Looking Ahead: Contested Childhoods and Migrancy

Abstract

At the beginning of this book, we explained how our interest in globalization ’s changing ideas and practices of childhood led us to propose ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’ as twin conceptual tools. The purpose was to understand the migration, governance, and identity processes currently involving children and ideas of childhood. In this final chapter, we return to this conceptual pair and reflect on some of the theoretical and policy implications of the concepts as emergent throughout the book. Whose children are we talking about? This question, raised in our first chapter, pinpoints the link between ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’. Whose children are trafficked, seeking refuge, taken into custody, active in youth organisations, struggling and juggling in identity work? Which societies can claim them as their own, and build individual and societal futures accordingly? These are questions with far-reaching implications of a theoretical as well as a practical and policy-oriented nature. In the following, we draw out and discuss some of these implications.