Introduction: Childhood and migration — mobilities, homes and belongings

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue on childhood and migration. It argues that understandings of the ways in which children form belongings and attachments are enhanced by conducting research with children who migrate or who live mobile and transnational lives. The articles in this collection highlight the mobile and translocal nature of children’s lives, from different perspectives and in different global and migration contexts. Taken together, they make a number of key contributions to an emerging literature on the lives of migrant, mobile and diasporic children and young people. They emphasize the situated and contextualized nature of migrant children’s negotiations of home and belonging. In particular, the collection explores children’s and young people’s constructions of home and belonging, often negotiated in contradictory or challenging circumstances and frequently destabilizing powerful assumptions about the nature of migration, mobility and childhood, such as ideals of childhood based on notions of residential fixity.

Children's agency and its contradictions in the context of transnational labour migration from Vietnam

“…The conventional perception in migration studies of children as the (often-male) migrant's dependants, 'luggage' or 'things transported by adults' (see Dobson 2009;Ní Laoire et al 2010;Orellana et al 2001) has shifted. In childhood studies there has been a reconceptualization of the child as a social actor in his or her own right rather than just an 'adult in making' (cf.…”

European Somali Children Dumped? On families, parents, and children in a transnational context

“…In such cases, it is seen as a means to foster children or youth, whose development trajectory is regarded by adults as 'off track'. A general tendency in the research field of transnational mobility of children is to highlight the fact that children are subjective beings in their own right, with agency and decision-making capacity, and yet positioned in a web of wider family power dynamics (e.g., Ní Laoire et al, 2010;Orellana et al, 2001;White, Ní Laoire, Tyrrell, & Carpena-Méndez, 2011). Further, children are parts of larger family networks, where strategic decisions concerning children are taken for the benefit of the collective (Orellana et al, 2001).…”

“…(Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002, p. 28) Transnational familyhood is often related to migration (e.g., Gardner 2012;Ní Laoire, Carpena-Méndez, Tyrrell, & White, 2010). Mobility and migration abroad are taken-forgranted aspects of life in some cultural contexts, and this will have an impact on children (e.g., Akesson, Carling, & Drotbohm, 2012;Coe, 2012).…”

The aspirations of Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors before departure and on arrival in the host country

“…Research that acknowledges children's and young people's own perspectives on their lives is, therefore, very important. Children's perspectives can differ from those of adults and contribute alternative ideas and ways of understanding processes of migration (Ni Laoire et al, 2010). This increased knowledge can help to improve care regimes for separated refugee youth in host countries, where they can focus more on how particular aspirations relate to the host countries' realities, and trajectories can be set up to enhance the realization of at least some aspirations.…”