Third Culture Kids’: Migration Narratives on Belonging, Identity and Place
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This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights and duplication or sale of all or part is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for research, private study, criticism/review or educational purposes. Electronic or print copies are for your own personal, non- commercial use and shall not be passed to any other individual. No quotation may be published without proper acknowledgement. For any other use, or to quote extensively from the work, permission must be obtained from the copyright holder/s. 1 ‘Third culture kids’: migration narratives on belonging, identity and place. Ms. Rachel May Cason Thesis submitted for consideration of Doctor of Philosophy degree status October 2015 Keele University 2 Contents: Abstract p. 3 Acknowledgements p. 4 Chapter One: Introduction p. 5 Chapter Two: Mapping Third Culture Kids onto the Migration Landscape p. 19 Chapter Three: Experiences of Migration p. 47 Chapter Four: Multi-sited Methodologies p. 90 Chapter Five: The Third Culture Kid Experience – In the Field p. 123 Chapter Six: Third Culture Kids and a Sense of Belonging p. 156 Chapter Seven: Third Culture Kids and Identity p. 198 Chapter Eight: Third Culture Kids and Place p. 236 Chapter Nine: Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Experience p. 258 Chapter Ten: Conclusion – Migration narratives on belonging, identity and place p. 275 Bibliography p. 298 Appendices p. 326 3 Abstract Third Culture Kids are the children of people working outside their passport countries, and who are employed by international organisations as development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives. The “third culture” they possess is the temporary, nomadic multicultural space they inhabited as children, within an expatriate community and, in some cases, international school. This culture is distinct from their parents’ homeland culture (the first culture) and from that of the country in which they spend their formative years but of which they are not native members (the second culture). The “third culture” inhabited by Third Culture Kids does not unite the first and second cultures, but rather comprises a space for their unstable integration (Knörr, 2005). This thesis explores the following question: In what ways does being a Third Culture Kid affect notions of belonging, identity and place? Through analysis of both fieldwork in an international school, and exploratory life story interviews with adult TCKs from myriad backgrounds, this work contributes to a better understanding of the experience of growing up abroad, and tracks the long term effects of this experience on the ways in which TCKs orient themselves towards belonging, identity and place. Throughout the course of this research, findings coalesce to orient TCKs as cosmopolitans, rooted in the expatriate communities of their childhoods, continuing in mobility and self-conscious “otherness” into adulthood, and moving through place as “elite vagrants”. 4 Acknowledgements This thesis was inspired by Professor Pnina Werbner, who took a kind interest in a small assignment on Third Culture Kids submitted as part of my undergraduate studies. The development of this initial encouragement to the completion of this thesis is thanks to the valued support and guidance of my supervisory team, comprising Dr. Jane Parish, Professor Pnina Werbner, and Professor Chris Phillipson. Dr. Dana Rosenfeld also contributed to earlier stages especially in the planning of fieldwork and interviews. Dr. Emma Head’s encouragement was invaluable throughout, and I am most grateful for her kind interest and support. I am also indebted to the ESRC, whose funding made such a multi-sited project possible. This project would not have been possible without the many Third Culture Kids who generously invited me into their lives, and introduced me to their thoughts, hopes, frustrations, and joys. Some of these TCKs chose to keep their real first names associated with their words, whilst others wished to remain anonymous. I have adhered to the wishes of both, yet have gone so far as to keep the fieldwork site anonymous also, for the sake of the latter. The expatriate world is astonishingly well networked, and associated expatriate communities and their precise geographical location must be kept anonymous in order to preserve anonymity for individuals within those communities. I trust that the TCKs so generous as to share their stories, will find the narratives here presented to be faithful representations of their own. Any errors are, of course, my own. 5 CHAPTER ONE: Introduction A Brief Life Story: A Third Culture Kid She was born in West Africa in 1985. Her parents were Protestant missionaries living at that time on a Muslim compound, in a major town. The three rooms of the home expanded to four when home-schooling requirements demanded more space, and she was then schooled just yards from her front door, alongside a younger sister and, at various times, other missionary children. Her father worked as an evangelist in the local market, inviting religious conversation and debate, and later taking on greater administrative responsibility within the mission, such as would move the family, in her eleventh year, to the country’s capital. At this time, she attended, alongside her sister, the mission school in that city. This school was international and diverse in its composition but largely North American in its curriculum, apart from the introduction of (British-based) International GCSEs. At the age of 16, her family made the permanent move “home” to England. Every three to four years during this childhood abroad, she would “return home” with her family to England and live for a year reconnecting with supporting churches and individuals, and attending the local primary and, later, secondary schools. She recalls an especially poignant early memory of the struggle adjusting to her passport home environment: One event of significance happened during our return to ______ when I was five years old. My parents chose to always place us in the local public school when we were in England and I was to attend my local primary school. I don’t really remember this period, but I am told that I would have to be dragged to school by my father (my mother refused after a while) and placed in the hands of the 6 teachers, so distraught was I. It turns out that I was terrified of all the white children. I was used to playing with black children, and I can only surmise that I felt my world had turned upside down and that my core identity had been called into question. Up until this point I had been fluent in the local language of my West African neighbours, but that after this year, I never spoke it again. This is pure speculation, but it was as if I had decided that if I was white English, I would need to make the best of it, and the only way to maintain this identity clearly was to speak English only. Even now, I can only manage the most rudimentary greetings in my first language and this saddens me greatly and must have greatly upset a couple who worked for my parents and helped to raise me. They did not speak English. I still played with neighbourhood children but in mime; games of pretend that did not require much speaking. She recalls this event as perhaps the first of many that would illustrate the cultural tensions and identity challenges presented by a highly mobile childhood. Indeed, her first 16 years comprised frequent cultural adjustments as high mobility, both in her own experience and as the norm for the expatriate community around her, saw her navigate identifications as English, British, missionary kid, and “foreign” to her passport peers. She lived in West Africa, England and France, variously, and encountered different interpretations, and associated expectations, of all four of her cultural identifications as her environments shifted. Once “settled” in England at 16, she attended sixth form on the basis of IGCSE grades, and her background in home-schooling and mission school afforded her a high degree of independence in her approach to education. A year after her return to England, when her internal clock began to get impatient, she read Third Culture Kids (Pollock and Van Reken, 2001), and cried all the way through it. She recognised the story as her own 7 and felt validated in her experiences of mobility and loss. She decided to take a gap year after these studies, to complete her three years’ residency, being otherwise subject to foreign student university fees, and worked for a local special needs charity in the provision of respite care. University followed this gap year, in languages and the social sciences, including several stints studying and working abroad, as did marriage, motherhood, divorce, multiple house moves, a second engagement and its subsequent termination. Locating the Story The story above is representative of many similar stories relating to mobility in childhood. Its protagonist is one of a group identified in the 1950s as “Third Culture Kids”. The Useems, during a field study of Americans living in India, and the schools set up to educate their children, “...began to use third culture as a generic term to cover the lifestyles created, shared, and learned by people who are in the process of relating their societies, or aspects thereof, to each other. The term third culture kids, or TCKs, was coined to refer to the children who accompany their parents into another society” (Useem and Cottrell, 1996, pp.23-4). This definition has since been more precisely defined as “a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parent’s culture.” (Pollock & Reken, 2001, p.19). Third Culture Kids are the children of people working outside their passport countries, who are employed by international organisations as development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives.