Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and practical care. The discussion illuminates two aspects of parents’ involvement in fieldwork: (1) how the unique nature of parent–child relationships shapes the research process at multiple stages, and (2) how the gendered notions of knowledge production result in parents’ contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.
Much of the scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families concentrates on challenges migrants encounter when providing care across transnational space. This paper focuses attention on older adults as transnational care recipients, their agency, and alternative sources of care. Drawing on the experiences of 35 affluent, urban older parents residing in Sri Lanka with at least one adult child who is a skilled, permanent migrant in Australia, I examine how the older parents adapt to the migration of their traditional caregivers, and how the family, community, market and state respond to this care gap to varying degrees. I propose a “care pentagon” as a framework to interrogate older persons' negotiations with these multiple caregivers in the home and host countries, and the manner these agents operate to form a tiered network of caregivers. Through the analysis, I highlight the care‐receiver's tendency to self‐care and the agency they exert within their relationships of care. The paper demonstrates that older persons' landscapes of care change both temporally and spatially as their levels of health and independence vary over time.
The nascent scholarship on geographies of alternative education focuses on alternative education spaces, mostly located in the UK, that resist and/or negotiate neoliberal restructuring of education, some of which cater to socially marginalised groups. In contrast, through an ethnographic focus on an underground Christian international school in China, we examine an alternative education space that responds to parents' aspirations for their children to be inculcated with global cultural capital, Chinese values, and Christian beliefs. These aspirations are not fulfilled in mainstream state schools or international schools in China, but are demanded by parents looking for a “superior” set of skills for their children to navigate the increasingly neoliberal, and global, higher education and employment landscapes. The discussion reveals the incongruities in the school's claim to simultaneously instil global, local, and spiritual forms of cultural capital, which leads to two visions of the pathway to higher education. The paper expands the geographies of alternative education in three ways. First, it shows how international and faith‐based schools can provide alternative schooling. Second, it shows how the departure of alternative education spaces from their mainstream counterparts can reveal the inadequacies of the latter. Third, it draws attention to how the cultural capital inculcated through alternative education can lead to alternative international higher education pathways within and beyond China.
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