Reconfiguring Migrant Meals and Doing Family: A Practice Theory Approach

Drawing on ethnographic research with six migrant families, this article explores how they reconfigure meal practices to stabilise family identity. The findings investigate three facets of the reconfiguration process: the reconfiguration of material arrangements; the reconfiguration of rhythms and spatial arrangements; and practitioners’ changing enrolments across practice bundles such as parenting and working. We argue that there is a set of macro general understandings of family meals reflecting family hierarchy, affiliation, care and unity that hold in both pre- and post-migration contexts. By exploring the continuities and discontinuities in how general understandings shape reconfiguration of the mealtime, we demonstrate that doing family meals offers terrain for migrant families to find themselves anew, foster a sense of continuity and instil a sense of stability to family members. In conclusion, our study contributes to the theorisation of the practical dynamics (or doing) of family identity in times of change and disruption.