This article
introduces a special issue on childhood and migration. We argue that
understandings of the ways in which children form belongings and attachments
are enhanced by conducting research with children who migrate or who live
mobile and transnational lives. The papers in this collection highlight the
mobile and translocal nature of children¿s lives, from different perspectives
and in different global and migration contexts. Taken together, they make a number
of key contributions to an emerging literature on the lives of migrant, mobile
and diasporic children and young people. They emphasize the situated and
contextualized nature of migrant children¿s negotiations of home and belonging.
In particular, the collection explores children¿s and
young people¿s constructions of home and belonging, often negotiated in
contradictory or challenging circumstances and frequently destabilising
powerful assumptions about the nature of migration, mobility and childhood,
such as ideals
of childhood based on notions of residential fixity.