Liudmila Kopecka presents her paper 'Children go first! Family strategies and educational migration' in Parallel session II(C) of the conference Examining Migration Dynamics: Networks and Beyond, 24-26 Sept 2013
Recent developments in migration studies have shown that is very important to pay attention to how migration decisions are taken collectively. Families and kin group play a significant role in the process of migration and influence individual’s behaviour. However, there have been only a few studies, which focus on family strategies and migration for educational purposes. This paper attempts to show what kind of role does family play in student migration from Russia to the Czech Republic and what kind of transnational strategies and migration projects do have parents, sending their children abroad. The field research for this article was conducted in a few cities in Russia and in Prague, in the Czech Republic, involving in-depth interviews with student migrants and their parents.