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Empowering Interactions, Sustaining Ties: Vietnamese Migrant Students’ Communication with Left-Behind Families and Friends

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As globalization continues unabated, migration in general and student migration in particular have intensified worldwide. Mobile communication technologies are important links between migrant students and their left-behind family and friends. This chapter seeks to highlight the complex relationships between the students' migrant status and their technology use, as well as between technology and the family in Vietnamese transnational households. This chapter presents contextualised accounts of three Vietnamese migrant students' media use over a two-week period, drawing from data from a one-week media monitoring exercise, a one-week media deprivation exercise, semi-structured interviews and daily media diaries. The study found that the Vietnamese migrant students appropriated a variety of communication technologies to connect with their home country, which helped to energise family interactions, sustain family ties and facilitate parental and sibling mediation, thereby supporting bonding within Vietnamese transnational families. Moreover, the technologies also helped the students to build social capital with their left-behind friends in Vietnam.
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... From letters to phones calls, text messages, and video calls, communication technologies and smartphones have profoundly altered women's ways of performing long-distance mothering (e.g., Madianou, 2012Madianou, , 2016Madianou & Miller, 2011Parreñas, 2014;Waruwu, 2022). Previous studies of long-distance mothering in transnational/crossborder contexts have focused primarily on migrant mothers and their left-behind underage children (e.g., Madianou, 2012;Madianou & Miller, 2011), while scholars have paid less attention to long-distance mothering for adult childrenparticularly those studying abroad/cross-border (Kang, 2012;Peng, 2016;Pham & Lim, 2016). ...
... Yet communication technologies have also blurred the boundaries of parental care and control, in which intensive mothering turns to virtual surveillance and thus causes psychological burdens on their adult children (Peng, 2016). As similarly found in Vietnamese migrant students in Singapore, their left-behind mothers often overwhelmingly intruded into their daily lives, including not allowing their adult children to hang out too late, while Facebook was used to check their children's activities at a distance (Pham & Lim, 2016). Notwithstanding, such integrated communication environments offer left-behind mothers more flexible, direct, and intentional ways of doing mothering. ...
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... For transnationally separated households, mediated communication through ICTs assumes particular significance, as it is the only viable way for members to keep family bonds alive (Horst, 2006;Pham and Lim, 2016;Uy-Tioco, 2007). Extensive research has delved into mediated intimacies within transnational households, with a major strand of literature focusing on the renegotiation of parenthood -especially motherhood -in transnational families in which children have remained in the home country (e.g. ...
... For transnationally separated households, mediated communication through ICTs assumes particular significance, as it is the only viable way for members to keep family bonds alive (Horst, 2006;Pham and Lim, 2016;Uy-Tioco, 2007). Extensive research has delved into mediated intimacies within transnational households, with a major strand of literature focusing on the renegotiation of parenthoodespecially motherhoodin transnational families in which children have remained in the home country (e.g. ...
Chapter
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... Such transnational communication was also found to reinforce gender roles of breadwinning fathers and nurturing mothers in the Korean tradition. While extant research tended to focus more on the perspective of the migrants in their communication with home (see for example Hjorth 2007;Kline and Liu 2005;Pham and Lim 2016;Sandel 2004), the experiences of left-behind family members remain largely unexplored even though they are just as important and imbued with contextual richness. Hence, this study aims to rectify this long unfilled research gap. ...
Chapter
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... Indeed, there is growing evidence for the phenomenon of delayed launching where young people increasingly delay the responsibilities of adulthood and remain "under the care" of their parents (Kins & Beyers, 2010). My recent research on Vietnamese university students in Singapore shows that even when the students hail from semi-rural areas where household internet connectivity is not a given, they set up internet-enabled mobile phone subscriptions for their parents back home so as to ensure a constant line of contact with their parents (Pham & Lim, 2015). Members of these transnational families then communicate frequently using affordable and visually rich messaging platforms such as Skype or LINE that facilitate voice and text communication. ...
Book
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Thesis
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Preprint
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