Child migrants and deportees from Poland and Ukraine after the Second World War: experience and memory

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.     

Rethinking Russian–Ukrainian relations: a new trend in nation‐building in post‐communist Russia?

This article analyses new trends in the assessment of Russian–Ukrainian relations by representatives of the Russian elites in the late 1990s. It sees a discussion of the historic roots of Ukrainian separatism in the Russian media and attempts to identify the origins of the ‘Russian national homeland’ outside Kyiv Rus as the first steps towards a revision of traditional Russian perceptions of Russian–Ukrainian relations. The article argues that the new trends have become particularly visible following the signing of the Russian–Ukrainian inter‐state treaty in May 1997, which it regards as an important landmark in Russia's acceptance of the independence of Ukraine.     

‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

Exercising Exit,Voice and Loyalty: A Gender Perspective on Transnationalism in Haiti

This article explores gendered patterns of migration and transnationalism in Haiti. A combination of factors has prompted extensive rural–urban migration and emigration over the last three decades: violence, repression, economic collapse and the implementation of neo‐liberal reforms have left many Haitians with few options other than to seek a new life elsewhere. Although many Haitians abroad naturalize and take citizenship in host countries, emigration does not mean that ties to their homeland are severed. Indeed, a substantial number of Haitians remain intimately connected to Haiti, visiting, sending remittances and gifts, investing in land and exercising political voice in Haiti and in their country of residence. This article focuses on the gender dimension of Haitian migration and transnationalism drawing on Hirschman's typology of exit, voice and loyalty. These options are uniquely gendered. Although most analyses of transnational citizenship focus on men, women and women's movements in Haiti have also benefited from transnational organizing and the transnational links forged over the past three decades. Through migration, women have participated in changing the financial architecture and political landscape of Haiti. Expressions of voice and loyalty by women are challenging traditional gender roles in Haiti and contributing to an emerging transnationalism that has profound effects on Haitians and their communities at home and abroad.     

Making a homeland,constructing a diaspora: The case of Taglit-Birthright Israel

The study of diaspora policies in political science, international relations, and political geography has moved away from conceiving diasporas as bounded entities to conceptualizing diasporas as a process to be made. One body of literature maps different strategies employed to bond diasporas to their country of origin, while another body of literature pays specific attention to diasporic identities and the ways such identities are reproduced and constructed abroad. This article seeks to bring these two literatures together by focusing on homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy, i.e. the construction, reproduction, and transmission of diasporic identity. Through the case of Taglit-Birthright – a free educational trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults – the article identifies the specific mechanisms and micro-practices used in order to transform Israeli territory into a Jewish homeland, reproduce the narrative of dispersion, and demarcate group boundaries. Incorporating insights from theories of territorialization and based on the program's educational platform and existing ethnographies of Taglit-Birthright, this article unpacks the notion of the homeland and demonstrates how the homeland itself – as an embodied, affective, and symbolic site – is strategically used in order to cultivate diasporic attachments.     

Boundary Crossings: Transitions from Childhood to Adulthood

In this paper I argue that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is very difficult to define. Notably, it is blurred by the ambiguous period of 'youth'. I therefore draw upon Beck's theoretical work on individualisation and the life-course, which has been influential in youth research in sociology and youth studies, to provide a framework for reviewing some of the processes through which young people make the transition from childhood to adulthood. In the conclusion I reflect on the need to explore the importance of the different spaces implicit in young people's transitions, and the interconnections between them. I also highlight how distinctions between the states of childhood and adulthood are not clear-cut, nor are transitions a one-off or one-way process. Rather I draw attention to the way that changes associated with growing up may or may not be connected, and may occur simultaneously, serially or not at all. Finally, I point out the limitations of normative models of transition given the way that other social differences such as gender, class and sexuality intersect with the categories children and youth.     

Migration and tertiary educated youth: a reflexive view of mobility decision-making in an economic crisis context

Despite the popularity of student and graduate migration as research topics, mobility decision-making among tertiary educated youth is relatively neglected, resulting in under-appreciation of the complexity of this process. This article seeks to overcome this shortcoming through taking a reflexive view, recognising the significance of personal considerations alongside economic motives as potential mobility drivers. Evidence is drawn from a survey of 400 undergraduates aged 25 and under conducted in Dublin during 2014, with results illustrating anticipated destinations, durations of stays abroad and the bearing of the economic crisis. Using logistic regression, the influence of a range of subjective level factors is explored in relation to different mobility choices. This analysis leads towards a concluding summary that posits a reflexive view on student and graduate mobility decision-making, illustrated with qualitative case study evidence.     

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.     

GUEST EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: NORDIC GEOGRAPHIES OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the sub field 'geographies of children and youth' and outline ongoing research within the subfield in the Nordic countries. It is shown how geography of children and youth is a relatively new subfield in the Nordic countries but is thriving being spearheaded primarily by young researchers. The main fieldwork locations are the Nordic countries and Africa where principally qualitative methodologies are employed in data collection. Thematically a wide range of issues are being researched. Much of the work being carried out fits within the growing interest in examining the connection between ordinary young people's social position and the production of space, including young people's use of public space. The relationship between place and identity is another important focus. Mobility and migration, however, is arguably where Nordic researchers are making the greatest contribution to the literature on the geographies of children and youth. This special issue should be of interest both to geographers outside of the sub-field who are curious to know what is going on within geographies of children and youth, and to those who are already specialists in this area but know little about the research emanating from the Nordic countries.     

Migrating heritage? Recreating ancestral and new homeland heritage in the practices of immigrant minorities

ABSTRACT

This paper problematises the engagement with heritage of immigrants and their new-homeland-born children, bringing together heritage and migration studies. It discusses the use of ancestral heritage in group identity maintenance strategies, and sheds light on minorities’ participation in the heritage of the dominant population. The paper investigates how the ancestral heritage of immigrant minorities has adjusted to the circumstances of the new homeland, and how the elements of heritage of the dominant population were fitted within the festivity routines of minority families. Therefore, it attempts to grasp the transformations of heritage occurring as a consequence of adjusting heritage practices to the new settings. To do so, it employs a notion of ‘heritage in becoming’ that refers to the situational and processual character of recreating inherited practices within the circumstances of the present. The paper proves that the boundary between minority and majority culture in the heritage practices of individuals is blurred, discussing the transformations the traditional heritages of nations undergo under the influence of migration. The author attempts to answer the question of whether these new qualities can be accepted as part of a so-called multicultural heritage of nations.     

Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: an Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.     

Transnational practices and language maintenance: Spanish and Zapoteco in California

The theoretical framework of transnationalism has become more prominent within migration studies, examining how (im)migrants maintain connections with communities in their homeland (Sánchez, P. 2007a. “Cultural Authenticity and Transnational Latina Youth: Constructing a Meta-narrative Across Borders.” Linguistics and Education 18: 258–282). Children's identities are also affected by maintaining ties to their parents’ homeland through language. In California, a group of (im)migrants from Mexico, of Zapotec-speaking backgrounds, were among the families who wanted their children to maintain their Spanish language by enrolling in a dual immersion school. Although California has exhibited anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislated against bilingual education, some programs supporting heritage language maintenance continue to exist. This article presents interview data from 10 students who attended this school and their parents. Students maintained transnational and intergenerational ties to their families and communities in both Mexico and southern California through the maintenance of Spanish, but a subset of students who spoke Zapoteco as a heritage language also valued this language and used it as social capital.     

From ‘flight and expulsion’ to migration: contextualizing German victims of forced migration

Abstract

The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives.     

‘The largest volunteer life saving corps in the world’: centering child caregiving in histories of U.S. human security through the Little Mothers’ League

Abstract

In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving through a study of the U.S. Little Mothers’ Leagues, an initiative which began in New York City in 1910 with the aim of reducing infant mortality by training young girls to properly care for their infant siblings. Critical approaches to caregiving view security and insecurity as relational, drawing attention to contemporary power arrangements in the global caregiving industry and the contemporary crisis of care. However, in treating children as perpetual care recipients, it fails to provide a robust framework for understanding youth and children in historical and contemporary concerns related to human security. The history of the Little Mothers, largely children of European ‘non-native white’ immigrant families, illustrates the importance of children in securing population-wide well-being and the nation’s status in the global competition to reduce infant mortality. When set in contrast to the eugenics-inspired Mothercraft movement, the case reveals how children and youth become enlisted into projects of national human security, and how their ambiguity as caregivers – too young according to modern childhood, yet effective lifesavers – intersects with race and gender to further obscure their status as caregiving agents     

Interviewing with Children in their Homes: Putting Ethical Principles into Practice and Developing Flexible Techniques

Children-focussed geographers have begun to move beyond highlighting ethical problems that may occur when researching with children, instead focusing on the development of successful research strategies. This piece is intended to contribute to this work in two ways. Firstly, I reflect critically on how ethical guidelines were put into practice during a migration research project which involved interviewing children in their homes. In relation to researching with children, conversations concerning ethical issues such as access, gatekeeping, informed consent, payment, confidentiality and disclosure are not new. However, putting ethical principles into practice is rarely straightforward and requires further discussion. Secondly, I evaluate the practical, flexible techniques that I developed to try to ensure successful interviewing with children in their homes and emphasise the need for further discussions of this kind.     

Kyiv's Nontraditional Immigrants

Two American specialists, one on urban issues and the other on Ukraine, examine the changing character of migration into Kyiv, Ukraine's capital and largest city, during the post-Soviet period. The analysis, based on field work, interviews, and local media sources, demonstrates the increasingly global character of immigration patterns, characterized by changes in points of origin of incoming migrants, percentage of legal versus illegal immigrants, the mix between temporary and permanent migration, motives for relocatipn, and mode of entry, impacts of the new wave of immigration on Ukrainian tolerance for foreigners and on the operation of neighborhood schools in Kyiv are investigated. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I20, J61, O15. 46 references.     

‘We’re moving out’: Youth Out‐Migration Intentions in Coastal Non‐Metropolitan New South Wales

This article discusses youth out‐migration on the non‐metropolitan New South Wales Eastern Seaboard. High levels of in‐migration and counter‐urbanisation, typical of many coastal non‐metropolitan towns in NSW, mask the out‐migration of youth. There are relatively few 15–24 year olds in the coastal communities of non‐metropolitan New South Wales, because many youths out‐migrate to larger centres, for a range of reasons. Out‐migration also demarcates a life transition away from school life, adolescence and the parental home. This paper draws from research with senior high school students in one coastal town – Coffs Harbour – where such trends have been particularly apparent. It examines the propensity for youth out‐migration and discusses how young people articulate their migration intentions. Young people's perceptions of their current and future prospects feature prominently in their discourses about intended migration, although this research also demonstrates that the life courses of regional youth are unorthodox and diverse in nature.