Contested Childhoods: Growing up in Migrancy

EU Children in Brexit Britain: Re‐Negotiating Belonging in Nationalist Times

“…Identity construction for such transnational subjects has been influenced by possibilities and constraints within more than one national context (Reynolds and Zontini, ). This is particularly the case for children and young people growing up in migrancy (Seeberg and Gozdziak, ), who develop complex affective links that challenge the relationship between citizenship, identity and belonging (Van Liempt, ). Trasnational mobility has also been shown to foster cosmopolitan values and a European identification (Recchi, ).…”

Afterword: Gender Practices in Transnational Families

“…The appeal made by Mazzucato and Schans in 2011 to consider children as active agents in the context of transnational family research had the same effect as those calling for a greater visibility of women as active agents of migration at the beginning of the 1990s. In highlighting the increased importance of the presence of children in this domain during the second decade of transnational family research, a number of journal special issue editions has gained value in reference terms (Mazzucato and Schans 2011;White et al 2011;Gardner 2012;Carling et al 2012), along with some edited volumes (Spyrou and Christou 2014;Nagasaka and Fresnoza-Flot 2015;Seeberg and Gozdziak 2016).…”

The Politics of undocumented migrant childhoods: agency, rights, vulnerability

“…James et al, 1998). Migration studies, to a larger extent, is more occupied with questions of structure, whereas childhood research has made agency a central conceptual focus (Seeberg & Goździak, 2016;Tisdall & Punch, 2012). Recent developments within the sociology of childhood have suggested, however, that the dichotomy of agency/structure is increasingly irrelevant and that one needs to discuss agency in the context of "contingent empirical realities" (Oswell, 2013, p. 50).…”

“…A number of special issues and edited collections in recent years have attempted to address the lack of childhood research within migration studies (Coe et al, 2011;Ensor & Goździak, 2010;Gardner, 2012;Ní Laoire el al., 2010;Seeberg & Goździak, 2016;Veale & Dona, 2014;A. White et al, 2011) and the research project 4 that this thesis originated in was inspired by some of these earlier works' call for more research on migrant childhoods.…”

“…As a result of these conflicting perceptions and positionings of mobile children, when you grow up in migrancy your childhood is contested. When approaching children in migrancy, non-migrants seem to feel that they have the right to decide what is best for them and define who they are, Seeberg and Goździak (2016) argue. Thus, one central aspect that is contested is the future of these children.…”