Beyond family: Separation and reunification for young people negotiating transnational relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores perspectives on family reunification and emergent forms of separation among young migrants. These young people lived apart from and later reunited with their migrant parents who moved from the Philippines to Canada for work. I draw from 15 months of ethnographic, arts-based, and participatory research with ten participants living in Greater Vancouver. I demonstrate that while reunification literature and child rights discourse often focus on the process of a mother and child coming back together, this can obscure the relationships that young people form with others in the meantime. Cared for by grandmothers, aunts, or siblings, as well as becoming close to best friends, romantic partners, and confidantes, meant that the time these young people spent apart from mothers was utilized to cultivate vital connections to others. These connections were often quite painfully ruptured upon emigration, paradoxically turning “family reunification” into new separations. I explore how young people engaged in dual forms of relational work as they sought to foster a bond with their mothers while also maintaining—or grieving—connections with now-distanced loved ones in the Philippines. My findings, focused mainly on the emergent artistic and participatory methods, complicate family reunification discourse that stresses the importance of nuclear family bonds by calling into question who is family and who becomes family in a global economy that pulls such kindred apart. The young people I introduce speak creatively through poetry, story, and music to how familial separations are not resolved upon reunification but rather that reunification can give rise to new separations that navigated or even grieved in lesser-known ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".