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Families, Kinship and the Dynamics of Transnational Networks

• Human Rights in Contexts of Ethnic Plurality: Always a Vehicle for Liberation? - by Roger Ballard
  This paper explores the Euro-centric foundations of the contemporary discouse of 'universal' human rights, and examines the ways in which its provisions can be - and are being - deployed as a means of placing those who have the temerity to order their families around alternative premises are being legitimately subjected to systematic disadvantage.

• Inside and Outside: Contrasting Perspectives on the Dynamics of Kinship and Marriage in Contemporary South Asian Transnational Networks - by Roger Ballard
  This paper explores the radically different premises around which the concept of the family is constructed in Euro-American and South Asian cultural contexts, and the confusions, contradictions and misunderstanding which routinely occur when behaviour generated and ordered in terms of one of these sytems is naively interpreted in terms of through the premises of the other.

• Forced Marriages: Just who is conspiring against whom? - by Roger Ballard
  Presented to a conference at the University of Roehampton, this paper explores the underlying logic of the rapidly expanding debate about so-called Forced Marriage within Britain's South Asian population.

• Riste and Ristedari: the significance of marriage in the dynamics of transnational kinship networks - by Roger Ballard
  This paper explores ever-increasing importance of marriage in facilitating the maintenance of transnational kinship ties, and the strikingly varies trajectories which these networks have begun to follow in different sections of the South Asian Diaspora. It also focuses on the role of women as active agents in these processes, as well as the tensions which can all too easily be precipitated when marriage is used to facilitate transnational migration, precipitating - amongst other things - the current debate on so-called"forced marriage".

• The Impact of Kinship on the the Dynamics of Transnational Networks - by Roger Ballard
  Prepared for a Conference on Transnational Networks in Princeton, this paper explored the comparative dynamics of the trans-local networks which South Asian migrants from Mirpur (Pakistan), Jullundur (India) and Sylhet (Bangladesh) have constructed around themselves.

• Migration and Marriage rules: the differential impact of marriage rules on processes of Punjabi migration to Britan - by Roger Ballard
  An exploration of the reasons why rules of clan exogamy followed by Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs, as opposed to the Mirpuri Muslim preference for close kin marriage, have had such a far-reaching impact on patterns of migration to, and resettlement in, Britain.

• South Asian Families - by Roger Ballard
  Published several decades ago, and so long out of print, this article sets out the basic logic of South Asian kinship systems, and of the dynamics of inter-personal relationships within the households so constituted.

• On the consequences of migration from below: ethnic colonization and the dynamics of transnational networks - by Roger Ballard
  Presented at a Conferenece in Korea, this paper takes the opportunity to explore the dynamics of migratory initiatives from a 'bottom-up' perspective.