Call for Chapters for an Edited Volume: Kids in Cages: The History, Politics, and Lived Experiences of Child Migrant Detention

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit a chapter proposal for an edited volume tentatively titled Kids in Cages: The History, Politics, and Lived Experiences of Child Migrant Detention (see description below). Should you be interested in participating, please send a title, abstract, and author bio by August 1, 2021. Should the abstract be accepted, we would notify you by mid-August and would expecting to receive drafts for review by November 1, 2021 and finalized chapters byJanuary 15, 2022. The expectation is that the project will be published with NYU Press, who has shown considerable interest in the volume.

The detainment of migrant children has recently become well-documented in news media, with viral images of “kids in cages” being attributed to the Trump administration. However, the migration of children to the United States is not new, nor is their detainment. In this volume, we seek to provide greater context to the history and current realities of child migrant detention.

The “surge” of children migrating alone since 2012 became a reminder of our precarious understanding of this population in the social, legal, and political immigration discourse of the United States. It also became clear that our social, legal, and political remedies are vastly inadequate at best and cruel at worst. When and how did the detention of immigrant children become the norm? What has been the evolution of legal remedies and its connection to American politics? What has been the impact on immigrant families in the United States that endured the detention and forced separation from their children? Who profits and how much has the detention of children increased? What has been the response of the American public to the detention of immigrant children over the decades?

In this volume, we will bring together interdisciplinary work that explores the practice of detaining migrant children. We hope to address the longer history of child migration to the United States, with a particular focus on the government interventions throughout the decades. We would like to include insight into the political and activist battles surrounding child migrant detention. Finally, this volume seeks to provide accounts of the impact of detention on children, their families, and their communities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: Child migration history, law, and policy; Emergence of the unaccompanied minor in American immigration; Historical accounts of child migrant detention; Psychological and developmental impacts of detention on children and families; Political battles over child migration detention; Ethnographic or narrative accounts of child migrant detention; Activism around child detention; Analysis of the Flores settlement and other policy; Detention as violence; Criminalization of migrant children in and through detention; Media representations of child migrant detention; Ethics of detention; Experience of practitioners working with detained children; Analysis of nonprofit and for-profit detention structures.

Manuscripts should not be previously published.

Please submit inquiries and abstracts for consideration to Emily Ruehs-Navarro, PhD (emily.navarro@elmhurst.edu) and Lina Munoz-Caswell (lcaswell@ccm.edu) by August 1, 2021.

Seeking Chapter Submissions for COVID Play Academic Volume

Two folklorists will be editing a multidisciplinary academic volume on COVID Play and are seeking submissions for chapters. We are particularly interested in a range of cultural voices that address the play of children, youth, or adults in a variety of countries during the pandemic. Topics of interest include: resilience, creativity, and resourcefulness in play during this time, COVID related themes in play, use of public playgrounds and public spaces during the pandemic, and creative uses of online play and techno mischief.  Send expressions of interest to Dr. Anna Beresin aberesin@uarts.edu, and Dr. Julia Bishop j.c.bishop@sheffield.ac.uk

Dr. Anna Beresin is professor of psychology and folklore in critical studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US. She serves as co-editor of the International Journal of Play.

Dr. Julia Bishop is research associate in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield in the UK where she studies children’s folklore, past and present. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Play.

Upcoming talk by Dr. Amy Brainer April 23rd, 12pm (EST)

Intimate harm, intimate healing: Thinking more globally and intersectionally about queer youth and Covid-19

 

Impacts of Covid-19 on queer youth have been profound. We must think about these impacts in ways that are locally rooted and global in scope, as the pandemic itself has been. This talk will concentrate on three areas where harm has occurred: carceral and immigration systems; loss of basic material security; and the family as a site of care and oppression that is underserved by current models of activism. These are a small number of the many areas that require attention and healing. Thus, the talk will move quickly from presentation to dialogue so that other participants can share their work and insights.

 

Bio: Amy Brainer is associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and coordinator of LGBTQ+ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, for which she received the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology. Her current research follows queer and trans individuals and couples as they navigate marriage-based immigration to Taiwan and the United States.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAof-muqTovE9xaf1pxFDp3flhOtsiipOCP

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please feel free to share the talk
with others who may be interested.

New Book Announcement: Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization

Dear Colleagues:

I’d like to share word of my new book: Warshel, Y. (2021). Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

You can find links below for book review copies, course inspection and purchase copies, and a description of the book below those.

The book is divided into 4 parts. If you are interested in adopting for a course, dependent on your focus, you can use one or all. The first part of the book describes the production of peacebuilding versions of Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street; the second, the reception of it by Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli citizens in-the-making; the third, an ethnography of violence of these young audience members conflict zones lives, illuminating why they interpreted the glocal hybrid television programs the way they did; and the fourth, offering recommendations to peace media practitioners interested in applying evidence to their practice. Part IV ties together the introduction, aimed at advancing a subdiscipline of peace communication, to provide scholars with methodological recommendations to critically and empirically determine the utility using media to build, make, and sustain peace in contexts of armed political conflicts.

While focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the book is framed both comparatively and globally so applicable to and includes recommendations for using communication to manage conflict worldwide and address debates surrounding structural discrimination and social justice.

A TEDx talk I gave summarizes the book and can be used together with chapters as a standalone course module for teaching (including for those in need of an asynchronous online module): https://www.ted.com/talks/yael_warshel_a_call_for_evidence_can_media_help_build_make_and_sustain_peace

purchase copies: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/experiencing-the-israelipalestinian-conflict/696329534C17D1B0BA9243FE02A7D0C8

review copies: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/request-review-copy

inspection copies: https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/textbooks/inspection-copy-information

Book Description:

“Over the last eighty years there has been a global rise in ‘peace communication’ practice, the use of interpersonal and mass communication interventions to mediate between peoples engaged in political conflict. In this study, Yael Warshel analyses Israeli and Palestinian versions of Sesame Street which targeted negative inter-group attitudes and stereotypes. Merging communication, peace and conflict studies, social psychology, anthropology, political science, education, Middle Eastern and childhood studies, this book provides a template to think about how audiences receive, interpret, use and are influenced by peace communication. By picking apart the text and subtext of the kind of media these specific audiences of children consume, Warshel examines how they interpret ‘peace communication’ interventions, are socialised into Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and Arab/Palestinian Israelis, political opinions they express, and violence they reproduce. She questions whether peace communication practices have any relevant structural impact on their audiences, why such interventions fail, and offers recommendations for improving future communication interventions into political conflict worldwide.”

Best,

Yael Warshel
Pennsylvania State University

Children as Political Subjects in the Age of Uncertainty

by Seran Demiral (Boğaziçi University, Primary Education & at Kadir Has University, City and Children Studies)

In our contemporary world, certainty has left its place to flexibility, adaptability and willingness to change (Lee 2005:19). A new sociology of childhood addresses children’s agency to debate child ‘beings’ as both individuals for their own lives and social actors to affect the world. At that point, agency matter is discussed through other concepts, like subjectivity and/or competency. Bollig and Kelle (2016:37) claim that “the acting subject or the competent actor is replaced with a concept of participation in practices.” It is obvious that not only globalization but also digital technologies have changed our culture so that “from a global perspective childhood culture is becoming more homogenized” (Prout 2005:29). Besides, politics and childhood movements all over the world have become similar, especially during this decade.

Atlas Sarrafoğlu, Greta Thunberg, Selin Gören respectively[1]

 

Children can be aware of what happens in other places of the world and how their peers live. As it is known that Greta Thunberg has become an enormous inspiration for many children and young people from different countries, for instance, Atlas Sarrafoğlu gave a start for children’s climate activism in Turkey. Atlas was also honoured by the 2020 WWF International President’s Youth Award (BIA 2020), which is an indicator that childhood movements can be seen by institutions and authorities. After several months of children’s first universal school strike, Atlas and another young activist from Turkey, Selin Gören, attended the “Smile for Future summit” in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their meeting might have affected Greta’s sensitivity about ecologic resistance in Canakkale, so that she said, “Ida Mountains belong to us all” in Turkish (BIA 2019).