Children displaced across borders: charting new directions for research from interdisciplinary perspectives

Abstract

This paper introduces the special issue on Children Displaced Across Borders, tied to the outcomes of the conference held in Swansea in 2016. It explores discussions in migration research that attend to different meanings of the ‘border’ in relation to varied displacements of children. It starts with the discussion about the boundaries of migrant subjectivities and brings into question the ability of the child to manage and order displacements. It considers changing ethical and symbolic boundaries that are used to represent children and their movements, and challenges dominant dialectical oppositions used to define their belonging. It explores the linguistic and symbolic structures enabling children’s displacements and disappearances. It concludes with the conceptual observations about different ways of engaging with the silences and limit-experiences in children’s displacements often overlooked in contemporary migration research.