CALL FOR PAPERS

Childhood & Migration: Interdisciplinary Conference 2008
Philadelphia, PA, USA
http://globalchild.rutgers.edu/

Friday, June 20th , and Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Call for Participation (issued September 2007)

Announcing our Keynote Speaker: Prof. Jacqueline Bhabha, Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, the Executive Director of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies.

Emerging Perspectives on Children in Migratory Circumstances

The Working Group on Childhood and Migration (see http://globalchild.rutgers.edu/) will hold its first conference in June of 2008 in Philadelphia, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Drexel University, and Rutgers University, Camden.

At this inaugural conference, we welcome researchers and policy advocates from all disciplines and all areas of the world whose work focuses on the ways that increased migration affects children and the cultural, legal, educational, medical, and psychological perception of childhood. Please submit a 200 to 300 word abstract for an individual paper proposal in the body of an email to _rrr@drexel.edu_ by December 15th . Notification of acceptance will be by January 10th, 2008 .

Conference website is available at:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~dtd28/GlobalChild/index1.htm

The way that world migration affects children's lives is complex and multi-faceted. Studies of children in migratory circumstances cross multiple areas of the world and multiple areas of concern for researchers, policy makers and direct service workers. Moreover, larger public concerns alter children's lives, concerns like immigration visa policies, media representations of child labor, and changing educational systems. Migratory familes also undergo unique private concerns over problems like the quality of substitute care and communication with loved ones across long distances. Holistic or at least less partial glimpses of these children's lives therefore must cross-cut the disciplines of law, political science, sociology, anthropology, demography, psychology, education, economics, communication, humanities and the arts. And yet, within academe researchers tend to communicate only with those in the same discipline or in the
same geographical
region. Thus, the June 2008 conference will provide
a venue to share
data, methodologies, and theories regardless of
discipline, with a focus
directly on how children fare under conditions of
migration.
Additionally, we want to create cross-disciplinary
synergy by bringing
together junior and senior research-active faculty
internationally
committed to developing new research avenues on
childhood and migration.

To frame our approach to child-centered
understanding of childhood and
migration, we consider childhood to be centrally
important to grasping
the effect that increased (and increasingly visible)
world migration has
on social and household reproduction. As a result,
the following
questions are important in guiding researchers
abstracts for the conference:

--Are children's development and maturation
processes significantly
affected by migration experiences, and if so, how
deleterious or
beneficial are they? Is a migration-associated
childhood now something
normative, and what does that kind of childhood look
like?

--How are children's rights and the notion of
children as citizens
affected by transnationalism, or by movement of
parents and children in
and out of various national legal systems?

--What are the emotional consequences of family
separation across
migratory families, especially for children?

--What are children's perspectives on migration, how
are they to be
elicited, how well can they be elicited and
represented, and what can
these perspectives tell us about socialization and
processes of
maturation in transnational families?

--How is migration shaping any given culture group's
notions of
childhood, and how are cultural notions of childhood
shaping migration?

--What are general and specific manifestations of
notions of childhood
under global economic change? For example, how do
remittances affect
expectations for children's scholastic achievement?
How do remittances
which elevate families into higher classes affect
children's social
development? How are attitudes toward child labor
changing with
increased international migration?

--How do media and policy makers represent children
in migration and how
do discourses about immigrant children and migrant
parents affect their
lives and experiences?

--What can we do to generate better quantitative and
qualitative data on
the effects that migration has on children? What are
the numbers of
migrant children and how are they best defined as
children in their own
rights?

The conference will run two days, Friday, June 20^th
, and Saturday,
June 21^st , at Drexel University in downtown
Philadelphia. Philadelphia
is accessible from Philadelphia International (PHL),
Newark
International (EWR) and Baltimore-Washington, D.C.
(BWI) airports.
Philadelphia is two hours from New York City and
Washington D.C. by
train. Limited funding for travel and/or
accomodations in Philadelphia
is available for graduate students and international
scholars (please
indicate your interest with your abstract
submission). We anticipate
publishing selected papers in a conference volume.

Conference includes buffet breakfasts, and a lunch
and a dinner on one
day. Conference pre-registration fees will be U.S.
$30.00 for tenure and
tenure-track professors and U.S. $20.00 for all
others. For
pre-registration rate, please register by February
1, 2007. Registration
on site will be $40.00.

Contact Rachel Reynolds _rrr@drexel.edu_ phone
215-895-0498, or Cati Coe
_ccoe@camden.rutgers.edu_ phone 856-225-6455, for
more information.
Conference website is available at:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~dtd28/GlobalChild/index1.htm