Families of immigrants and settled populations of immigrant origin have become central to arguments about the rights and wrongs of ways of living in multicultural societies in Europe and elsewhere. The cultural practices believed to be characteristic of such families are central to the current intense, acrimonious debate about difference and its limits. Such (often imagined) practices are frequently the object of policy initiatives and much media comment, and on a daily basis preoccupy social service practitioners, teachers and others. At the same time, immigrants and ethnic minorities are themselves reflecting on how to manage their family relationships in a changing world in which migration is transnational, societies are increasingly pluralised, and relations ever more complex and less clear-cut.

This politicisation of the family, as it may be called, which touches not only immigrants, occurs on many levels, and in different interconnected locations in Europe and across the globe. It may be observed at the United Nations and in the array of international organisations concerned with human rights, especially the rights of women and children (born and unborn), as well as in transnational religious organisations such as the Catholic Church or (in a different way) the Muslim ummah. It is apparent in debates within the European Union and its constituent nation-states, and within local states and their institutions (health, social services, housing, etc.). The contested nature of families and everyday familial practices also appears in arguments (sometimes their resolution) in migrant and minority ethnic communities, associations, and neighbourhoods, and within households and networks of relations which may, in an era of transnational migration, be widely dispersed across geographical and socio-cultural space, linking members perhaps located – and this would not be especially unusual among Sikhs, for example – in Punjab, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and East Africa. Views on the nature of the ‘Turkish family’ may be aired in Germany as much as in Turkey.

Within this plurality of multi-sited, multi-vocal representations, discourses, narratives and reflections, the family is, crucially, seen as a moral order, a set of beliefs, values, ideas and practices by reference to which family members and their relationships are identified, organised and bound together. Sometimes idealised, sometimes vilified, there are many doubts, hesitations, and disputes about what the family is, and how familial relations should be defined and practiced.