NEW BOOK RELEASE: ‘Care Across Generations’ by Kristin E. Yarris

Re-posted from Stanford University Press.

Global inequalities make it difficult for parents in developing nations to provide for their children. Some determine that migration in search of higher wages is their only hope. Many studies have looked at how migration transforms the child–parent relationship. But what happens to other generational relationships when mothers migrate?

Care Across Generations takes a close look at grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families, examining both the structural and gendered inequalities that motivate migration and caregiving as well as the cultural values that sustain intergenerational care. Continue reading NEW BOOK RELEASE: ‘Care Across Generations’ by Kristin E. Yarris

CfP—Migrant Illegality across Uneven Legal Geographies: A Two-Part Convening

University of Colorado-Denver, April 6-7, 2018 and Brown University, October 26-27, 2018

Given the current political climate, there is a crucial need to examine how illegality is experienced across geographic contexts for undocumented immigrant communities. According to Hiemstra (2010), “labeling a person ‘illegal’ is a subtle yet powerful tool for creating, marking and magnifying perceived difference and exclusion” (p. 78). While the federal political and legal landscape is characterized both by enforcement through a record number of deportations andinaction on comprehensive immigration reform, states and localities have also begun to engage in their own vastly different immigration policy making and enforcement (Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon, 2005; Martos, 2010; Varsanyi, 2010; Varsanyi and Provine, 2012). Some localities have expanded rights for undocumented immigrants, as is the case in states like California and Illinois, both of which are traditional immigrant gateways. While others have become much more restrictionist, as is the case in places such as Tennessee and Georgia, which are considered new immigrant destinations.

Continue reading CfP—Migrant Illegality across Uneven Legal Geographies: A Two-Part Convening

From Mogadishu to Istanbul: An auto-ethnography on childhood, migration and education

By Eda Elif Tibet
(Originally posted on August 7: reposted here with permission from Youth Circulations)

Prior to a radio broadcast, I asked youth residing in a shelter for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Turkey to draw his dream of an ideal life. Showing them the outline of a world map with no country names and no borders, I asked them to draw their dreams of living any place they wanted. Below is an excerpt from my conversation with Caadil.

Elif:          Caadil, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Caadil:     My name is Caadil, I am from Somalia. I came in 2012 into Turkey. I am living in Istanbul and I am a student. Would this be enough?

Elif:          Sure, thank you. Today, I asked Caadil to draw his dream. Could you tell us something about what you drew?

Continue reading From Mogadishu to Istanbul: An auto-ethnography on childhood, migration and education

The Social Fact of Racism Persists, Even if Racial Categories Aren’t “Real”

By Elizabeth Chin

In the current context of the United States, it is more important to talk about race – and to deconstruct it — than ever.  Our culture, unfortunately, is dominated with “common sense” notions of race that owe much too much to eugenicist thinking, false biology, and plain old wrongheadedness.  These notions of race are, from a scientific point of view, incorrect.  However, their clear social power is undeniable.  Just a few months ago, one study documented that a startling proportion of white medical students hold spurious ideas about biological differences among races, including the ridiculous notion that Blacks feel less pain, a belief that has had direct and measurable implications for how the medical profession has responded to the physical pain reported by Black people – for centuries.

The social reality of race, then, is inescapable. For me and for many others, it is also terrifyingly personal.   Continue reading The Social Fact of Racism Persists, Even if Racial Categories Aren’t “Real”

CfP — Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South

For the Springer series Perspectives on Children and Young People
Dr Hernán Cuervo & Dr Ana Miranda (Eds.)

This edited book addresses a gap in youth studies by focusing on young people’s experiences in the Global South. It draws together a scholarly range of international and interdisciplinary work on young people’s lives in an incredible diverse and rich but unequal global region. This edited book aims to expand our thinking on youth experiences by linking theoretical and empirical perspectives to regions in the Global South; questioning the Global North domination in the social sciences and in youth studies.

Continue reading CfP — Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South

CfP — Latin American Studies Association 2018 in Barcelona, May 23-26, 2018

Panel organizers: Fina Carpena-Méndez (Oregon State University)
Aleksandra Wierucka (University of Gdansk)

Youth making and unmaking hope in Latin America’s New Ruralities and beyond

Climate chaos, ecological disasters, failed rural livelihoods promoted by neoliberal models of development, exclusionary and authoritarian politics are the conditions in which peasant and indigenous youth in Latin America give meaning to their daily experiences and shape their life trajectories. Both schools and migration that were imagined as sources of hope have often had contradictory roles or failed to deliver on their promises for a better future for rural populations. Facing Euro-American modernity’s imperative of severing the threads of tradition and the constant emergence of new forms of practice and knowing, we explore ethnographic work on peasant and indigenous youth’s struggles to produce spaces of hope through the active generation of alternatives to a consumer-dependent society, new livelihood strategies, sustaining inter-generational relations and cultural identities, migration, social justice advocacy and beyond.

Please send abstracts to Fina Carpena-Méndez (finacarpena@gmail.com) and Aleksandra Wierucka (aleksandra.wierucka@wp.pl) by August 25th 2017.

https://lasa.international.pitt.edu/eng/congress/

CfP—Playing with Childhood in the Twenty-First Century, University of Pittsburgh, April 6-7, 2018

Download pdf announcement.

The past decade has witnessed an array of new forms of public and global interest in marginalized children, whether the incredible rise in the visibility of lesbian, gay, and transgender children, the international migrations of refugee children from Latin America and the Syrian conflict, or the over-incarceration and detention in the United States of undocumented and African American children. In a moment when the marginality of childhood and the child’s function as a signal of futurity are being refigured by these global and historical events, this conference seeks papers that reach across the many disciplines that study children to produce new ways of thinking that make sense of and respond to the complexity of their lives.

This two-day conference hosted by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, the Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies Program, and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh will explore how to conceptualize, theorize, and approach research on children and childhood in the rapidly changing context of the twenty-first century. Affirming a conceptual and methodological “play” across fields, a mode of intellectual curiosity and unsettling of boundaries, we invite participants to reimagine the place of the child and childhood in their home discipline, and to reimagine their home discipline through the figure of the child and childhood. There will also be several meet the author book panels featuring scholars with recent monographs on children and childhood. Continue reading CfP—Playing with Childhood in the Twenty-First Century, University of Pittsburgh, April 6-7, 2018