The Right to Be Transnational: Narratives and Positionings of Children with a Migration Background in Italy

Abstract

This chapter presents a social system and interactional approach to explore how theorising children in sociology has moved beyond mere interest in children’s ‘voice’ to one where children practise agency and contribute to the structuring of social systems. It examines how children with a migrant background play with narratives of transnational mobility, claiming transnational citizenship. Reflecting on how children’s citizenship and rights relate, and how they are affected by transnational mobility, allows a focus on children’s active participation in social processes. Through positioning theory and interaction analysis, applied to video-recorded extracts of workshops, we aim to explore the resources that children activate in the interaction to deal with their travelling experiences and to construct and negotiate their identities inside the group in an institutional setting.