25 October 2023, 15:30-17:00
Please join us for the first CIE Research Café of the new academic year. This is a collaborative event between the University of Sussex Centre for International Education (CIE) and the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY).
Location: Jubilee G36, University of Sussex/ Zoom
Crisis for whom? Global border regimes and childhood (im)mobility
With Rachel Rosen (UCL) and Valentina Glockner (NPI, Mexico City)
Narratives of ‘crisis’ – whether ‘migration crisis’ or ‘childhoods in crisis’ – have become rhetorical tropes which shape and are reproduced by value-ladened political responses to children on the move. These typically reflect a sedentary bias which, as they intersect with generational time, draw on normative ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ childhoods and rigid assumptions about children and care. Consequently, children on the move globally, whether with family or separately, and those who remain in place when parents migrate, do so in contexts where migration is typically framed as a political and existential crisis for rich countries and associated with trauma and pathologisation for children. Equally, some children’s movements, particularly those involved in South-South mobility, are rendered invisible, as protracted displacement and ongoing historical crises are normalised. Indeed, these silent stories raise questions about when and why children’s (im)mobility is or is not constituted as a ‘crisis’, by and for whom, and with what effect for infrastructures and practices of care.
In this presentation, Rachel Rosen and Valentina Glockner will draw on their just-released edited volume Crisis for whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration* to complicate these silences and challenge hegemonic interpretations by considering the diverse and diffuse effects of border technologies and crisis narratives on childhood (im)mobility.
Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute. Her research, teaching and public engagement focuses on marginalised children and families, especially those with precarious immigration status; the intersection of welfare and border policies which shape their lives; and their practices of sustenance, care, and solidarity.
Valentina Glockner is a Mexican anthropologist affiliated with the Educational Research Department of The Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City. Her work in Mexico and India explores engaged research and reflective and participatory methodologies around the anthropology of childhood, migration and the state.
*Freely available to download in English and Spanish: Rosen, Rachel, E. Chase, S. Crafter, V. Glockner, and S. Mitra (Eds). (2023) Crisis for Whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration. London: UCL Press.
Tea and coffee will be provided.