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Preventing and ending homelessness requires actions at multiple levels. HOD researchers have contributed by analysing the structural causes of homelessness and their links to social exclusion, by empirical work with collaborators and policy engagement at the national and local levels. A national 12-site experiment examines what interventions work best to end homelessness for families. Qualitative interviews help to understand families’ experiences, their access to supports, the ways they make housing decisions, and the ways that programs separate family members from one another. Work in New York City and Alameda County California helps homeless service administrators target prevention services to people who can derive greatest benefit from them and evaluates a prevention program. Local work in Nashville responds to needs identified by the homeless service system.

I investigate how the interplay between legal-juridical notions of citizenship and socioculturally mediated belonging affects the family lives of return migrants, as well as how and why transborder ties between returnees and their kin have been maintained or broken. I pay special attention to the production of transborder kinship by paying heed to the lives of families across and within nation-state borders. Here, family composition and living arrangements, especially those involving parents and children, often defy normative understandings of family. I investigate how such arrangements have been necessitated by the transnational movements of my interlocutors and their affective connections with each other and with the Korean nation. And though returnees maneuver their locations in time and space in order to accommodate their family lives, their family lives have nevertheless been interrupted by their migration to South Korea, which has repercussions for their affective topographies.

Suicide among the enslaved has been well documented, with most historians arguing that slave suicides were evidence of resistance. Adopting a ‘neo-abolitionist’ approach, this chapter, building on the exposes of abolitionists who wrote about slave suicides, takes seriously the individual reasons the enslaved killed or tried to kill themselves in order to move beyond attributing these acts ideologically. This approach honors the suffering and full humanity of the enslaved and the experiences that led some to self-murder. White southerners ignored evidence that the enslaved suffered from depression or committed suicide, in order to mask the many causes of slave suffering including rape and sexual assault, punishment, abuse, separation of families, hopelessness. The enslaved embraced self-murder because it ended their suffering.

This chapter examines the significance of the Korean War in the overall biography of South Korea's transnational adoptees and how television made it possible for transnational adoptees to be integrated in the greater history of the nation and into a narrative of loss and sadnesss. More specifically, it considers the role played by Ach'im madang in the meeting of the divided families separated by the war and by the partition between South and North Korea. It first discusses the Korean Broadcasting System's production of Ach'im madang based on some techniques used in a 1983 telethon organized for the purpose of reuniting relatives separated during or after the Korean War. It then explores Ach'im madang's historicized interpretation of family separation based on the number of the “divided families” and concludes by interpreting the television program's family meetings between orphans or adoptees and their long-lost relatives as a symbol of national reunification.

This chapter renders the U.S. and Mexican governments’ investment in using competing conceptualizations of race and racial difference to recruit Mexican immigrant men of varying class backgrounds into the Bracero Program throughout the Mexican countryside. In anticipation of advancing the economic imperatives of local municipal Mexican governments, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated with each other to contract braceros who already had or could lend fellow Mexican immigrant men the financial resources to journey and labor in the United States without adequate wages or protections. Using the oral life histories of bracero families, this historical consideration of the influence of race captures the intensity of these families’ disenfranchisement at the hands of these governments and fellow Mexican immigrant men.

Steeped in the oral life histories of Mexican women who shouldered the emotional, physical, and financial accountability of raising families separated from their bracero husbands across the U.S.-Mexico border, this chapter illuminates the spaces, conversations, and inroads these women shared to forge awake houses. These houses, over time, provided these women with the solace, inspiration, moral support, and information to persevere in their pursuit of developing productive outlooks, lines of communication with their families, and goals toward facing a most traumatic family situation together. This distinct brand of solidarity increasingly drew young single women to act as the most dedicated and trustworthy of allies for women married to braceros and other Mexican immigrant men.

The conflicts in Iraq (Operations Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn) and Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) have resulted in the deployment of more than 2.6 million service members since 2001. Almost half of these service members had children at the time of deployment, and almost half experienced multiple deployments. Separations in the context of danger pose unique challenges for parenting at a distance, including civilian parental mental health problems that are in turn associated with disruptions in parenting and family relationships and increased mental health symptoms in children. Using an ecological framework, this chapter reviews the impact that more than a decade of war has had on children and their parents, identifying risk and protective factors in the context of parental deployment. Opportunities to maintain parenting during deployments across developmental stages for children are discussed, including the role of family-level programs and family services to support military parents and children.

An increasing number of families around the world are living apart—defining and redefining their relationships, roles, and ways of maintaining a sense of cohesion across distance. This book uniquely highlights how families, both in times of crisis and within normative cultural practices, organize and configure themselves and their parenting across distance. Readers are given a unique peek into the lives of families globally that are affected by separation in a wide range of circumstances including migration, fosterage, divorce, military deployment, education, and orphanhood. Authors delve into the daily reality of members and help us understand why families live apart, how families are redefined across distance, and the impact on various members. This volume is unique in its representation of issues affecting families around the world, in its broad geographic scope of studies, and in the diverse representation of authors from fields such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, and geography.

This chapter examines the dilemmas confronting citizen children whose parents are refused permission to reside in the children's home country and who thus face “constructive deportation” from their own country. It begins with two contrasting immigration stories, both concerning families of U.S. citizen children and noncitizen mothers who must make the choice between family separation and exile from their family home. It then explains the importance of citizenship as a social fact and as the legal correlate of territorial belonging, along with the primacy of nondeportability as an incident of citizenship. It also considers the political and legal attack, in the United States and elsewhere, on the citizenship rights of children, and birthright citizenship in particular. The chapter goes on to compare European and American approaches to child citizenship and highlights the ambivalent legal framework in the United States regarding the rights of citizen children.

This chapter examines how Korean adoptees are reintegrated in their birth country by focusing on the Korean Broadcasting System's television program Ach'im madang and its narrative on family separation—and by extension on transnational adoption. In particular, it considers the televised family meetings and shows that even if some participants cannot find their relatives after their appearance on Ach'im madang, they are still somewhat reintegrated within South Korean society via the program hosts' discourses on physical resemblances. The chapter suggests that Ach'im madang's organization included transnational adoptees in a hierarchy South Koreans could relate to and conferred on them a social status superior to that of Korean orphans or domestic adoptees.

Using the records of U.S. government officials enlisted to protect the welfare of children in the United States and the oral life histories of women raising children without the emotional or financial support of their bracero boyfriends or husbands, this chapter interrogates the trauma these women faced when investigating the whereabouts and intentions of these men for the sake of their children’s welfare. The caution and conviction with which they pursued the U.S. government’s assistance in a most personal family situation exposed these women to invasive proceedings and transactions. These processes and interactions further confirmed that, indeed, these women had been most daring in searching for answers that would help them parent their children responsibly and on their own.

This chapter looks at Kempe's search for spiritual joy and companionship in conjunction with contradictory advice, offered in books of consolation, about interpersonal relations. One model insisted that the highest form of spiritual love could be found only in solitude—in a relationship with “Jesus Alone;” another recommended that believers seek out the fellowship of “right-minded men.” This chapter shows that Kempe's Book traces her struggle to live in accordance with both models. This involves, first, separation from family and home, followed by a series of pilgrimages, and, second, upon her return to Lynn, reintegration into English devotional and familial communities.

This chapter presents a double feature, the 1965 South Korean feature film The DMZ and the 1975 North Korean feature film The Fates of Geumhui and Eunhui. Both films let the tragic separation of families unravel on the haunted stage of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), where life and death intersect. For divided families, having to carry on after being uprooted from their hometown and family network is akin to living an incomplete life in the past continuous, where part of them died upon their separation from the inseparable. Both films feature siblings whose lives and deaths intersect and drift away while crossing that crucial line, capturing the shifting rhetoric toward people of the other side as separate from their failed regime, reflecting and anticipating the subtle changes in the political and cultural climate of the inter-Korean relationship in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter explores the concept of the Middle Passage, which has attained iconic significance in African diaspora discourses. The concept refers to the transportation of numerous Africans across the Atlantic; difficult and pain-filled journeys across ocean space; dismemberment referring to the separation from their families and kin groups; the economic trade and exchange in goods in which Africans were the capital, commodities, or source of exchange and garnering of wealth for others; deterritorialization, the separation from one's own native geography or familiar landmarks, and the parallel disenfranchisement of Africans in new locations; the necessary constitution of new identities in passage and on and after arrival. However, the Middle Passage has also become a historical marker in space and time, for some an aesthetic, for many an evocative body memory in terms of confinement to limited spaces, but absolutely a break between different ways of being in the world.

Francis Marion Poteet, a farmer and carpenter from McDowell County with nine children and a tenth on the way, is conscripted in to the 49th regiment. He has no taste for war, would rather remain with his wife of sixteen years, Martha Henley. Their love letters offer a vision of a family rent by war: Francis endures the horrors of heavy combat and imprisonment for unauthorized leave after he sneaks home to bury his thirteen-year-old son; Martha is threatened with eviction and can barely keep the household going. At last they reunite.