Globalized Childhoods? Children’s Experiences and Subjectivities In Contested Migration and Mobility Contexts

Riding a renewed tide of anti-immigration sentiments, many societies are experiencing a resurgence of anti-globalisation politics and policies. These developments have profoundly reshaped the lives of immigrant and diasporic communities, including children and youth, emphazising their oftentimes vulnerable positions as members of a minority group. Meanwhile, children are also positioned across multiple axes of inequality, gender, generation, race and so on. By foregrounding the intersectionality perspective and aiming at its theoretical refinement, we bring together scholarship examining how migration regimes, racialised institutional orders, family processes, and cultural formations intersect in shaping the lived experiences and subjectivities of children/youth across diverse global contexts.

We invite contributions addressing a set of pertinent questions. How do children navigate legal precarity, deportability, and institutional surveillance within contemporary migration regimes? How do the cultural repertoires of home and host societies, including normative notions of a "good childhood" shape young people's strategies of negotiation and belonging? How do racialised institutional orders produce particular forms of subjectivity, and how do children accommodate, contest, or transform these conditions? How are children's identities constituted as resources for meaning-making, solidarity, and future-oriented imagination? How do these structural dimensions vary among migrant or mobile children across different class positions?

Collectively, we aim to advance a critical, relational, and globally attentive approach to childhood studies. By holding structure and culture in productive analytical tension, we illuminate both the conditions that generate childhood precarity and the cultural, relational, and collective capacities through which children and young people navigate, challenge, and reimagine those conditions.