This presentation reports on a doctoral research project exploring the intergenerational and intercultural dynamics within Chinese migrant families living in the UK. The project focuses on families in which parents are adult migrants from China and children have spent most, if not all, of their lives in the UK. These families present an important yet under-researched site for intercultural research, as they are shaped by intersecting processes of migration, language, intergenerational and cultural negotiation.

The study is situated within the ethnic Chinese communities in the UK, a population which continues to grow rapidly but is under studied (Huang and Lamb, 2015). Earlier research which explored UK-Chinese families often presented the Chinese in the UK as a homogenous group and often used an essentialist frameworks of culture to explain behaviours (e.g. Sham and Woodrow, 1998). Given the diversity of Chinese people who live in the UK today, a non-essentialist, more critical understanding of culture can shed more light on these families’ experiences. 

Although migration is a common practice, and it has been identified by migration scholars that the family is central to the migration process (Scocco, 2022), surprisingly few studies actually explore what is happening within the family after migration. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the everyday lived experiences and the intergenerational intercultural relationships of migrant parents and children. 

This study is guided by the research questions:

1. What are the shaping influences on these UK-Chinese families with intercultural intergenerational relationships?
2. How are these intercultural intergenerational relationships perceived by the parents and the children of these UK-Chinese families? 

The study aims to explore how family cultures emerge and are shaped within UK-Chinese migrant families and how intercultural dynamics are played out in intergenerational relationships. It aims to shed light on the diversity and complexity of UK-Chinese family cultures. It aims to contribute to intercultural education research by offering a non-essentialist, ecological account of migrant family experiences.

The study is grounded in an ecologically oriented, non-essentialist approach. Drawing on Holliday’s (1999) small cultures paradigm, family cultures are understood as emergent, locally situated practices rather than as expressions of fixed or homogenous cultural identities. This perspective resists deficit or essentialist representations of migrant families and aligns with social justice concerns around representation and voice. The study further adopted Holliday’s Grammar of Culture (2011) as a conceptual framework to understand how shaping influences within the families environment interact and how fixed ideas of culture (large culture) can shape small culture formation.  

The study adopted a qualitative case study design involving five UK-Chinese families. Families were recruited and selected to reflect diversity in migration histories and linguistic and cultural practices within the UK-Chinese community. Each case study involved one parent and one child aged over 16, as active participants, enabling an explicit focus on intergenerational perspectives. Data were generated through a series of multilingual interviews conducted over six months. Interviews were carried out in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, depending on participants’ linguistic preferences, in order to support participant voice and reduce linguistic power imbalances. Both individual and group interviews were conducted, allowing for exploration of personal experiences as well as shared family narratives. The use of multilingual interviews is a methodological choice aligned with intercultural and social justice principles, recognising language as central to identity, power, and participation in research. It also reflects the everyday multilingual realities of the families involved. Data analysis was conducted using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021). This approach allowed for an iterative, interpretive engagement with the data and explicitly acknowledged the researcher’s positionality as a member of the UK-Chinese community too. Reflexivity was maintained throughout data generation and analysis, with attention paid to how the researchers own experiences as a second-generation migrant informed the interpretation of participants’ accounts. Through this analytic process, five key shaping influences on the families’ small cultures were identified: education; religion; identity and cultural values; language and communication; and personal trajectories. These themes provided an analytical structure for examining how intercultural intergenerational relationships are negotiated within everyday family life.

The findings of this study demonstrate that the family cultures of UK-Chinese migrant families are shaped through complex interactions between intergenerational relationships and wider social, educational, and cultural contexts. Interculturality within these families is not experienced as a static difference between “Chinese” and “British” cultures, but as an ongoing process of negotiated of everyday practices. This process is coined as intergenerational interculturality within this work. The analysis highlights how parents and children draw on both lived realities and large cultural constructs to make sense of their intergenerational intercultural experiences. While family cultures are emergent and not fixed, participants also mobilise broader cultural discourses such as ideas about education, language, and identity, to explain intergenerational tensions and alignments. This reveals how even under a non-essentialist framework, we can see how large culture narratives continue to shape meaning-making. By foregrounding family life as a key site of intercultural learning, the study contributes to social justice–oriented intercultural education research that moves beyond institutional settings. It offers insights into how intergenerational relationships within migrant families can both reproduce and challenge dominant cultural expectations. The study makes an original contribution by providing an in-depth, ecologically informed account of an under-researched community and by highlighting the importance of intergenerational interculturality in understanding migrant experiences. These findings have implications for researchers, educators, and policymakers seeking to engage more critically and ethically with migrant families and to develop intercultural education approaches grounded in lived experience rather than cultural stereotypes.

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