Technology, Home and Gender: The Literacies of Third Culture Kids
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Beavis, Catherine
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Rowan, Leonie
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Abstract
This research explores the experiences of children living globally mobile lives. The children live in families where one or more parents are highly skilled professionals and mobility is an ever-present element of their employment. Understandings around the concept of ‘home’ can be wide-ranging for these children. A European International School is the site of the research. The majority of the students in the school are living outside of their ‘birth’ nation and culture, and may therefore be classified as ‘Third Culture Kids’ (Useem, Useem, & Donoghue, 1964). Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are loosely defined as children who do not live in their country of origin, and are foreigners in the countries in which they reside. As such, these children are members of an imaginary ‘third culture’ of those with similar lifestyles (Pollock & Reken, 2009; Useem et al. 1964). A sociocultural-new literacies paradigm provides a generative approach for exploration of the multiple dimensions of these children’s lives in the 21st century. The research compares and contrasts the children’s different forms of play involving digital technologies, including social connectivity facilitated through playful uses of technology. In many regards, for children whose lives are defined by the fact that they continually move away from existing social environments, new technologies have had extraordinary consequences. Computers and the Internet are significant components of most of these children’s out-of-school worlds, and are enjoyed in both private and social environments. The role of technologies in these children’s school lives is also considered. This dissertation particularly focuses on the ways in which identities, online and offline worlds, everyday life and literacies and the worlds of school, interact in the lives of these young people.
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Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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School of Education and Professional Studies
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The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.
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Subject
Third Culture Kids
Children of expatriots
(im)materialities framework