Third Cultural Kids (TCKs) are here defined as the children who spend a significant part of their formative years outside their parents' native culture(s), and during that time live in several countries (at least 2) other than their passport countries.

 

What it is different in TCKs, compared to other migrant population, is not only their significant serial moving, but also that global mobility has produced during their formative years, so they grow up learning and experiencing several cultures as part of child and young education. Consequently, TCKs are both exposed to so many different cultures and acquire meaningful relations with those other cultures that arguably, as adults, they embody multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

 

TCKs have certain difficulties to define themselves in terms of origin, cultural affiliation, homeland, and family passport(s). They are simultaneously belonging to “everywhere  and nowhere”, which gives them a certain sense of lack of full cultural ownership, rootlessness and restlessness. They are living in and among different cultures. And consequently, their collective identity is often perceived as marginal and liminal, i.e. experienced as being in constant transition in relation to the dominant culture where they life in each moment.

 

Consequently cultural heritage identity of TCKs may be a restructured mix of everything that has relevance in creating a particular sense of belonging, without drawing on a single culture or place. Memories, images, emotions and performances from different cultures and landscapes compose a single but particular reminiscence that has little relations to the traditional concepts of defining heritage in terms of place and national ethos. Such cross-cultural identities challenge conventional definitions of cultural identity insofar as they can foster a sense of belonging that relates neither to any one culture (as most migrant or diaspora people experience) nor to all cultures experienced.

 

Cross-cultural heritage thus derives from particular meanings given by people to their surroundings as they move between cultures.  Some research exists on the psychological and educational effects and benefits of this cross-cultural reality, but notably absent is a consideration of collective identity, collective memory, and heritage.

 

My research project aims to reduce this gap. This blog will posts ideas & thoughts, early results, and some questions that will come up during my work.

I welcome everyone to read them, but also to comment on them.