and cultural orientation.
This view upon children development finds its origins in developmental psy-chology (Sirota 2012) which has dominated, according to Prout and James (1997), studies concerning childhood up to recent years, becoming the explana-tory framework of children’s nature and the image of pureness and innocence which is usually related to childhood (Ibidem).
Narratives
In this Chapter I will look at how, empirically, these discourses are recognisable in teachers’ narratives and how they affect the ways in which concepts of culture, identity and belonging are constructed and how their meanings reaffirm the insti-tutional structures.
In a broad perspective, narratives include all stories that guide actions (Baker 2006) and they are constructed from events in time and space to create causal employment (Baker 2006; Somers 1994, p. 616).
According to Baraldi and Iervese (2017), an important development in the investigation of narratives was realized in communication studies with the work of Fisher (1987) and in sociology through the work of Somers (1994).
Through narratives we come to know, understand and make sense of the social world and we construct our social identities (Somers 1994). They are thus social constructions which construct reality rather than represent it (Amadasi and Iervese 2018).
As they are produced in communication processes (Baraldi 2014), they can be
“highly designed or loosely structured, employing a range of stories” (Amadasi and Holliday 2017a), but in any case they are highly dynamic entities, conti-nuously subject to changes as they are always influenced by the ongoing experi-ences and stories to which people are daily exposed (Baker 2006, p. 3).
Somers differentiates between ontological narratives, which are those that define ourselves and that “social actors use to make sense of—indeed, to act in their lives” (Somers 1994, p. 618), public narratives, conceptual narratives which are those scientific explanations constructed by scientists and metanarra-tives—“masternarratives” operating “at a presuppositional level of social-science epistemology or beyond our awareness” (Somers 1994, p. 619).
Although these differentiations are just descriptive, and my general research aim is also to investigate how operationally participants employ them, choosing how to intertwine them “within a complex mix of creative autonomy, reflexi-vity and conformity” (Amadasi and Holliday 2017b), in this Chapter I will focus mainly on the second category of narratives mentioned, which are public narratives.
As public narratives are those stories widespread in specific social or institu-tional environments (Somers 1994; Somers and Gibson 1994) they acquire parti-cular relevance when the investigated environment is the educational institution, where the research and data collection have been carried out.
The aim of this analysis is not to investigate the structural composition of narratives but rather their power and function (Baker 2006), which means to look at how they are built on a complex network of several, socially consolidated narratives, adopted and adapted by the interviewees in line with the context, the institutional needs and the specific events which refer to children’s journeys. The-refore, it is important to reflect on the social effects of these narratives and how, as public narratives developed inside an institutional context, they become means to co-construct and reproduce a political and social order that is functional to the institution itself.