Participation on the Margins of Immigrant Women’s Lives and Learnings

This study focuses on the participation and learning of five women immigrants in the Northwest US and the ways community-based organisations (CBOs) operated in their work and community lives. The study points to the ways that the women became assertive at work, moved from the private into the public sphere, and developed caring literacies in their communities

A Critique of the Transmission Model of Functional Health Literacy

The author will explore the concept of functional health literacy through a critical analysis of the definition. Derived from a medical model, it serves as an information commodity within a human capital approach to literacy and healthcare, transmitting particular information, and reinforcing compliance with the existing system

“I Wish I Was a Bird To Fly Back and Forth:” Immigrant Women and Their Transnational Families Caring At a Distance: DRAFT 4/14/15

This case study of fifty women immigrants in Washington state focuses on the ingenious emotional strategies they engaged in with their left-behind families to care at a distance and the problematic ways the information and communication technology (ICTs) mediated these relationships across space and time. The study draws on a feminist transnational framework and an extended case method approach to understand the emotional dimensions and meanings of care by separated members and the ways the social technologies, and other factors, shaped these transnational spaces and interactions. The study utilizes ethnographic methods (interviews, informants, journals, focus groups, documentary analysis, and informal observations) and both a thematic and narrative analyses to glean patterns across the women’s experiences as well as unique qualities. The themes and narratives of the participants demonstrated that these ICT-mediated interactions contained “conundrums:” 1) ICTs enabled “communication chains” that were essential for women immigrants caring for their families but which did not resolve problems; 2) Transnational family who interacted more regularly and through multiple modalities experienced an “embodied social presence” that made the care, more real, from afar but didn’t resolve emotional tensions inherent in relationships; 3) The existence of ‘hidden emotions” that resulted from the unacknowledged affective work of caring through ICTs; and, 4) the important roles mothers played as agents in their daughter’s migration

Symposium: Critical Perspectives on Practitioner Research

This symposium explores the ambiguities and tensions involved in carrying out practitioner research within specific funding and institutional contexts. It argues that more explicit recognition of these challenges is needed to realize the potential of PR

Migrant care workers at the intersection of rural belonging in small English communities

Shortage of staff in the private care sector brought migrant participants of this study to rural communities in northwest England. The care workers, fourteen highly skilled first-generation migrants, described experiences of feeling unsettled, despite residing in these communities for an average of nine years. Social divisions, such as their race, ethnicity, and gender, intersected in rural England to create an overwhelming, at times, feeling of being othered. We use intersectionality as a framework to examine the advantageous and disadvantageous positionings of migrant workers, alongside their strategies of resistance and adaptation, filling in the gaps that acculturation theory glosses over

Women’s use of health texts in Hawaii.

The researcher analysed two women's uses of popular culture texts on the island of Hawai'i. They read these texts in order to learn about, and manage, their health problems. These vernacular texts were different from the institutional texts that were prescribed to them by their doctors, as well as the commercial ones that were in the literacy programme they attended. Their uses of these self-help texts reflected the staunchly religious community where they lived, as well as the post-welfare society, with pressures to solve their own problems. The researcher used ethnographic methods to learn about these issues. These popular materials provided the women with relaxation and meaning, which fit with their communities of practice. The study points to the value of knowing about learners' social practices for policymaking and the importance of incorporating these types of texts into programmes

Outside practices : learning within the borderlands.

Social practice research can be seen to illuminate the practices of marginalised learners in ‘borderlands’, areas outside of formal educational frameworks. This paper examines the issues and challenges of social practice researchers as they explore borderlands logic set against a critique of the prevailing skills-based educational philosophies that dominate in the knowledge-based economies of the US and England. Social practice research highlights meaning-making through a wide-angled view of the learning contexts of marginalised groups. This paper introduces the themes and sets the scene in a series of papers in this volume from leading social practice researchers

Participation in the margins of women’s lives and learnings.

This study focuses on the participation and learning of five women immigrants in the Northwest US and the ways community-based organisations (CBOs) operated in their work and community lives. The study points to the ways that the women became assertive at work, moved from the private into the public sphere, and developed caring literacies in their communities

Home/work : the roles of education, literacy, and learning in the networks and mobility of professional women migrant carers in Cumbria.

This study focuses on a group of highly skilled female migrants who were carers to the elderly, and the roles of education, literacy, and learning in their social networks and mobility in Cumbria, England. Over a one-year period, interviews were conducted with care training specialists, carers, clients, and employers across England, including Cumbria, in conjunction with literature reviews and observations to develop themes about this phenomenon. The findings revealed that there were many barriers to the carers' adjustment and advancement in a new area of settlement, and that these obstacles were complex and invisible to the care sector establishment; while the women's migration took place over physical borders, there were also hidden socio-economic, cultural, policy, and 'paper walls' (Brinkmann 2006) that prevented their access to professional jobs, further and higher education, and formal associations. This case study casts many questions about the geographies of skilled migrant women and their roles in transforming the global care sector as well as their local communities through their educational capital