Allen White

Introduction: Childhood and migration — mobilities, homes and belongings

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 Roles in Transnational Migration

There are important gaps in our knowledge about children who migrate. Even in societies which employ technologically sophisticated systems for monitoring and measuring migration, data on child migrants are incomplete and focused on specific groups of vulnerable children and young people. The lack of data and research on processes underpinning child migration and on the experiences of children who migrate are rooted in hegemonic Westernised assumptions about, and constructions of, childhood, family migration, and migration in general. Migrant children are represented as passive, needy and different; their accounts of themselves and their lives are silenced through adultist discourses about migration decision-making and experiences. The papers in this special edition of JEMS challenge these constructions of migrant children by focusing on the childrens experiences in a multiplicity of migratory contexts. Presented first at the international conference ‘Children and Migration: Identities, Mobilities, Belonging’ organised by the Marie Curie Migrant Children Project at University College Cork, Ireland, in April 2008, the papers showcase emerging research which challenges the adult-centric nature of migration research and policy.

Using visual methodologies to explore contemporary Irish childhoods

Drawing on the use of children-centred visual research methods, primarily artwork and photography, in Irish primary schools, this article compares the use of artwork and photography as visual methods and outlines the theoretical frameworks within which the data produced can be made meaningful. The ways in which the social worlds of migrant children both converged with, and diverged from, those of children who were born in Ireland are also explored.

Immigration into the Republic of Ireland: a bibliography of recent research

Abstract Until relatively recently, research on migration to the Republic of Ireland has been limited to a handful of texts. As immigration into Ireland has increased over the last decade, so has the volume of published research exploring this phenomenon, with a significant increase in the number of published research reports, policy studies and submissions, conference proceedings, monographs, academic papers, book chapters and theses. However the piecemeal and often ad hoc nature of the growth of this bibliography presents specific problems for both researchers and participants. This paper draws together a comprehensive (though not exhaustive) bibliography of research into immigration in Ireland. The bibliography is organised into a typology of research on migration into Ireland by considering the existing corpus of work under nine headings. The paper concludes by highlighting the potential contribution that human geography can offer to our understandings of the processes and dimensions of migration to t...

Geographies of asylum: legal knowledge and legal practices

Abstract Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.

Interrogating Medical Tourism: Ireland, Abortion, and Mobility Rights

Medical tourism in Ireland, like in many Western states, is built around assumptions about individual agency, choice, possibility, and mobility. One specific form of medical tourism—the flow of women from Ireland traveling in order to secure an abortion—disrupts and contradicts these assumptions. One legacy of the bitter, contentious political and legal battles surrounding abortion in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s has been securing the right of mobility for all pregnant Irish citizens to cross international borders to secure an abortion. However, these mobility rights are contingent upon nationality, social class, and race, and they have enabled successive Irish governments to avoid any responsibility for providing safe, legal, and affordable abortion services in Ireland. Nearly twenty years after the X case discussed here, the pregnant female body moving over international borders—entering and leaving the state—is still interpreted as problematic and threatening to the Irish state.

Revisiting contemporary Irish migration: new geographies of mobility and belonging

Though immigration has become one of the key issues facing Irish society, geographers in Ireland have been slow to respond. This is despite a long tradition of studying migration, particularly emigration, within Irish geography. This is even more surprising given recent developments within the discipline, as geography moves to assert its centrality to the study of international migration. This paper outlines the ways in which geographers in Ireland could contribute to broader debates about migration, both empirically and theoretically. It also introduces the five papers in this special issue of the journal, which provide a comprehensive overview of research on Irish migration, as well as detailed discussions of Irish migration to the UK, return migration and migration to Ireland from Poland, China and Nigeria.

Teaching students to read the news via representations of asylum seekers in British newspapers

Research by geographers on using news media in the classroom has tended to concentrate on either content or discourse analysis of newspapers. These approaches hold in common an implicit understanding that what news stories say happened is not as important as the language, metaphors, images and representations used in news stories. In this paper the author discuss Bells (1999) approach to analysing news stories, which lies somewhere between content and discourse analysis. This approach works through emphasizing the ‘event’ and ‘time’ structure of stories as they are presented to us in newspapers. Through building up the ‘event’ and time structure of news stories about asylum we can put ourselves in a position to see what the story does—and does not—say. In turn this approach shows how our understandings of seemingly simple news stories are often based on assumptions, ambiguities and discrepancies that support and are based within exploitative power relationships.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research: Finding the common ground of multi-faceted concepts

Inter- and transdisciplinarity are increasingly relevant concepts and research practices within academia. Although there is a consensus about the need to apply these practices, there is no agreement over definitions. Building on the outcomes of the first year of the COST Action TD1408 “Interdisciplinarity in research programming and funding cycles” (INTREPID), this paper describes the similarities and differences between interpretations of inter- and transdisciplinarity. Drawing on literature review and empirical results from participatory workshops involving INTREPID Network members from 27 different countries, the paper shows that diverse definitions of inter-and transdisciplinarity coexist within scientific literature and are reproduced by researchers and practitioners within the network. The recognition of this diversity did not hinder the definition of basic requirements for inter- and transdisciplinarity. We present five basic units considered as building blocks for this type of research. These building blocks are: (1) creation of collective glossaries, (2) definition of boundary objects, (3) use of combined problem- and solution-oriented approaches, (4) inclusion of a facilitator of inter-and transdisciplinary research within the team and (5) promotion of reflexivity by accompanying research. These were considered five basic units for effective inter- and transdisciplinary research although the 4th building block was also considered as “matrix” that holds all the others together.