Flexible families? 'Astronaut' households and the experiences of lone mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the recent emergence of the 'astronaut family' as a migration strategy, practised by Hong Kong and Taiwanese business and professional families and manifest in immigrant gateway cities such as Vancouver, Sydney and Auckland. Exemplifying transnationalism as 'social morphology' (Vertovec 1999), the household is literally split across the Pacific Ocean, as the male head pursues his career in Asia, while his wife and children are relocated overseas. Based upon in-depth interviews with 'astronaut wives' in Vancouver, Canada, I examine these circumstances, challenging a prevalent representation of powerful and cohesive Chinese migrant families. In so doing, I hope to contribute to a much broader literature on transnationalism and transnational social forms. In addition, in light of research on household migration and patriarchal relations, I consider women's distinctive experience of this arrangement. This paper demonstrates the context dependency of female oppression, and highlights the enduring relationship between spatial distance and social relations within a profoundly transnational setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".