Abstract
A sociocultural framework illustrating Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicality informed this article’s interpretation of interviews with refugees discussing their parenting in exile. Multivoicedness is used as a tool for analysing how refugee parents talk about their evolving parenting practices; interview sequences from the parents of two families are presented. The culturally complex context of refugee parenting is understood in terms of transnational contact zones. Bakhtin’s concept of ideological becoming is used to understand how parenting evolves, making visible the parents’ critical assessment of unfamiliar practices, selective appropriation of certain practices, and agentic innovation of their own practices. The analysis adds relevant perspectives on professionals’ contact with refugee parents and may contribute to more culturally sensitive and less repressive treatment of parents while challenging facile conceptions of acculturation.
Of the 25.9 million refugees in exile, over half are children (UNHCR, 2019) and so parenting in exile is a pressing topic. There is thus a need to explore how parenting practices evolve in exile. This article will undertake to do so by building on a sociocultural framework (Wertsch, 1991), which explores parenting practices as being socially, culturally, and historically situated (Hundeide, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). Parenting practices evolve through social interaction in a given cultural and material context as children grow older and as society changes. In addition to the dynamic processes all families experience, families in exile are exposed to tremendous changes in the context of and the conditions for their parenting practices due to migration in general and due to the specific features of forced migration. The new context in which refugee parents find themselves is often ambiguous and also in motion. Consequently, parents in exile face additional challenges as compared to majority parenting.
Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogicality, I take as my premise that parenting is a situated practice and varies considerably according to the cultural traditions and circumstances of different communities (Rogoff, 2003, p. 18). This perspective rejects the idea of universal models of “good parenting,” as the task of parents is seen to be to guide their children as they navigate the life trajectories that are available in the society in which they live (Hundeide, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). After migrating, parents need to cope with life in a new context. This study aims to explore parents’ narratives about parenting practices “situated in a postcolonial setting marked by present global power structures” (Larsen, 2009, p. 226), which realizes resettled refugee parents’ underprivileged position along several dimensions. According to research on the demands placed on ethnic minority parents in Europe by the majority culture of their host countries, value judgements dominate public discourses about parenting in exile (e.g., de Haan, 2011; Hollekim et al., 2016; Keskinen, 2011). Muslim families are especially exposed to othering rhetoric, also in Norway (Bangstad & Helland, 2019; Eliassi, 2013). Assumptions about reactionary practices in childrearing, such as corporal punishment and negative consequences of honour culture are frequently seen (Hollekim et al., 2016; Wright et al., 2017; Yılmaz, 2006). Public discourse makes place relevant (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017) to the difference between there and here. Hence, immigrant families are expected to accommodate to the accepted practices of their new environment. Parenting unfolds in the relational sphere for all families, and both the local and the transnational relational spheres of parents in exile are complex.
Consequently, my work explores the question: How do parents in exile narrate and account for how their parental practices evolve in their host country? Addressing the question considers how parents’ narratives about parenting practices evolved during approximately 10 years in Norway. The data consist of interviews with parents from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Bakhtin’s notions of contact zones, multivoicedness, and ideological becoming are used as analytical tools because they enlarge our understanding of parenting in exile (for an empirical overview, see Merry et al., 2017; Salami et al., 2017).
Theoretical framework
This study’s first round of analysis led me to look for concepts well suited to analysing multifaceted speech and to encompassing complex processes of evolution. Namely, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicality (Wertsch, 1991) and related concepts were generative. According to Bakhtin, people’s speech is always linked to both earlier and future utterances, and “at least two voices can be heard simultaneously” (as cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 13). In Bakhtin’s view, dialogicality is not restricted to speech. For example, he views the relationship between the self and the other as dialogical and finds the boundaries between the individual and the social blurry (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 287; Raggatt, 2015). Meaning or ideology “is not within us, but between us” (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 8), and unfolds in the dialogue between people.
Dialogicality problematizes the concept most frequently used for understanding change or evolution of practices after migration: acculturation (see, e.g., Khawaja et al., 2017; Kiang et al., 2017). The “acculturation strategies” of assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization were introduced by Berry (1997), and the theory linked to these concepts has travelled to many fields. Scholars and researchers within cultural psychology and adjoining traditions (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Brown, 2005; Hermans & Kempen, 1998) have questioned the way acculturation is used, and have developed the concept further. Berry’s theory is criticized for universalism and essentialism, for seeing immigrants as victims without agency, and for seeing the processes as too linear and one-dimensional (Brown, 2005). Hermans and Kempen (1998, p. 1117) suggest a deterritorialization of culture. They point out that culture and geography do not cohere as we traditionally think. Thus, the term acculturation is inadequate because it assumes an overly linear trajectory from Culture A to Culture B. Contact zones, instead, permit a two-way intensification of contact and are, moreover, open to forms of communication that run across the boundaries of many groups and cultures simultaneously.
Bhatia and Ram (2001) further develop Hermans and Kempen’s position. They criticize Berry’s (1997) universalist perspective that stresses integration as the strategy with the best outcomes for all immigrants, and highlight the problems of regarding an integration strategy as an end goal in the acculturation process. The process towards achieving this goal is not explained and contextual circumstances, such as the inequality of power between the minority and the majority, are not discussed (Bhatia & Ram, 2001, pp. 12–13). Bhatia (2002) draws on the works of Bakhtin (1984, 1986) on multiple voices. He problematizes further the view of integration as the ideal goal for immigrants. Bhatia (2002) offers an alternative to the universalist perspective of acculturation, a dialogical model of acculturation. He regards this model as especially useful for migrants from the “Third World,” as negotiating and contesting voices will be normal for the diasporic self, shaped by “issues of race, colonisation and power” (Bhatia, 2002, p. 73). Bhatia and Ram (2009) elaborate and exemplify this model, and Tardif-Williams and Fisher (2009) tie this to families in transition. A closer analysis of the process offered by Bhatia (2002) can further elucidate negotiation and conflict without teleological containment. Thus, transnational contact zones, ideological becoming, and multivoicedness are introduced as elaborative concepts that can help us understand the processes of change in exile.
Transnational contact zones
Hermans and Kempen’s (1998) concept of transnational contact zones builds on Bakhtin’s (1981) idea of the contact zone (p. 345) and is linked to the deterritorialization of culture. They suggest a separation of culture and geography, and make place less relevant for change processes than acculturation theory suggests. People often make reference to place in everyday discourse on topics related to immigrants’ adaptation to their host communities (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017). However, Hermans and Kempen aim to contribute to our thinking of cultures as “moving and mixing” and with the notion of “global landscapes” (1998, p. 1117). The concept of transnationality was originally defined by Schiller et al. (1995) as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (p. 48). Levitt and Schiller (2004) developed the concept into “transnational social fields,” in which migrants maintain contacts in more than two nations. They call for researchers to “explain the variation in the way that migrants manage that pivot and how host country incorporation and homeland or other transnational ties mutually influence each other” (p. 1011). In the field of migration research, the concept is mostly used to describe physical movement back and forth across borders (Carling & Erdal, 2014; Phoenix & Seu, 2013). Most of the participants in the present study have made—geographically speaking—more complex moves than from A to B, but only a few currently practised a back-and-forth pattern. Applied here, the concept is understood in accordance with Levitt and Schiller’s (2004) development, and is mainly used to describe a specific phenomenon, namely that participants adopt both global and diverse local impulses to their parenting. Informants from Somalia who live in Norway may have been migrant workers in Dubai; they may have lived in Ethiopia for 4 years awaiting family reunion; they communicate daily over Skype with siblings in Canada; they watch news in Arabic on Al-Jazeera; and travel to London to visit family during the summer break. Informants from Kurdish Iraq who live in Norway and are close friends with neighbours from Palestine, may have studied in Baghdad, lived 8 years in exile in several neighbouring countries, and receive parental advice by listening to TV psychiatrists on Egyptian television. Their context for parenting in transnational contact zones can be seen as culturally complex (Hermans & Kempen, 1998, p. 1117) and I will use this concept of contact zones in the following to paint a more complex picture of time and place.
Ideological becoming
The Bakhtinian concept of ideological becoming extends our understanding of the change phenomena. Bakhtin (1981) defines ideological becoming as “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (p. 341). According to Ball et al. (2004), Bakhtin’s use of “ideological” has fewer political connotations than the English term. It refers more to “the way of viewing the world, our system of ideas” (p. 5). In the Bakhtinian tradition, ideology unfolds in the relational, dialogic sphere, “externally, for the eye, the ear, the hand” (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 8). As Cresswell (2009) emphasizes, the materiality and embodied experience of “ideology” is seen as an aspect of its external features. Bakhtin’s use of “word” does not only mean words. Along with “ideology,” the “word” also includes material and practical aspects: “these meanings and values are embodied in material things and actions” (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 7). Against this background, I include parenting practices and understandings of parenting in the Bakhtinian notion of the word. Bakhtin (1981) links the process of ideological becoming to otherness using the term “alien discourses.” Being alien makes dialogue possible (Holquist, 1981, p. 423) in general. Bakhtin (1986) links the creative processes made possible by this otherness to cultural encounters between foreign meanings: “they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures” (p. 7). In exile, the otherness is particularly apparent. In this study, many of the informants’ narratives imply that they are forced to relate to both unfamiliar parenting practices and unfamiliar statements regarding parenting. In this “zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345) occurs. The struggle, agency, and evolution of personal ideologies inherent in the concept of ideological becoming fit with the character of the experiences recounted by the parents in this study. As Morson (2004) argues, this process might never end: “Becoming becomes endless becoming” (p. 331). In this way, it is an answer to Bhatia’s (2002) call for a continuously negotiating and contesting process.
In his explication of ideological becoming, Bakhtin describes two categories of alien discourse, distinguished by how they are appropriated: authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. According to Bakhtin (1981), it is the latter kind of discourse that mainly contributes to the process of ideological becoming. “When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up” (p. 345). The dialogic character of this process, as well as the creativity and productivity associated with it, is described like this:
Internally persuasive discourse—as opposed to one that is externally authoritative—is . . . half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words. (p. 345)
As it is described by Bakhtin, the process of ideological becoming requires some freedom to acquire internally persuasive discourses by choice and in one’s own way. According to Matusov (2007), there is an “emphasis on voluntarily assimilation of words of others” (p. 230) in Bakhtin (1981), while other Bakhtinian texts emphasize more the “dialogic and critical properties” (Matusov, 2007, p. 230) of the process. When presenting my results, I will suggest how the analysed narratives of evolvement in parenting hold features compatible with the process described by Bakhtin. In the discussion, I will look at both voluntarily assimilation and the critical aspect of the process emphasized by Matusov.
Multivoicedness
Multivoicedness is central in Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicality. Parenting in exile is performed in a situation where multiple, complex interwoven impulses run across the boundaries of many groups simultaneously. These impulses influence practices and the way people talk about them. This cultural complexity is visible in the way in which parents talked about their experiences and is compatible with Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the multiplicity on which any given word or utterance draws:
The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents, weaves it in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse. (p. 276)
To describe the active process of drawing on earlier utterances and other multiple impulses in speech, Bakhtin often uses the metaphor of voices, defined by Holquist (1981) as “the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness” (p. 434). Several expressions for different simultaneous voices occurring in the same utterance are used in Bakhtin’s different texts. In the following, I will use the term multivoiced. As a consequence of the theoretical considerations above, and inspired by the way Aveling et al. (2015) have developed the concept as an analytical tool, I have chosen the concept of multivoicedness to analyse the parents’ narratives.
Participants and interviews
In total, 13 mothers and 12 fathers from 16 families were selected to participate in the study. I wanted interviewees with some years of experience as parents in Norway, hence I recruited parents who had arrived in Norway 6–12 years before the first interview was conducted. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia were chosen as countries of origin because these nationalities topped Norway’s refugee statistics throughout this resettlement period (2001–2007; Statistisk Sentralbyrå Norwegian Statistics [SSB], 2012). The participants’ educational background reflects the enormous variety generally found among parents from these three countries who have sought refuge in Scandinavia (Behtoui & Olsson, 2014). The full range is represented, from the illiterate to the university educated.
All the interviews were conducted by the author in Norwegian. In most families, the parents were interviewed together, normally in their family home. Some were interviewed alone. Most of the parents were interviewed two or three times; all interviews took place during 2013 and early 2014. The interviewees gave written consent, and the project was approved by the Norwegian Data Protection Official for Research. The topic of all interviews was parenting in exile. The first interviews sought to collect narratives about the informants’ experience as parents in Norway (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). Each interview was conducted in part as a life mode interview (Haavind, 2014; Ulvik, 2018). Within the framework of a narrative about the previous day’s activities, parenting practices were identified and the related meaning-making explored. Reasons for and reflections on parenting practices were often given spontaneously. In addition to the spontaneous meaning-making, meaning was further explored by the interviewer, as the examples below will show. In keeping with this study’s theoretical framework, I consider both the interviewer and the parents to be participants in the production of meaning occurring during the interview (Holstein & Gubrium, 2004; Tanggaard, 2009). Thus, it is important to note that the interviewer represented the majority culture, and to be aware of how this position might have influenced the interactions. In Bakhtinian terms, this amounts to awareness of the utterance’s addressivity (Bakhtin, 1986). (For a description of the analytical process, see Bergset & Ulvik, 2019.)
Narrative accounts of agentic evolution of parenting practices
The narratives of how parenting practices evolve during exile are filled with complexity, ambivalence, and multiplicity. In addition, the character of this evolution, the movement, is narrated as agentic, active work and illustrates a variety of ways in which parents talk about these processes and influential factors leading to evolution in their parenting practices. In the following, a selection of excerpts from the interviews is presented as belonging to one of two narrative variants: (a) narratives of modernization beyond place or (b) narratives of personal progression.
Narratives of modernization beyond place
In many of the narratives, there are comparisons with the variety of parenting styles experienced in the culturally complex contact zone. To illustrate such variety, I will present an analysis of excerpts from Leyla and Azad’s case. Leyla and Azad are both university educated. Their first child was born in temporary exile in a neighbouring country, so they had no experience as parents in their home country.
When Leyla describes how she shaped her mothering style in her new context after resettlement, she contrasts it to both her own mother’s style and to that of Norwegian mothers. She expresses her contentedness with the move she made and the balance she found:
You [Norwegian mothers] care about yourself. [. . .] So, in a way I want to balance between the two cultures. Not only sacrifice for the children like my mummy did, and not be like Norwegian [mothers] who sometimes forget their children [. . .] I think I found a balance.
Yes, right.
Like that. Because I have seen both, now I am in between them. Norwegians have not seen the mothers there. And the mothers there haven’t seen Norway. But I am in the middle of the road looking in both societies. Some things I find good, and some things I find not so good.
Leyla positions herself as liminal in this statement. She “[is] on the road and [looks] at both societies” and has different discourses available to her. She describes a freedom to navigate, and positions herself as balancing between the dichotomies. Leyla gives one example of her move away from her mother’s ways: “Cooking. Our mother used to spend three or four hours standing over the stove every day. Every day.” In her narration of her practice as a mother, Leyla includes activities her mother did not do. She spends time every day sitting next to her younger children assisting them with their homework.
Our mummy did not help us with homework. She didn’t even know which homework we had to do. [. . .] She just said, “Do your homework!”
Yes, right.
So, I could cheat her. [. . .] Because mummy was too exhausted. [. . .] But when I sit with my child [assisting with homework], I do not call it a sacrifice. No, it is my job. My job as a mother. If I do not do it, I’m a bad mother.
Leyla speaks here with a voice that includes assisting with homework as one of her tasks as a mother. She positions herself as an educated mother, and assisting with homework has a symbolic meaning. Earlier in the interview, when talking about her children’s homework, she says, “Education is almost sacred to us.” This voice shapes a contrast to her own mother’s mothering. Her mother had other ways of performing good mothering, belonging to another cohort and level of education, and to another time. Yet, another voice is present in Leyla’s speech concerning mothering. With this voice, she tells me about a conversation with an ethnic Norwegian colleague at work:
We were talking about breakfast, and that I prepare breakfast and lunchbox and so on. She was shocked: “But the children must prepare their breakfast themselves! Not you! [. . .]” I said: “How can I then show that I am a mother?” [. . .] Then I understood that not all mothers want to make the home into a paradise, in a way.
The other voice appears here in her spontaneous reaction, “How can I then show that I am a mother,” which displays another of Leyla’s implicit ideas about good mothering. The caretaking embedded in the act of preparing breakfast and a lunchbox is here positioned as a mandatory part of mothering. Multivoicedness can be seen in her positioning of education as sacred and her description of food preparation as a way of making the home into a kind of paradise. One voice emphasizes homework assistance and highlights the contrast with her own mother. The other emphasizes food preparation and contrasts with what she perceives as Norwegian mothering. The two voices can be seen as supporting each other (Aveling et al., 2015), and they serve as a practical example of what she refers to as “a balance,” the liminal position she gives herself in the road metaphor: “I’m in the middle of the road looking in both societies.” She claims to have insight into what she perceives as “two cultures” and contrasts her own parenting with practices from both of them. She critically assesses both practices with which she is familiar and practices that are new to her, and chooses which new mothering elements she wants to adopt. In other words, she is “selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 341), which is consistent with the notion of ideological becoming.
During the interviews with Leyla and Azad, the topic of corporal punishment and alternative methods of disciplining children came up often. Still, contradictory voices are heard in their narratives. They both claimed they were brought up violently. They accounted for their own practices by comparing them to their parents’ parenting, and expressed that they had found alternatives to violence. Leyla begins to talk about Azad’s father: He was far too harsh and hit his children frequently. Azad tells me about an episode when he and his brother stayed out at night later than agreed. Their father became very angry when they came home and hit them.
What do you think about that now?
Hitting the children? I don’t agree with hitting the children. I do not agree with that. [. . .] I’m not angry at him for hitting me. Because he did provide a lot for my sake. He set a time. I know why. Because the situation in our home country was bad, they killed people at night. [. . .] Our father wanted to protect his children.
So, you are not angry at him for hitting you?
No. All of us in our age became men because our parents hit us.
Almost all of us feel that way.
In Leyla and Azad’s utterances, different contradicting voices can be heard regarding the corporal punishment of children. I can identify different living threads embedded in their utterances, as outlined by Bakhtin:
The living Utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance. (1981, p. 276)
In dialogue with an ethnic Norwegian interviewer, Leyla speaks with one voice, judging the methods of Azad’s father as far too harsh in light of what she regards as good parenting for herself and her husband today, at the present time. However, another voice emerges simultaneously, a thread weaving in from conversations that seem to have taken place among their peers on the “given object” of hitting children: “Almost all of us feel that way” refers to Azad’s comment about becoming men. These two voices speak simultaneously, but they are contradictory. Speaking as a father in the present, Azad claims that he does not agree with hitting children. This voice intersects with his assessment of his own father as loving and protecting, and with the thread from conversations among his peers and their voices of what made them men. “All of us in our age” refers to a cohort-specific perception of the way Azad and those around him were raised. This cohort might perceive the treatment of their own children differently. The perception of right and wrong in child rearing seems to be dependent on context, and, in Leyla and Azad’s case, especially on time or cohort. Later in the interview, Azad says, “Now I think hitting children is almost gone, everywhere in the world.” In many different ways, during three long interviews, Leyla and Azad positioned themselves as being detached from their parents’ practice of corporal punishment. This particular sequence shows how contradicting values might appear embedded in voices woven in as one of many dialogical threads in multivoiced speech.
The dichotomies that emerge in the parents’ narratives do not always coincide with the place-based dichotomies often displayed in majority public discourse. Leyla and Azad both contrast their own parenting practices to those of the former generation, which they position as the old ways and the parenting of the uneducated. Azad says, “My father had no education. I am educated. My father hit his children because he had no education, and didn’t know how to treat children.” Azad and Leyla draw boundaries between their own and their parents’ cohort, as well as between uneducated and educated parents. They position themselves in the educated category. The way they talk about parenting as having evolved from the practices of an uneducated cohort to those of an educated cohort suggests a narrative of modernization. Leyla and Azad’s modernization narrative makes time relevant, in contrast to the public discourse, in which boundaries are linked to nationality and culture, in an Eastern–Western dichotomy. Indeed, the categories of nationality and culture are absent in Leyla and Azad’s construction of corporal punishment.
Most of what Leyla and Azad say coincides well with Hermans and Kempen’s (1998) notion of the deterritorialization of culture. This idea provides a backdrop for the following quote from Leyla’s life mode interview in which she talked about the family’s activities the previous day. Here Leyla recounts their evening:
After that comes brushing teeth. And they are fighting, quarrelling, they won’t brush. . .. – Yes, you have to! – No, I don’t want! I’ll not do that! – Yes! Then I use Karius and Baktus [characters from a children’s book] . . . The younger one brushes his teeth and says: – Oops, look, I see Karius there, Baktus is there, they are there, Mummy, they run! And the older one just laughs and says: – It’s not real. . .
In a subsequent interview, I referred to this narrative and asked Leyla where she got that idea. She tells me that she has been following a television program on child rearing on an Arabic channel, which is presented by an Egyptian professor. On the topic of how to treat a stubborn child, she tells me that the show recommended humour: “You can make it funny, not be so serious. So, in this gentle way you can manage to make your children do the thing they do not like. And I learned a lot from them.”
Leyla is speaking from the position of an educated mother, drawing on new and educated sources for parental inspiration. She knows Arabic, and resources in the transnational, digital sphere are available to her. Implementing a Middle East professional’s advice in her daily parenting practice, she uses characters from a tale for children, which her children know from kindergarten. In the tale, the tiny villains Karius and Baktus (Egner, 1949) are digging holes to live in a boy’s teeth, where they store beloved, sweet food. Leyla’s example of playful mothering, which she contrasts with her own mother’s serious ways, can be seen as an individual construction of creative, cultural hybridity. She combines educated resources selected from a Middle Eastern context with practical inspiration from the children’s everyday life in Norwegian kindergarten. In her narrative, the inspiration for breaking with the previous generation’s parenting comes from diverse sources. What Leyla narrates is the creative evolution of her parenting practices, made possible by the cultural complexity in the transnational zone in which her mothering is situated.
Such narratives transcend dominant dichotomies, as their boundaries are drawn in ways other than those expected in majority discourses (Keskinen, 2011). In particular, boundaries between good and not so good parenting are drawn along the lines of modern versus outdated, between their own and their parents’ cohorts and between the uneducated and the educated. They make use of professionals, both local and distant, available in their transnational contact zone as resources as their parenting practices evolve. Their own parents and Norwegian parents are used as contrasts to their own evolving parenting. Leyla’s perception of Norwegianness is inherent in her narratives, but she does not report Norwegianness as an inspiration. Educated sources imparting parenting, independent of location, are her inspiration. The different voices embedded in both parents’ narratives at times support each other and at other times contradict each other (Aveling et al., 2015).
Narratives of personal progression
Several parents in the study spoke about observing, interpreting, and reflecting on unfamiliar practices with children as inspiration for the evolution of their own parenting. The parents had observed and interpreted practices of other parents in the local milieu in Norway, both ethnic Norwegian parents and parents from their country of origin who had immigrated earlier, and Norwegian welfare state professionals’ practices in working with children. Kindergartens and schools were frequently mentioned as arenas for observing professional practices. All the examples of this in the data are accounts of adults’ ways of treating, approaching, or having dialogue with children in ways that seemed new or unfamiliar to the informants. The narrated processes of selectively observing and interpreting practices, are followed by a laboured work of reflection and the evolution of the informants’ own practice or understanding of parenting. These new practices are described as improvement in parenting, and the narratives can thus be categorized as narratives of “personal progression.” Compared to Leyla and Azad’s narratives, these narratives coincide better with the perceived dominant majority public discourse. Making place relevant in terms of “the West versus the rest” (Hermans & Kempen, 1998, p. 1117) and “a notion of change in terms of progression” (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017, p. 58) are discursive resources often employed by the informants in these narratives when making sense of how their parenting practices have evolved after migration. Nevertheless, their stories of progression bring interesting new perspectives. The process of change is described as hard work requiring agency, and verbal advice is more or less absent from these narratives.
One of the fathers, Khalid, positions himself as having no experience from his home country as the daily primary caregiver. In our first conversation, Khalid emphasizes inspiration from other parents in the neighbourhood. In the second, a social worker’s practice with his children is his source of inspiration. Before this first excerpt, Khalid had told me about how teachers behaved with pupils in school, where he had previously worked as a mother-tongue teacher. In the beginning, his colleagues’ practices appeared new to him.
And authority in my home country is something totally different than in Norway. I have seen that in school. I have seen that daily in supermarkets. When children scream and they want sweets and the mother just walks away, saying [demonstrates a low, firm voice] “Come. No, we won’t buy sweets today. Today is Wednesday.” And the 2–3-year-old is screaming in the middle of the supermarket. But she: [demonstrates the same voice] “No, we are not going to buy that.” And she ends up carrying her, still screaming. That’s something I’ve learned. It’s something I have seen, I have observed. So, learning it does not happen in one day or two days. That happens as a process.
The keyword authority—which I had actually introduced—makes Khalid reflect on how parental authority can vary and on the difference he sees between the use of authority towards children back home and in Norway. Earlier in the interview, he had answered a question about what he would have done to his son back home in a specific situation: “Back home, I would have scolded him, shaken him, maybe hit him if needed.” Based on this remark and what he had said earlier about the teachers’ way of showing authority, “something totally different” might be similar to his description of what he would have done back home. He does not describe the “back home” version of authority in this excerpt, but mentions it in contrast to what he has seen in Norway, both from teachers and parents in supermarkets. He interprets the mother’s actions as showing authority.
Khalid’s description of how he applied this kind of authority to his own fathering expresses the labour this process implies. At first, he gives the short version: “That’s something I’ve learned.” Then he divides the process into two phases: observing and learning. The first phase is what took place in the supermarket where he observed authority being displayed in a firm, low voice. But applying this strategy to his own parental practice is explicitly described as a process that took time: “it does not happen in one day or two days. That happens as a process.” What Khalid is describing is agency in parenting. The supermarket description is an example of observation as active work. Khalid first notices and interprets a particular behaviour, and this is followed by the work of reflection, in this case reflection on parental authority. In addition, Khalid accommodates his own parenting practices based on this experience, which happens “as a process.” The outcome of this activity manifests as ideological becoming. This is an example of how the narrated process of evolution holds features compatible with Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the process of ideological becoming: “Internally persuasive discourse is . . . half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words” (p. 345). Bhatia and Ram (2001) ask for description of the evolution process, and I see this as an example of how ideological becoming is suitable to analyse this process.
Which voices (Aveling et al., 2015) can we hear in this account? Khalid speaks with the voice of a learner: “That’s something I’ve learned. It’s something I have seen, I have observed. So, learning it does not happen in one day or two days.” His view of himself as inexperienced in daily child care when he immigrated seems to enable him to position himself as a learner. Still, the learner’s voice is in control of which practices are seen as valuable enough to acquire, and Khalid positions himself as having agency in a learning process of his own choice. Elsewhere in the interviews, he mentions other practices that he regards as part of Norwegian parenting and consciously rejects. He is “selectively assimilating the words of others,” which is how Bakhtin (1981, p. 341) defines the process of ideological becoming. His learner’s voice speaks of doing “bad” before learning and doing “better” after. There is also a voice that articulates a notion of “there and here,” making place relevant. This voice devalues what Khalid perceives as the use of authority in his home country and makes the observed parenting practices in the supermarket a case of “Norwegian authority”: “And authority in my home country is something totally different than in Norway.” Consistent authority displayed in a low, firm voice is positioned as Norwegian, and the boundary between the different kinds of authority seems to be understood as ethnic, cultural, or national.
Place becomes relevant as a means of explaining this difference. We might ask whether the boundary could also be drawn along class lines. The authority displayed by the Norwegian mother in the supermarket is consistent with middle-class parenting, according to Stefansen (2007) and Vincent et al. (2004). Looking at it in this way, many ethnic Norwegian fathers would potentially go through a similar changing process if they took up a learner position similar to Khalid’s. The voice with which Khalid is speaking here relies on an understanding of middle-class parenting as a feature of Norwegianness. The dialogic threads (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 276) inherent in this voice might include conversations that took place during “new in Norway” teaching, as suggested by Åberg and Mäkitalo (2017) and Gulbrandsen and Østereng (2012).
Khalid appreciates the parenting practices he claims to observe daily in supermarkets. They are different from what he experienced in his home country, and he wants to manage something similar. As a learner, he “accepts the curriculum.” His concern is that it is hard to adopt this practice. There is no struggle with alien discourses in this narrative. On the other hand, the behaviour he observed in the supermarket has been selected as a practice he wants to incorporate in his own parenting, among others that he does not like. We can also assume that addressivity plays a role in how his learner’s voice speaks about the observed practice’s value. Bakhtin (1986) emphasizes the following regarding the addressee: “When speaking, I always take into account . . . his prejudices [from my viewpoint], his sympathies and antipathies” (pp. 95–96).
The parents’ narratives of personal progression often included observation of how Norwegian welfare state professionals behaved with children. This is also the case in the next excerpt from Khalid’s interviews. Since he was inexperienced in daily child care before his migration to Norway, he found himself in a special, acute situation right after his family’s arrival, when his wife unfortunately remained absent from home for a longer period of time. A social worker from Child Protection Services served as a home counsellor for the family during this time. Khalid talks about her like this:
What had an impact on me was what she did. I saw that my children fully accepted what she said. She told them, “You tidy your room like that; you make your bed like that.” They accepted it; there was no need for discussion. While I quarrelled with them. I could see that her results were more effective than mine, even though I was demanding and spoke harshly to them. I could understand that she had a kind of dialogue with them. And dialogue was what was lacking between me and my children to make them collaborate with me. But it was not easy to manage. It took me several years until I felt that now it works to just tell them like that—Now it’s 10 o’clock, now you should go to bed. After long time, I managed to change it. I changed my understanding of how to bring up children.
Khalid’s is speaking as a learner in this excerpt as well. He describes the social worker as having a “kind of dialogue” and that the children then accepted what she told them, an exchange that was unfamiliar to him. He describes his own former practice as being “demanding,” he “spoke harshly” and “dialogue was lacking.” He describes his laboured process of evolving and his fathering practice in his own way as “not easy to manage” and mentions that it took him several years to feel that his new practice was working. Khalid’s evolution as a parent is recounted as both a change in practice and a change in understanding. After an active struggle, Khalid was able to appropriate elements of unfamiliar discourses which manifested in his practice and thinking.
Khalid’s situation having a social worker in the house was special, but his account is typical of this kind of narrative in the study. The analysis shows that other parents also positioned themselves as learners. Parents talked about having selectively observed and interpreted other parents’ and welfare state professionals’ practices with children, reflected on what they had seen, and experimented with how they themselves could perform a similar practice in their own way. In this way, they widened their parenting repertoire.
In some of the interviews, one voice dominates and contrasting voices are weak. In some cases, this voice might be analysed as stuck to “imaginary homelands” (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017), in others as praising life in Norway in a way that seems to lack multivoicedness. Nevertheless, none of the parents insist only on this one perspective throughout the interview. Complexity is the overall dominating impression of the analysed material.
Discussion: Transcending majority discourses and “acculturation” assumptions
The narratives of how the informants’ parenting evolved are partly compatible with, but mostly different from, assumptions present in research focusing on unidirectional models of acculturation. The dichotomy of “here and there” is challenged, and agency is displayed in the way parents speak about their own evolution as parents.
Assumptions about reactionary parenting practices among refugees might be based solely on one of the multiple voices of refugee parents or only parts of their speech. The voice of traditional parenting will often be the only one heard but parenting practices are multivocal rather than monological. Multivoicedness highlights particular opinions articulated by parents as only one of several voices embedded in multivoiced speech. As one example, the analysis of Leyla and Azad’s speech about Azad’s father and corporal punishment shows how “thousands of dialogic threads” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 276) might be embedded in speech, making the nature of multivoicedness visible. Contrasting voices can be present at the same time. Analysed in this way, it is less likely that we understand one single voice in the parents’ utterances as a sign of practices of corporal punishment.
Ideological becoming encompasses the complexity of the narrated evolution processes. Both critical and dialogical aspects are inherent in the process of ideological becoming. Analysis of Leyla’s narratives shows that her way of approaching the dominant ideology of her new community is consistent with the critical aspect of ideological becoming, emphasized by Matusov (2007) and mentioned in the theory section. We can see the struggle between voices, the inner battle between alien and self, the laboured process of interweaving the alien discourse with “one’s own word” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345). She critically assesses both practices with which she is familiar and those that are new to her and chooses which new mothering elements she wants to incorporate in her own parenting. In other words, she is “selectively assimilating the words of others,” which is how Bakhtin (1981, p. 341) defines the process of ideological becoming.
The dialogic combination of professional resources selected from the Middle Eastern context with practical inspiration from her children’s everyday life in Norwegian kindergarten is displayed in Leyla’s toothbrush narrative. It makes visible the dialogic feature of internally persuasive discourse. The creative evolution of parenting practices applied to new material is made possible by the culturally complex transnational zone in which her mothering is situated. This exemplifies how Leyla does not only assimilate the dominant values and discourses but shapes her own values and practices.
Khalid’s learner voice in the two narratives of agentic progression is less critical than Leyla and Azad’s voices. He seems to uncritically “[accept] ideas of the dominant ideology,” which, Matusov (2007, p. 231) argues, is part of authoritative discourse. Still, Khalid narrates a critical selection of practices to acquire. Unfamiliar practices were tested before being selected. This implies involvement in internally persuasive discourse, as Matusov (2007, p. 231) also emphasizes.
Viewing the material of narratives of change in parenting in exile with acculturation as the concept of change might lead to solely looking for narratives of change concerning the migration or adapting to a new context. Ideological becoming is a concept of change that will not limit the understanding of development to the results of these conditions. Parents’ meaning-making of their own development may emphasize the different impulses in the transnational contact zone of which they are part, including the impulses from their region of origin. This is easier to discover with such an alternative concept of change. Leyla and Azad’s narratives of change are examples of the fact that change in exile does not have to be understood as adapting to the host culture. Their narratives of change adopt diverse impulses transnationally, including modernization that stems from their country of origin and the academic Middle East.
The two excerpts from Khalid’s interviews have served as examples of narratives of agentic personal progression, on which observed practices with children had an important impact. On the contrary, verbal advice is absent from these narratives. The processes occurred outside settings designed for learning. Some freedom to voluntarily acquire nonauthoritative discourses is presented as necessary to facilitate the process of ideological becoming, and is a feature of internally persuasive discourse (Matusov, 2007, p. 230). The parents recounted having picked up on practices they had observed in different contexts. These changes had not been authoritatively planned for them. This freedom of choice seemed to be important because it created a space for internally persuasive discourse. Matusov (2007) discusses the status of ideological becoming in pedagogy and highlights the “pedagogical challenge of teaching for ideological becoming” (p. 218). Because of the asymmetrical relationship between teachers and students, there will always be an authoritarian aspect to schools that obstructs internally persuasive discourse. In the narratives of observed practices analysed in this study, this obstacle is left out, since the situations involve selectively assimilating the words of others with no prior planning.
When I started the study, I expected to hear more from the parents about verbal advice or instructions from Norwegian welfare state professionals than I actually did. While some parents did talk about the impact of verbal advice, such examples are few. As already suggested, I assume an effect of freely chosen observations. One can also assume that observations may have more impact on parents in exile than verbal advice due to language problems that might make verbal advices less effective.
Ideological becoming, rather than acculturation, is used to understand the process of evolving as a parent. This concept allows us to see the agency inherent in this process. Selecting which unfamiliar practices one wants to try out, and implementing those in one’s own parenting in one’s own way is a laboured process. The parents’ narratives are characterized by creativity and productiveness in particular. The observed practices are “applied to new material” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345). The parents’ understanding or interpretation of the observed practices is interwoven with any ideas on parenting they may have had from before. Alien discourses challenge or merge with preexisting ideas to create multivoiced discourses (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345). The material was filled with narratives describing this laboured and agentic process, which results in parenting practices with new combinations of elements. This process could be called parental innovation. The features of ideological becoming make it a more relevant concept than acculturation for understanding this innovative process.
Concluding comments
This article has shed light on parenting in exile by looking at parents’ narratives of how their parenting practices evolve, as well as how they account for these changes. Narratives and utterances were analysed using the concept of multivoicedness (Aveling et al., 2015; Bakhtin, 1981), and processes of evolution were understood as ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981). Analysis of selected sequences of these narratives was presented, making visible multivoiced talk and interesting examples of evolution in parenting practices whose character might transcend dominant dichotomies and serve as a corrective to simplified notions in public discourse of parenting in exile.
Parenting is often at stake in welfare professionals’ communications with parents in exile. The use of these Bakhtinian concepts as thinking tools may contribute to improving such communication practice. The analysis might help professionals appropriate the perspective of multiple voices and the nature of multivoicedness in the speech of refugee parents. If they are aware that contrasting voices can be present at the same time, professionals might listen for multiple voices, and thereby override prejudice based on one single voice.
Using ideological becoming rather than acculturation as a concept for understanding the evolution of parenting practices in exile might lead to the acknowledgement that this is a laboured and agentic process. This optic makes visible the struggle between voices and critical assessment of values and practices experienced in the complex contact zone of these parents, which leads them to innovate their own parenting practices. This lens is an alternative to seeing evolution processes as a kind of passive adoption of alien practices, which might be the case with the concept of acculturation.
The analysis shows how selected, observed practices inspired parents to reflect on and innovate their own parenting practices. This might contribute to extending professionals’ views concerning how evolution processes can be activated. Do welfare state professionals rely too much on verbal advice or instruction, treating refugee parents like pupils in a “Norwegian parenting” class? Bakhtin’s notion of internally persuasive discourse can help us understand the importance of observation. The freedom to select among observed practices for inspiration and to acquire them in one’s own way, guided by an inner dialogue with values and practices with which one is already familiar, are prerequisites for this process. Acknowledging such a process might help welfare professionals give up the idea of dictating changes in parenting.
The article’s relevance is not limited to parenting in exile. According to Bakhtin, multivoicedness is a feature of all speech. It might be easier to recognize the different voices embedded in speech when the speaker is living in more culturally complex contact zones, but the nature of the speech might not be different. Understanding evolving processes as ideological becoming might also be relevant in a scope broader than parenting in exile. In addition to its relevance for the treatment of refugee parents, the analysis presented in this study might also provide relevant perspectives on professionals’ contact with all parents and also contribute to more culturally sensitive, class-sensitive, and less repressive treatment of parents generally.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik, Olga Dysthe, the Discourse Research Group of HVL, Sogndal, the DANASWAC network, James Cresswell, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
