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Unsettling narratives of care, childhood, and migration "crisis"

Most children who migrate globally, with family members or separately, do so in a context where migration is increasingly framed as a political and existential crisis. Such crisis narratives often serve as justifications for rising xenophobic nationalism, enhanced border securitisation and hostile environments in receiving countries. As a result, migration regimes often set limits on care entitlements and children experience processes of everyday bordering in their encounters with education, health, social care, and even humanitarian groups as they seek care for themselves and to provide care to others.

In popular discourse and much academic scholarship, migration is treated more generally as a crisis for children, viewed as essentially traumatising because of assumptions that 鈥榞ood childhoods鈥� are sedentary periods of dependency on local kin. Yet, migration scholarship makes clear that mobility is a part of the human condition, and that it is the conditions under which such movement is controlled, disciplined, and framed that cause politicised precarity for forced migrants. Equally, some children鈥檚 movements, particularly those involved in South-South migration, continue to be rendered invisible both within and beyond crisis narratives, and those silent stories are also of interest. Indeed, their invisibility raises questions about when and why children鈥檚 movement is or is not conceptualised and constituted as a 鈥榗risis鈥�, by and for whom, and with what effect.

The ways in which care, childhood and migration are conceptualised have important implications for the provision of, and access to, necessary resources, infrastructures and relationships of care. The one-day, interdisciplinary and international symposium aimed听to unsettle the assumptions highlighted above through discussion of the following questions:

• How is care recognised, understood, constrained, fractured, and practised in the context of a multiplicity of 鈥渕igration crisis鈥� narratives?
• How do diverse global understandings of care and childhood come into contact, conflict with, and/or amplify each other and 鈥渕igration crisis鈥� narratives?
• What are the diverse and diffuse effects of the intersections of care, childhood, and 鈥渕igration crisis鈥� narratives for children and young people living migrating in and through diverse global contexts?

The symposium would be听convened by Rachel Rosen, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and Elaine Chase (University College London) and Sarah Crafter (Open University), and is part of the organisers鈥� broader research agendas including the ESRC-funded Children Caring on the Move project.听

听Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the symposium was unable to continue. However, the project ran from 2019 - 2022.听