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Global Childhood and Migration
Working Group Members
Our working group on childhood and
migration, made up of scholars from over 25 universities worldwide,
aims to bring a human face to children's experiences of migration,
including children who are left behind, children who move back and
forth, and children who settle in a strange land. We study and report
on issues like how migration changes children's notions of self,
strategies that parents and families use to handle child-rearing
when they find they must migrate, and changing notions of childhood
across cultures.
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María
Florencia Amigó is a Post Doctoral
Research Fellow at the Children
and Families Research Centre (CFRC) at Macquarie University in Australia. She studied
Anthropology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina,
and received her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia
in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation is on child workers
in rural Indonesia and was supported by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her current work
at Macquarie University explores the cultural transitions
young children born overseas undergo as they start school
in Australia. >>> email |
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Deborah
A. Boehm is an Assistant Professor of Women’s
Studies and Anthropology at the University of Nevada,
Reno. Her research focuses
on constructions of gender and family among transnational
Mexicans with ties to a rural community in the Mexican state
of San Luis Potosí and several locales in the United
States. Current projects explore the gendered character
of migrants’ interactions with the U.S. state, gender
subjectivities in the context of migration, cross-border families
with mixed U.S. immigration statuses, transnational childhood,
and immigrant rights post-9/11.
>>> email |
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Maren
Borkert is
Scientific Assistant at the Department of Sociology II
at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and Cluster Assistant
of the ENoE ‘International
Migration, Integration, Social Cohesion’ (IMISCOE), Cluster
C9, at the International and European Forum of Migration Research
(FIERI) in Turin, Italy.
Since
October 2008 Dr. Borket works as a research
officer at the International Centre of Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) where she
coordinates and works in several EU funded projects in the
area of migration, development and integration.
>>> aMaren.Borkert@icmpd.org
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Tamara Mose Brown is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her
fields of interest are family
and motherhood, urban sociology, and ethnic identity.
Currently, she is conducting research which focuses on transnational motherhood
among West Indians/Caribbean child care providers in Brooklyn, New York. Her
ongoing research highlights motherhood and child adaptation to living transnationally,
as well as changes in local consumer markets. |
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Beth Anne Buggenhagen is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Dr. Buggenhagen is a cultural anthropologist who has worked
on the global circuits of Senegalese Muslims. Her research
concerns circulation and value, diaspora and transnationalism,
neoliberal global capital, gender, Islam and visuality. She
has conducted field based research in Dakar and Tuba, Senegal
and New York City and Chicago, USA. She is currently working
on a book manuscript, Prophets and Profits: Gender and
Islam in Global Senegal, in which she considers the global
circuits of Senegalese Muslims in relation to the politics
of social reproduction in Senegal. |
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Naomi Bushin is
a Marie Curie Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of
Geography, University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests
include children’s experiences of family migration, children’s
participation in migration decision-making, family migration
to rural areas ‘for the sake of the children’,
migrant children’s social networks and experiences of
schooling. Her current project explores the migration and integration
experiences of children who have moved to Ireland from eastern
and central European countries.
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Fina
Carpena-Méndez received her PhD in
Anthropology from UC Berkeley. Her interests lie at the
border between childhood and youth studies and globalization
and transmigration processes. Her work explores the effects
of economic restructuring on new migrant-sending communities
in Puebla (Mexico) and the emergent transnationalization
of Mexican youth gangs. She is currently working on a
book manuscript on the reorganization of the experiences
of children and youth in indigenous communities recently
affected by accelerated processes of trans- national
migration to New York and Philadelphia by exploring the
contradictions and negotiations in everyday life, the
relationships between generations and the formation of
youth subjectivities. She has been a visiting research
fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
and the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego
during the academic year 2005-2006, before joining the
Marie Curie Migrant Children research team in Ireland
for a comparative ethnography on children’s mobilities
and transnational lives in regions dramatically affected
by recent political and economic reforms. She has recently
initiated research on Brazilian migration into rural
Ireland.
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Ernesto
Castañeda-Tinoco is a Ph.D. Candidate in the
Department of Sociology at Columbia University and a member
of the multidisciplinary IGERT Program on International
Development and Globalization. He is particularly interested
in the intersections between inequality, migration, remittances
and development in Latin America. His present work focuses
on exploring migration from Mexico into the United States
and the effects that migration and remittance-economies
have on family structure and human development, including
the role that children in transnational families have in
the reproduction of migratory patterns.
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Kristen
E. Cheney, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa
Cruz in 2004. She joined the University of Dayton Dept. of
Sociology, Anthropology, & Social Work faculty this year.
Her research interests include Africa, children and childhood,
human rights, international development, discourse, education,
ethnicity, identity, music, nationalism, peace and security,
music and performance.
Dr. Cheney is interested in children's survival strategies amidst difficult circumstances
in Eastern and Southern Africa. Her work has focused on children in Uganda, including
child soldiers. While her forthcoming book Pillars of the Nation (Spring 2007,
University of Chicago Press) looks broadly at the social intersections of childhood
and nationhood, she is now conducting ethnographic research with children affected
by HIV/AIDS to see how they tap into resources, among them migration, in order
to ensure their own survival. Her work takes an explicitly child-centered approach
while still considering the hegemonic practices of government, development industry,
and family and their effects on children's choices. >> email |
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Marisol
Clark-Ibáñez, Ph.D., is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State
University San Marcos. Dr. Clark-Ibáñez has
published on the topics of visual sociology, sociology of
education, ethnography, and the sociology of childhood. She
has just completed a book manuscript called Learning
Inequality: An Ethnography of Charter School Reform
and Inner-city Classrooms. Her current book project
is a visual study of urban childhoods. In photo-elicitation
interviews (PEI), the researcher introduces photographs to
the interview context as a way to generate responses beyond
conventional interview methods. She argues that we can further
elaborate our theoretical and analytical framework of childhoods
by incorporating a methodology, such as PEI, that allows
us access to explore and better understand the texture and
complexity of inner-city kids’ lives.
Email: mibanez@csusm.edu |
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Cati
Coe is an Associate Professor of Anthropology
at Rutgers University, Camden. Her research explores
the strategies that Ghanaian immigrants use to raise
their children. One strategy that they draw upon is to
have their children live in Ghana with extended family
members. She is currently exploring whether this practice
has increased or changed as a result of international
migration, and to determine the impact transnational
migration has on family life. Dr. Coe is the author of
a book on the teaching of traditional culture in Ghana’s
schools, Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools:
Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge (Chicago,
2005). >>> more
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Frayda Cohen,
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Program
at the University of Pittsburgh, received her Ph.D. in anthropology
from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. Her research interests
include China, children and childhood, gender and development,
kinship, migration, and transnationalism. Dr. Cohen has written
on transnational adoption between the United States and China
with regard to three key aspects of the transnational adoption
process: adoptive families and cultural identity; gender, race
and citizenship; and adoption and labor in China. Her current
project examines comparative groups of transnational adoptees
and the care workers employed by Chinese welfare institutes. |
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Mathew Creighton is a Ph.D. Candidate
in Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. His
research looks at how migration structures sending households
and affects those that are left behind, particularly children. Working
primarily in Mexico, he has sought to empirically and theoretically
bridge research focused on single parents with migration. In
addition, he is part of the Philadelphia Migration Project
which seeks to understand the incorporation of immigrants
into urban America, focusing on the shift in native and immigrant
residential patterns from the city to the suburbs in post-WWII
Philadelphia. |
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Dr.
Liesbeth de Block researches and teaches
in the Centre for the Study of Children Youth and Media (CSCYM)
based in the London
Knowledge Lab as part of the Institute
of Education, University of London and Her research interests
are in the interrelation between media, migration, globalization,
children, and education. She has worked in primary, secondary,
adult education and teacher training in the UK and abroad and
has spent time making international documentaries. She has
coordinated two cross national research projects funded by
the European Community: CHICAM:
Children in Communication about Migration (2002-2005) and CIVICWEB:
civic participation, youth and the internet (2006-ongoing)
>>> email |
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Margarita del Olmo is an anthropologist who
works as a senior scientist at the CCHS (Center for Social
Sciences and the Humanities) of the CSIC (Spanish Council for
Scientific Research) in Madrid. She has done work on immigration
since 1985 when she was working for her PhD degree on Argentinian
exiles in Spain. Her main field of interest is focused on Racism
and Xenophobia in Europe, although she has worked in Canada
(Toronto University, York University), the US (Harvard University,
UC Berkeley, South Africa (Northenr Cape University), Argentina
(Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos), and Austria
(Zentrum für Soziale Innovation, Navreme Knowledge Development).
She currently teaches postgraduate courses on Racism (Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Multiculturalism
and Education (Universidad Complutense), and Fieldwork Methods
(Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain,
and Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico). She has published books
on Cultural Identity (La construcción cultural de la
identidad, 1990), Native Americans in the US and Canada ( Expediciones
a la Costa Noroeste, 1991, Historia Etnológica de los
Indios Norteamericanos, 1992, Las <Noticias de Nutka> de
José Mariano Moziño, 1999), Argenitnian exiles
(La utopia en el exilio, 2002), Methods in Anthropology (Problemas
metodológicos en Antropología, 2003), and Anthropology
and Education (Antropología en el aula, 2005). Since
2002 she has been part of the INTER Group research team and
with them she has published Teacher Training Needs from a European
Perspective (2006), Culture Is Our Focus, Diversity Our Normality
(2006), Racism: A Teenagers’ Perspective (2007), and
Racism: What It is and How to deal with It (2007). She is currently
conducting a research project on integration of immigrant students
and racism prevention in schools funded by the Spanish Ministry
of Education (www.navreme.net/integration).
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C. Nana Derby is an Assistant Professor of Criminal
Justice at Virginia State University. She graduated from Florida
International University in 2005 with a Ph.D. in comparative
sociology. Her research interests include contemporary
slavery, feminist criminology and crimes of transnational migration.
Her book (set to be released in March 2009) Contemporary
Slavery: Researching Child Domestic Servitude was developed
from her Ph.D. dissertation, which investigated the use of
children as domestic servants in some Ghanaian households. She
has also researched child trafficking in Ghana. In future,
Derby plans to undertake an extensive historical comparative
research on gender, colonization and child labor exploitation
in some African cultures. Her articles have appeared
in York University’s Journal of Woman Studies, and the
Virginia Social Science Journal.
>>> email |
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Hilary
Parsons Dick completed her PhD at the University
of Pennsylvania in 2006 and is an interim lecturer at Bryn
Mawr College. A linguistic and cultural anthropologist,
her work investigates discourse production as a causal
force shaping Mexico-U.S. migration. Her overarching interests
include the semiotics of social difference; production
of place and national identity; home-building practices;
gender, class, and ethno-racial relations; and the impact
of policy on migration practices. Her present research
focuses on how Mexican migrants learn and transform images
of personhood ascribed to them by U.S. native-born residents.
In this, she is interested in two key activities: (i) how
migrants become configured as ethno-racially and national
distinct; and (ii) the role migrant children play as translators/intermediaries
and the effect this role has on relations of power and
processes of identification inside families. |
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Jie Dong is a PhD candidate at the School of Education, University
of East London, UK. Her research focuses on the education and
identity construction of children from internal migrant families
in Beijing. Phenomenal population movements from rural to urban
China took place in the early 1980s, and the education of migrant
workers' children has attracted increasing attention from researchers
as well as policy-makers. To find out the actual education
provision to and the identity construction of migrant children
in urban area, Jie has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in
two Beijing schools in 2006 and 2007. |
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Joanna
Dreby is an Assistant Professor of Sociology
at Kent State University. Her work examines a common
family migration strategy in which Mexican parents leave
their children behind when they migrate to work in the
United States. Her writings concentrate on consequences
of family separation for all members of the family, including
parents, children of all ages and caregivers. With
support of a Fulbright grant in 2004-2005, she conducted
research with children of all ages "left behind" in
Mexico as well as Mexican school children on their perceptions
of the US and migration. She has published articles
on Mexican transnational families in Gender & Society
(2006) and the Journal of Marriage & Family (2007). Her
broad research interests include international migration,
immigrant communities, gender and the family, and childhood
studies. Dr. Dreby has also participated in a long-term
research project on safety in U.S. child care with Julia
Wrigley; the study s findings have been published in
the American Sociological Review (2005).
>>>email |
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María Claudia Duque-Páramo is
Professor in the School of Nursing at the Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia; she received her PhD in
Anthropology from the University of South Florida, Tampa. Her
dissertation research was conducted with Colombian children
in Tampa about the food changes and adaptations they were experiencing
as building and transforming cultural elements. Her research
interests include child-centered research, parental migration,
food and migration, health and migration, and Colombians. Current
projects aim at exploring, with ethnographic and participatory
methods, the transnational experiences of children and parents
living parental migration with the purpose of developing policies
and participatory programs to improve their health and wellbeing. |
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Núria Empez is a Ph.D. Candidate
in Anthropology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Her
research looks at children’s migration status under
the law, and the question of how families use migration to
survive, with a focus on the migration of “unaccompanied
minors” coming from Morocco to Europe. For such
children who migrate without any responsible adult, the law
is not clear on their status. On the one hand, they
are minors who should be protected; on the other hand, they
are illegal migrants whom the Spanish government wishes to
send back to Morocco. From families’ perspectives,
the possibility of children migrating alone may be starting
to affect family dynamics and efforts to raise children among
poor Moroccan families. Because it is increasingly difficult
for adults to live securely in Spain, families in Morocco
may be orienting their strategies for selecting who migrates. Indeed,
sending a child to Spain is seen as an investment in their
future and the future of these families.
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Marisa
O. Ensor is an assistant professor at Eastern
Michigan University. Dr. Ensor, an applied anthropologist
with an LLM in International Human Rights Law, has researched
and published on conflict-, disaster- and development-induced
displacement in Mexico, Colombia, Central America and
the United States. Her current work examines the impact
of Hurricane Katrina on Central American migrant children
in New Orleans.
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Heather Rae Espinoza is a Ph.D.
Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California
San Diego. She conducts research among children who
have been left in Ecuador by parental emigration, focusing
on psychological adaptation, social adjustment and the shifting
values of children as their lives and cultures change due
to immigration. Her work also theorizes how immigrant
children fit into the social landscape of the global city.
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Maarit
Forde is a postdoctoral researcher at the
Department of Anthropology, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Her work focuses on the Anglophone Caribbean, and she
has conducted extensive fieldwork in Trinidad and Tobago
as well as in the West Indian neighbourhoods of Brooklyn.
Her main areas of interest include Caribbean religions,
rituals and cosmologies, migrations and transnationalism,
gender, and literature. She is currently working on a
manuscript on religious transnationalism in and between
the Caribbean and New York, and designing a new project
on transnational kinship in the context of Caribbean
migrations with a special focus on ideals and practices
of mothering and child-rearing. Her publications include
articles in journals and edited collections as well as
a published Ph.D. dissertation.
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Lacey
A. Gale is a post-doctoral fellow at the Feinstein
International Center at Tufts University. She received
her PhD in Cultural Anthropology and Population Studies
from Brown University. Her research examines the intersection
of international humanitarian policies and the lived
experiences of camp-based refugees in Guinea. Her areas
of interest include refugees and diasporas, child fostering,
and the role of kinship in transnational livelihoods.
She is currently collaborating with the United Somali
Women of Maine, a refugee-headed non-profit, to create
an educational multi-media piece concerning the lives
of Somali families in Maine. Her upcoming research focuses
on child fostering practices in post-conflict Sierra
Leone. |
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Christina Getrich is a Ph.D. Candidate
in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Her
research examines how second-generation Mexican immigrant
teenagers living in mixed-status families make sense of their
social belonging and navigate the currents of anti-immigrant
sentiment directed at them and their families. She
also explores new patterns of transnationalism emerging among
the Mexican second generation. Christina is more broadly
interested in the social adjustment of immigrant families
to life in the United States, and has also conducted research
with immigrant/refugee communities in New Mexico, California,
and North Carolina. |
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Roberto G. Gonzales is an Assistant Professor
at the University Of Washington School Of Social Work. He
earned his Ph.D. in the department of sociology at the University
of California. His research focuses on the ways in
which immigration policy, community institutions and processes
of acculturation shape confusing and contradictory trajectories
in the transition to adulthood of 1.5 generation unauthorized
immigrant youth. Current projects include a 3 ½ year
ethnography in Los Angeles, and comparative projects on undocumented
youth in the U.S. and Europe, and unaccompanied minors residing
in an ORR youth shelter. Gonzales' research and teaching
interests include: International and Unauthorized Migration,
Urban Studies, the 1.5 and 2nd Generations, and Latino communities
and families. |
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Sarah Gould is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She conducts
research in Sakalava communities of northwestern Madagascar
where she focuses on the relationships between child fosterage,
migration, kinship, and Sakalava politics. |
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Kenneth
J. Guest is an Assistant Professor in the
Sociology and Anthropology Department at Baruch College
(CUNY). His research focuses on immigration, religion,
and transnationalism within and between China and New
York City, with particular focus on the role of religious
communities in the recent migration of Fuzhounese from
southeast China to New York City, the creation of transnational
religious networks, and the effects of this migration
on the religious revival sweeping coastal China. He has
conducted fieldwork in China and the US. He is
the author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival
in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (NYU
Press, 2003) |
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Edmund
'Ted' Hamann is an Assistant Professor in
the Dept. of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He studies
the shaping of educational policy in reaction to the
growth in school enrollment of English learners and/or
immigrant newcomers. With colleagues at the Universidad
de Monterrey in Mexico, he also studies students in Mexico
who have prior experience in U.S. schools, looking at
how they and their schools negotiate their transnationalism.
He is author of The Educational Welcome of Latinos in
the New South (Praeger, 2003) and, with Stanton Wortham
and Enrique Murillo, Jr., co-edited Education in the
New Latino Diaspora (Ablex, 2002). |
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Daniel
Senovilla Hernandez is a Ph.D candidate
at the Instituto Universitario de Migraciones- Universidad
de Comillas de Madrid and has been hosted since 2004
by the research centre MIGRINTER, Université de
Poitiers- CNRS. He has worked for the International
Juvenile Justice Observatory, Brussels; Spanish Red Cross,
Madrid & Médecins sans Frontières,
Paris.
Since 2004, he has been doing comparative research
on the situation and treatment of unaccompanied & separated
migrant children in 6 European countries: Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, Spain & the United Kingdom. >>> contact
information
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Julia Meredith Hess is an Instructor at
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She
explores the social adjustments parents and children make
as they resettle as immigrants and refugees in the United
States, with a focus on Tibetan exiles in South Asia and
the US. Her past research explores changes in expressions
of identity and belonging, particularly among youth, as they
moved from being stateless refugees in South Asia (India
and Nepal) to citizens of the United States. She also looks
at opportunities and challenges Tibetan parents and children
face as they encounter new ideas and practices associated
with bringing up “good” Tibetan-American children. |
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Sarah Horton is a Research Specialist in
the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine
at the University of California, San Francisco. She
examines the issue of transnational motherhood in terms of
the psychological effects on women who have had to leave
their children behind, focusing specifically on Salvadoran
immigrants to the United States. She is interested in how
such women endure separations from their children, how they
experience their children's recriminations and feelings of
abandonment, and how they express their distress through
idioms of nervios and coraje. Her work takes a psychological,
person-centered approach. |
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Mélanie
Jacquemin received her Ph.D
in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS) in Paris in 2007. She is an associate post-doctoral
researcher of the African Centre Studies (EHESS/IRD, Paris).
By focusing on working children and youth in a gender perspective,
as well as on the economic role and value of female (child)
work performed in the domestic arena, her research interests
include child, youth and female migration; gender and ethnic
social relations; urban domestic economy; school, education
and work; children's voice and agency; working children's mobility
and future; research methods and procedures for generating
data on child migration and child labour; international, state
and development policies implementing children's rights; media
representation of child migration and labour.
She's currently working on a book manuscript from her Ph D thesis, which dealt
with a sociology of child domestic service in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), exploring
how the practices evolved, over the past 40 years, from a family work linked
to educational process, into the kind of wage work that exists today.
She now seeks to develop deeper analysis of child and youth labour migration
patterns in Africa today, by going beyond the classical thesis of child fosterage
and “family solidarity”, as well as beyond the hyperbole of mere
economic constraints and child trafficking. meljacquemin@gmail.com |
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Jacqueline
Knörr is a Research Professor
at the Max Planck Institute
for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale
(Germany). Her research focuses on identity formation & politics,
integration & differentiation, childhood and migration,
creole identity in postcolonial societies, and on postcolonial
nationhood. Her regional foci are West Africa and Indonesia,
as well as Atlantic Ocean societies, Germany and Switzerland.
In 2005 she edited a book on "Childhood and Migration.
From Experience to Agency".
>>> email
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Jessaca
Leinaweaver is an Assistant
Professor of Anthropology at Brown
University. Her
research explores informal, cultural fostering patterns,
particularly how children are relocated when it seems
best for socioeconomic or educational reasons. In Peru,
relocating children is an effective strategy to aid in
migration. Adult migrants are able to leave their children
with trusted friends or relatives, and they are also
able to use child relocation to support their own aging
parents. Dr. Leinaweaver is interested in how children
move between homes, whether in support of their parents'
migration, in migrations of their own, or through legal
adoption (a particular and formalized kind of migration). She
is currently researching the situations of young Peruvians
living in
Spain, both those who have come as part of migrant families and
those who
have been adopted inter- nationally.
>>>
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Valentina
Mazzucato is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer
at the Department of Geography, Planning and International
Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research
explores various aspects of transnational family life, including
the effects of split families on children who stay behind.
She has recently co-authored with Djamila Schans a state-of-the-art
paper on transnational families and the raising of children
for the Social Science Research Council.
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Cecilia
Menjívar is associate professor of
Sociology in the School of Social and Family Dynamics
at Arizona State University. She specializes in the social
aspects of immigration primarily from Central America
(Guatemalans and Salvadorans) to the United States. She
has written on social and kin networks, family dynamics,
gender and intergenerational relations and on family
separation as a result of migration, as well as on second
generation and transationalism. Recently she has
started to explore family reorganization linked to migration,
as well as the lives of those who do not migrate in Armenia
and Mozambique. |
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Caitríona
Ní Laoire is the Marie Curie Excellence
Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at University
College in Cork, Ireland. Her current research
focuses on the experiences of children in return migrant
families in Ireland. She has recently completed
a life narrative research project that explores the experiences
of children who 'return' to Ireland with their parents,
many of whom have been born elsewhere. This is part of
a larger research program based in Cork, Ireland, which
explores the immigration and integration experiences
of children in Irish society, and which is particularly
interested in issues of spatiality and children's uses
of place and space. |
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Misako
Nukaga is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
at UCLA and a graduate student in Education at the University
of Tokyo. Her interest lies at the intersection between
migration, education, community and family resources,
and children's identity formation. She is currently conducting
a multi-sited fieldwork at a transnational upper-middle
class Japanese community in Los Angeles and in Japan.
Taking a sociology of childhood perspective, she examines
how Japanese children among expatriate families, who
plan to reside in LA only for several years and thus
maintain strong ties to their homeland, negotiate and
reconcile American and transnational values in their
everyday lives, while being supported by their parents'
extensive utilization of cultural and social capital
available in the well-established transnational community.
Children's collaborative formation of ethnic identity
in this trajectory, as well as its impact upon their
academic achievement, psychological well-being and their
career after returning to Japan will also be explored
in her study. |
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Joel
E. Oestreich is Assistant Professor of Political
Science at Drexel University specializing in international
relations. His primary areas of research include
international organizations, international finance, development,
and human rights. Joel has just completed a project
on the human rights policies of several UN agencies, including
UNICEF. The manuscript will be published next Spring by
Georgetown University Press. He has also published on the
rights of indigenous peoples; on the U.N. Convention on
the Rights of the Child; and on methodological issues related
to studying the impact of war on children. He received
his Ph.D. from Brown University, where his dissertation
concerned the human rights policies of the World Bank. |
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Genevieve
Okada is
PhD student in anthropology at the University of California-San
Diego, specializing in psychological anthropology. Previously
she was a researcher and administrator at the Institute of
Human Development and Social Change at New York University.
Previous research examined the moderating role of acculturation
within a Latino/a immigrant subsample of the Chicago School
Readiness Head Start study on children's behavior problems. She
also worked on a multi-site evaluation of a social and literacy
development program in New York City. Her research interests
include the psychology of parenthood, the history of childhood,
adoption and non-traditional family structures, immigration,
and multi-ethnic identities.
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Marjorie
Faulstich Orellana is an Associate
Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University
of California at Los Angeles. Her research focuses
on the work that the children of immigrants do as language
and culture brokers for their families in the United
States. She takes a child-centered approach and
highlights children's active contributions to family
settlement processes as well as to the development and
maintenance of transnational social spheres. She
is also interested in language and cultural practices
and how these are implicated in processes of sociocultural
change. |
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Patricio R. Ortiz is Assistant Professor in the College
of Education at Western Oregon University. His focus
of research is on ethnographic approaches to the study of
cultures and languages in contact in schools, and the impact
in identity construction process of culturally and linguistically
diverse students, positioned in the intermediate spaces produced
by the asymmetric relations of power, generated by this contact.
His recent research includes the study of the impact of migration
on intercultural bilingual education programs and indigenous
knowledge, among Latin American indigenous populations in
Chile. Patricio comes to the field of academia with a long
experience in the field of journalism and international development,
including participation as international observer for elections
and human rights missions for the United Nations and Organization
of American States (OAS) in Perú, Nicaragua, Dominican
Republic and Haiti. |
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Rhacel
Salazar Parreñas is an Associate
Professor of Asian American Studies at the University
of California, Davis. Her research explores issues of
gender and migration, gender and intergenerational relations
in transnational migrant families, and the politics of
care in globalization. She is currently at work on a
research project on Filipino migrant hostesses in Tokyo's
nightlife industry.
She is the author of Servants of Globalization: Women,
Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, 2001) and Children
of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered
Woes (Stanford, 2005).
>>> Dr. Parreñas's Research Notes |
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Flavia Piperno is a researcher
at CeSPI
(Centre for Studies in International Policy) in Rome. Her
main focus is on international migration from Eastern Europe
and specifically on the link between migration, local development
and welfare. She has carried out field work in Italy, Albania
and Romania. Currently she is conducting a research on the
impact of female migration on the welfare system in Italy and
in the countries of origin; the aim of the research is also
to define policy strategies specific to migration regimes of
immigrants who work in domestic care and health care industries.
>>> email |
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Sara
Poggio is Associate Professor of Social
Sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
She has done research on South and Central American (mostly
Salvadoran) immigrant families in the State of Maryland
since 1994. She analyzes changes in gender and generational
family relations after settlement in the host country
and during the adjustment period. She is currently analyzing
the factors affecting school performance among Latino
immigrant children. While many studies focus on factors
such as lack of English proficiency, and the lack of
involvement that Latino parents have relatively to their
children's school life, Poggio focuses on aspects of
the migration process that can have a negative effect
in the child school performance. Her work looks at factors
like separation from mothers who have to leave their
children with relatives planning to send for them after
settlement; emotional distress for the separation (which
is understood as abandonment), and stress caused by reunification
in the host country. These factors all contribute to
the difficult process of adjustment to a new country,
new school, and a new language. She is th e author of Migration
Mexicana a los Es tados Unidos: cambios en las relaciones
de genero en la familia published by Edamex Mexico
2000. |
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Rachel
R. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Culture & Communication at Drexel
University in Philadelphia. She conducts research
among African professional immigrants to find out how
and why they immigrate to North America and their experiences
in American workplaces, schools, churches and in economic
exchange. Her work with children has included studies
on how African college students living abroad are sponsored
by distant relatives in their pursuit of education. She
is also currently studying how immigrant children learn
about their heritage and the languages of their parents’ home,
in order to better understand how members of transnational
communities imagine themselves as ethnic Americans and
how this does or does not maintain a sense of identity
for second generation children. |
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Djamila
Schans is a post-doctoral researcher
at the Department of Geography, Planning and International
Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has
been a visiting researcher at the CCPR at UCLA with a Fulbright
grant and is a lecturer at Utrecht University College (UCU).
Her PhD thesis focused on intergenerational ties in immigrant
families in the Netherlands using a large scale survey on
family relations (NKPS). Currently, she is conducting research
on transnational family ties of immigrants in the Netherlands
and transnational family arrangements. >>> email |
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Leah
Schmalzbauer is an Assistant Professor of
Sociology at Montana State University and member of the
executive board of Proyecto Hondureño, an immigrant
right’s organization in Chelsea, MA. She researches
and writes on the survival and mobility strategies of
poor Honduran transnational families.
Her research specifically examines the experiences of transnational
families from the perspectives of the second generation that
remains in Honduras, the means by which the second generation
develops their expectations and aspirations in a transnational
space, and whether they will be able to meet these expectations
and aspirations in the political-economic context in which
their and their migrant parents’ lives are rooted. She
also conducts qualitative, participatory research in the
US and Honduras. >>> more |
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Susan
Shepler is an assistant professor in International
Peace and Conflict Resolution in the School of International
Service at American University.
She has studied the reintegration of former child soldiers
in Sierra Leone and is interested in Youth and Conflict generally. Her
most recent work is on transnational fosterage of children
displaced by war in West Africa. Children who fled
from war in rural areas often ended up separated from family
but quickly absorbed by unknown families on the other side
of national borders. Dr. Shepler is also interested in investigating
the intersections of transnational adoption and child trafficking. >>> more |
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Aviva
Sinervo is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology
at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. Her doctoral research explores the
practices of children as vendors in the tourism industry
in Cusco, Peru. She is interested in children's use of narratives
about their poverty to engage tourists, as well as the children's
roles as wage-earners within their families. The current
project also addresses policies of the state and foreign
aid organizations that focus on child labor and poverty. |
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Rachael
Stryker is a visiting Assistant Professor
of Anthropology at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
Her research explores the assumptions and expectations that
western cultures place on internationally- and domestically
adopted children, and the social production of knowledge
(medical, ethical and sociopolitical) that occurs when adoptees
do not conform to these expectations. Examples of such knowledge
regimes include Reactive Attachment Disorder diagnosis and
treatment, nativist intercountry adoptee narratives of adoption,
and popularized/folklorized images of adoptees in media and
myth. |
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Greta Uehling received her PhD in cultural anthropology
from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2000. She has
done research on the international smuggling of children from
China and Latin America to the United States for the past four
years. Her current project concerns the political and affective
frameworks guiding policy and practice with respect to the
children who cross US borders without documents and without
caregivers. Dr. Uehling is particularly interested in the tension
between humanitarianism and security as reflected in the treatment
of children. Dr. Uehling has also done research on irregular
migration to Europe, the gender dimensions of repatriation
in the former Soviet Union, gender relations in post-Soviet
Central Asia, and Soviet refugees. Her first book, Beyond
Memory, traces the repatriation of the Crimean Tatars
from Uzbekistan to Ukraine. Currently, Dr. Uehling is a researcher
for InterMedia Survey Institute in Washington DC, a private
non-profit that specializes in global research, consulting,
and evaluation. |
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Dr.
Charles Watters is Director of the European
Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Kent, UK.
He is director of the Masters programme in Migration , Mental
Health and Social Care and the PhD programme in Migration Studies
based at the universities Canterbury and Brussels campuses.
He is Vice-Chair of the European Commission action on Migration
and Health and was appointed Scientific Advisor to the Portuguese
Presidency of the European Union in 2007 on Migration and Mental
Health. Charles is engaged in ongoing research and supervision
in the field of childhood and migration. He has been principle
investigator for a range of national and international studies
including a major study for the European Commission on the
mental health and social care of refugees in four European
countries, Canada and Australia and a recently completed longitudinal
study into migrant children’s identity in the UK. He
is engaged in ongoing research links with colleagues from McGill
University into schools programs for refugee children across
Europe and Canada and is developing further proposals for work
in this area. His research interests include investigation
of the treatment of children at the borders of industrialised
countries and this has included recent investigations of Dover
in the UK, Zeebrugge in Belgium and the Mediterranean region.
He is also supervised studies of migrants and refugees undertaken
in Istanbul (on street children), Minneapolis (Somali migrants),
South Africa (migrant mineworkers), Brazil (internal migration)
and Mexico City (asylum seekers and refugees). His publications
include the recent book Refugee Children: Towards the Next
Horizon. Routledge (2008).
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Karen Wells is Programme Director for the Msc
International Childhood
Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research
interests are in the impact of globalisation on childhood and
the
material and visual cultures of childhood. She has published
on
childhood and representation in Journal of Visual Culture,
Journal of
Visual Communication and Children and Media. She is the author
of
Childhood in a Global Perspective (forthcoming 2009, Cambridge:
Polity
Press) She is currently developing a research project on young
unaccompanied asylum seekers and refugees. Email: k.wells@bbk.ac.uk |
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Viviana
A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor
of Sociology at Princeton University. She specializes
in historical analysis, economic processes, interpersonal
relations, and childhood. She has published books on
the development of life insurance, the changing economic
and sentimental value of children, and on the place of
money in social life.
Prof. Zelizer's most recent book, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton
University Press, 2005) deals with the interplay of economic
activity and personal ties, especially intimate ties, both
in everyday practice and in the law. It includes the formation
of couples, the provision of personal care, and social relations
within households.
>>> see also Dr. Zelizer's Research Notes |
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************************************
Working Group on
Childhood and Migration Advisory Board:
Cati Coe,
Joanna Dreby, Heather Rae Espinoza,
Julia Hess, Rachel Reynolds,
and Rachael Stryker
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