Crisis, Im/mobilities and Young Life Trajectories

Introduction

In recent years, we have experienced multiple intersecting global crises ranging from the socio-economic crisis of 2008 and austerity, the migration crisis of 2015, ongoing humanitarian and climate change crises and recently the novel coronavirus pandemic. While these crises affect populations as a whole, they result in a multi-layering of crisis for those whose lives are affected by conditions of mobility and immobility, such as stateless and internally displaced populations, migrants in transit at the border, travellers, asylum seekers and refugees in camps and urban areas, post-colonial diasporas, and migrants with precarious legal statuses. Across the lifecourse, these crises intersect with developmental trajectories and have an impact on the present but also the imagined and strived for future of displaced and migrant children and young people.

Intersecting global crises influence young lives’ trajectories, multi-directional journeys, identities and representations. They shape relationships with families (nuclear, extended, transnational but also peer-based, child-headed and alternative family types) and peers, shifting positions within communities (religious, ethnic, political, digital, transnational, and self-defined communities) as well as encounters with a variety of social systems (care arrangements, humanitarian agencies, protection systems) - themselves changing in response to crises.

1. This Special Issue

This Special Issue on Crisis, Im/mobilities and Young Life Trajectories proposes to examine under-researched elements and dynamics of the relationship between crises, im/mobility and childhood/youth, to advance critical perspectives, and to bring current issues and debates to the forefront in a single collection. We seek papers focused on the dynamic and intersectional nature of crisis and shifts or adaptations in children and young people’ gendered and racialised lives due to challenges brought about on their im/mobility by times of crisis.

Paper should situate the lived experiences of children and young people living in situations of im/mobility within historical, legal, socioecological, cultural, economic and political contexts. They should show a critical awareness of the political situatedness of children and young people’s gendered and racialised lives. Contributors could consider challenges but also opportunities emerging from intersecting crises for agency, activism, imagining futures, and wellbeing. We are seeking papers from a variety of fields and using diverse methodologies; empirical studies are preferred, but conceptual pieces and reviews will also be considered, and practitioners’ perspectives and personal narratives are welcome. Papers may include a consideration of the direct impacts of Covid-19 or indirect consequences of responses to Covid-19 but papers examining other intersectional crises are welcome.

In this Special Issue, we focus on the following areas:

Transitions, meaning-making, emergent selves and striving in times of crisis and precarity  
Developmental trajectories in areas such as educational, social, political, cultural and affective realms amidst crisis 
Intergenerational and transnational impacts of crisis on children and youth 
Gendered and racialized identities, representations and inequalities exacerbated by crises 
Post-colonial and decolonial perspectives on crises, im/mobility and childhood/youth 
Migrant child and youth activism, mobilisation or collective action in crises 
Young digital lives in times of crises  
Critical perspectives on young life trajectories, community adaptation and limits to adaptation in times of crisis  
Critical psychosocial ways of understanding how children and adolescents deal with crisis 
Activist and practitioner critical perspectives on responses to crisis  
Imagining crisis and beyond crisis with and for migrant children and youth 

1. Guidelines

We welcome contributions from academics, practitioners, activists' perspectives and young migrants including personal accounts. We particularly encourage submissions from outside Europe and North America to offer a global perspective, and we are willing to offer assistance to contributors who are non-academics or do not have experience with British academic writing requirements.

We encourage contributors to submit abstracts (250-500 words) by the 15h of December 2020 to assess the suitability of the topic and approach for the Special Issue. The deadline for submissions of full papers is the 30th of April 2021.

We are pleased to inform you that the publishers have agreed to a fee waiver for publication in this open access journal.

If you are uncertain whether your proposed paper might address these issues, please feel free to contact us to discuss this.

Giorgia Dona’, Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK

Angela Veale, School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland