Making diversity visible in often unrecognised family practices

Abstract

This article makes a small contribution to Families, Relationships and Societies’ knowledge production. It addresses racialised and ethnicised inequalities experienced in the everyday lives of a family constituted through serial migration, where the adult interviewed (‘Lizzie’) reflected on her childhood experience of leaving the Caribbean to join parents she did not remember and siblings she had never met. It reuses material from a larger study of the retrospective narratives of adults who had been childhood serial migrants. A major finding is that Lizzie’s experience of serial migration was intersectional, linked to her social positioning and her experiences of racism at school and felt outsiderness at home in contrast to feelings of belonging and being valued at the Black-led church she attended. The article argues that, while such family experiences are frequently unrecognised, they pattern children’s experiences, their adult relationships and identities and contribute to, and arise from, historical and sociostructural constructions of society.