Naomi Tyrrell

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.