300658 Migration strategies of children and youth: trauma, resilience and affective economies (MA: Soziologie der Globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

Children and youth cross international borders together with their families or on their own. The reasons for leaving their home countries are often similar to those of adult migrants. Yet, the challenges that children and youth encounter along the way can be very different from adult migrants, depending of course on the constellation of their fellow travellers, the routes and the financial opportunities they can afford. Over the last decade, the autonomous migration of children and youth has become particularly visible, e.g. the number of asylum applications by unaccompanied children in the EU increased from 23,255 in 2021 to 39,520 in 2022.
Conflict-induced migration is understood as traumatic and deemed to have long-term impacts on children’s developments. While independently migrating children and youth are not an entirely new phenomenon, their increased presence has challenged accepted ideas about childhood and ‘best interests’ held by policymakers and academics. Within the contemporary discourse on refugees and deservingness, their presence has spurred the politicization of childhood as well as conflicting perceptions of minors as either “criminal alien” or “deserving minors”.
This course directs attention to the cross-border movements of children and youth to under-stand their motivations, facilitations and adjustments in various places. In addition, this course will discuss how states of origin and destination states respond to the growing numbers of underage migrants, not least as states have special obligations towards children and particularly unaccompanied minors.

Bibliography

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