UC Santa Barbara

This ethnographic study was performed in three online communities populated by English-speaking transnational settler mothers in Israel. The purpose of this study was to engage with the languacultures (Agar, 1994) (co)created by mothers of the three communities in order to uncover and reconstruct the processes by which Family Language Policy (FLP) decisions are made as shown through the telling case informant’s story (Mitchell, 1984). This was the first study that examined online communications related to FLP on Facebook that were unsolicited, naturalistic and longitudinal, spanning approximately 7 years. Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1962,1978; Vásquez, 2006) and Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) served as lenses to first focus on the Online Community context and then (re)turn to the communities for evidence of FLP (re)formulations as recorded by the platform, Facebook.

Hence the two overarching research questions in this study dealt with:

a) The online communal living examined through analysis of all communication by the telling case and two additional participants or tracer units (Cole cited in Evertson & Green, 1983), and

b) the FLP processes as communicated in the blog by the Telling Case (Mitchell, 1984).

The findings of this study showed that methodologically speaking, carrying out online ethnographies and ‘flowing ’ (Markham & Gammelby, 2017) with the telling case uncovered thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of the different social processes that were found to be meaningful by those of the examined communities. Transnational mothers (co)created online communities and oscillated between utilizing them as tools and as places (Markham, 1998), based on, as this study will show, complex interplay between life and transnational trajectories; that is, between the stage of motherhood and stage of the transnational-immigrant experience. New mothers and new transnational settlers particularly depended on this connected presence (Licoppe, 2004) for information and social outlets. FLP (re)formulations by Daniella, the primary tracer unit were largely dependent on family-internal experiences rooted in the complex relationship between the life and transnational trajectories such as growth of family and mother’s own multilingual development.

The one domain that caused most uncertainty and anxiety amongst the transnational mothers and Daniella (the tracer unit for the telling case) specifically was found to be the education domain. Transnational mothers struggled with widely circulating misconceptions and misinformation regarding multilingual development and academic achievement. With a global increase in transnational living patterns and digitally mediated and networked living, this study began the work of turning to the Internet of/for People (Io/fP): internet that is shaped by and for people. Internet that is populated, (co)created, (re)used, shared by people in different corners of the Io/fP depending on their stable and/or fleeting interests, needs, desires, hopes and every other noun (person/people, place, or thing) one chooses, needs, desires to be with(in), interact with(in), challenge and/or identify with(in) and through which permeating effects ensue within the Io/fP and outside of its boundaries. By turning to the Io/fP this study began the work of meeting individuals and communities where they are as they grapple with the unique pressures and stresses of navigating multilingual needs of transnational living.