Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how unemployment shapes childcare practices in the North of Montenegro. While parents' joblessness can create financial vulnerability and affect emotional climate in the family, it may also foster reshuffling of the traditional parental roles.

Paper long abstract:

Since the breakup of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 90's, Montenegro has been experiencing high unemployment rates, especially in the northern part of the country. Besides, more women than men are without a formal job. The data from my ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017-2018 suggest that families in the north of Montenegro consider financial insecurity and unemployment as the main challenge to their family life.

While unemployment in Montenegro has a significant effect on people's childcare practices, families have different strategies of dealing with the father's or mother's joblessness. On the one hand, the mother's formal unemployment is normalized because of the traditional gender roles. Historically, childcare was seen as solely the woman's responsibility. Therefore, in the case of formal unemployment, the woman continues her traditional role as a childcarer and household manager.

The father's unemployment, on the other hand, can place the man and family in a vulnerable position. Nowadays masculinity is centered around economic prosperity. Therefore, inability to be a breadwinner for the family not only creates financial insecurity, but also endangers the man's masculinity. At the same time, my ethnographic data suggest that the father's unemployment may also open up a new gender repertoire and foster more active and equal participation in childcare, creating an emotional bond between father and pre-school children. I argue that the father's unemployment and the lack of financial resources are translated into access to greater time resources that can be redirected to foster more meaningful involvement in childcare.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation aims at reconstructing the experience of vulnerable parenthood in the social and cultural context of contemporary Russia by means of analyzing the narratives of parents of children with developmental disabilities.

Paper long abstract:

Stories of parents of disabled children have often become the focus of attention for anthropologists and sociologists in the framework of constructivist and phenomenological approaches. These studies aim at reconstructing the interpretations of the disability labels, meanings individuals ascribe to their experiences shaped by certain socio-cultural settings, and notions of transformed self-hood and motherhood in relation to the child's disability [see, for example: Skinner et al. 1999; Goddard et al. 2000; Kausar et al 2003; Kelly 2005; Goodley, Tregaskis 2006; Hines et al. 2012; Lalvani 2015; Ginsburg, Rapp 2010; and, certainly, a well-known study by Gali Landsman, Landsman 2008].

As these studies have shown, parents of children with disabilities exist at a crossroad of discourses - one, a traditional discourse of pathology and sorrow, and the other, a newer and more critical discourse of acceptance and empowerment of people with disabilities. It is equally true for the present-day Russia context, the parent's narratives reflecting similar paradigmatic change.

Drawing upon the interviews (N=120) with parents of children and adults with disabilities living in big cities and small towns in Russia, my presentation will highlight their constructions of "self" transformed by the experience of being a mother or father of a disabled child.

In these constructions they base upon certain values, corresponding to their lifestyles, professional backgrounds, or broader cultural ideologies, including generational ones, and represent several modalities of thinking about the future: anxiety, hope, belief, certainty. The changing modalities illustrate the process of socialization into a disabled child's parent role.

Paper short abstract:

This research questions how educational opportunities in the host context drive or generate familial migration decisions to come, stay in or return from the host context and whether they could be (further) considered for the development of valorization strategies for highly-skilled migrants.

Paper long abstract:

In the light of the contemporary brain drain discussion, Beltrame (2007:60) sustains based OECD data that the 'Italian problem' is not emigration of its professional elite but the scarce capacity of attracting high-qualified immigrants. He prompts to offer them attractive conditions in the host context that go beyond economic opportunities.

Several scholars (Clark and Withers 2007) confirm the crucial agency of family within migration processes, and highlight the interdependence between life course events, such as childbirth.

This research hence assumes family needs to be the main indicator when talking about attractive conditions for highly skilled migrants. It thus questions how educational opportunities drive or generate familial migration decisions and whether they could be considered for the development of valorization strategies.

On this purpose, parental practices towards the choice of formal and non-formal educational contexts and strategies have been examined through a comparative lense with qualitative data on German and Romanian highly-skilled in Turin. Both groups are significantly polarizing in numbers and migration patterns, however they reveal several historically and politically rooted peculiarities in common. The choice has thus been made to see how "European tradition" works in the collective habitus of both populations.

Drawing on King's (2002:91) appeal to link "pre- with post-migration characteristics, sometimes across more than one generation, and often employing a social networks approach" investigations examine the motivation for spatial mobility, the processing of choices within the own family nucleus and the decisional power ascribed to the migrant's family, first and second degree relatives.

Paper short abstract:

Based on 171 interviews in urban Tanzania, this paper applies a social reproductive lens to examine under-18 marriage. I trace out how worse alternatives for daughters motivate poor families (and some daughters) to choose early marriage, and how these alternatives are linked to economic depletion.

Paper long abstract:

Anti-child marriage discourses assume that girls never choose early marriage, and that eliminating it automatically improves girls' lives. It is known that under-18 marriage increases risk of early childbearing, maternal death, and abuse. Yet my research in urban Tanzania (171 interviews) revealed that some girls wanted to marry early. I therefore ask: what are the perceived realistic life options for girls in poverty?

Rates of early marriage have risen in East Africa since 1990. One reason is that current market-led gender empowerment approaches overlook the depletion of social reproductive resources, i.e. the regeneration and maintenance of able-bodied labour power. Cities requires a flexible pool of low-wage workers - produced and cared for by women - to function efficiently, prevent workers' collective action, and keep living costs down. To accumulate value, urban capital seeks to avoid paying for labourers' social reproduction. Costs are transferred to workers and their families, draining value from communities and households, and eroding the sectors of education and employment expected to foster women's economic independence.

Early marriage can represent families' efforts to conserve social reproductive resources and resist market exploitation and depletion. If daughters cannot access affordable education or reliable income, a husband's income may be the best option to support child-rearing. Many of the families I studied were aware of early marriage's risks. Yet worse alternatives for daughters included pregnancy, resorting to sex work, contracting HIV, or returning home to burden already ill or impoverished parents - all of which continued poverty into future generations.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a long-term research, I want to discuss some of the transformations that can be observed among the Kalapalo's families and childcare (Upper Xingu, Brazil), due to the expansion of conditional cash transfer policies in Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a long-term research, I intend to present some reflections on access to and effects of cash transfer programs among the Kalapalo, speakers of a variation of the Karib language in the Upper Xingu region (Mato Grosso, Brazil). Bolsa Família is a conditional cash transfer program, aimed to "poor families", especially those with children, registered in the Single Registry for Social Programs of the Brazilian's Federal Government. Programmes like this are based on concepts that disregard the indigenous peoples' specificities, specially concerning "poverty", "family" and parenthood. The criteria adopted to identify families, for example, are economic dependence among their members, as well as cohabitation in the same "domicile". This definition does not consider, for example, the transit of children between the various village houses throughout the day, which implies not only sharing food, but also sharing care, blurring the boundaries between "families" as thought by the Program. Besides, the very process of introducing money into a hitherto under-monetized economy transform gender and generation relations inside the "families", reinforcing some hitherto unmarked relationships and at the same time breaking with certain obligations that marked, for example, the affinity relations between in-laws. At the same time, the conditionalities families must attend in order to receive the benefits compel parents to maintain educational and health habits that disregard and often disqualify traditional care practices.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we bring social advertising to the forefront of the collective fight against sociocultural vulnerability by considering it not only a crucial tool for raising public awareness, but also as a potential major transformative social agent itself.

Paper long abstract:

The tremendous economic and financial crisis that befell Europe (with a major impact on Southern Countries as Spain) a decade ago has gradually pushed vulnerable groups over the verge of poverty. The combination of depriving factors as the increase in the number of households in a situation (or at risk) of poverty, the loss of jobs and the decrease in material income in many households have paired with the inability of institutional care services and public resources to alleviate the living condition of those exposed to situations of moderate and severe risk of vulnerability.

In this context, the conjunction of a weakened welfare state, on one hand, and the overload of personal networks of informal support, on the other, triggered various public and private initiatives mainly aimed at raising awareness of different manifestations of the problem, as well as at raising funds for specific palliative initiatives. The design of advertising campaigns that use Media as the main communicative artery has become a crucial asset to reach this goal. Hence, in our paper we propose to analyse the communicative and persuasive strategies that set up these campaigns, specifically concerning poverty and vulnerability situations, by paying special attention to the underlying ideological assumptions and to the ways of representing vulnerable subjects. And to do so, we propose a multimodal analytical strategy (that is: including several agents' perspectives) that, far from being limited to the mere examination of the audio-visual repertoire, seeks for the incorporation of media and professionals from the advertising milieu.