Koen Leurs

EVERYDAY FEMINIST RESEARCH PRAXIS. Doing Gender in the Netherlands

Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. They provide a reflexive account of their research, and put into words what drives them.
    The relation between theory and practice has been a key concern of feminist research in recent decades. The two domains are here not considered as oppositional, but rather contributors chart their interconnections and entanglements. The authors cover a wide topical area that includes, amongst others, digital representations of women movements; European homonationalism; fashion modelling and labour; sexual identities; child-birthing discourses; digital documentaries; fan fiction; and the post-human. As a whole, the interventions show how feminist research praxis remains crucial in critically disentangling naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched power relations and the revealing of contradictory and layered, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday feminist research praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.

HARDBACK
ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-6011-6
ISBN-10: 1-4438-6011-5
Date of Publication: 01/08/2014

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Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0.
Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture and the spaces it opens up for migrant youth to negotiate power relations and to promote intercultural understanding.

Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital perfor-mativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.

Marking a decade of exciting interdisciplinary internet research, this is the 10th Information, Communication and Society special issue that features research generated by the annual Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conferences. This issue consists of eight provocative articles selected from #AoIR2016, the 17th annual conference, held at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany from 5–8 October 2016. The #AoIR2016 conference theme Internet Rules! invited participants to address the complex interplay of digital technologies, business models and user practices. For some, the Internet rules! Others are ruled by the internet. Reflecting the emergent focus during the conference, this special issue addresses the Internet as a set of connected platforms that have various technical, social, cultural, political and figurative meanings, and seeks to understand rules as a set of normative values. Offering a primer on platform values, the contributions share a commitment to social justice, offer innovative theoretical interventions and empirically ground the workings of platform values from various scholarly perspectives. They show how normative digitally networked technologies are mutually shaped by top-down decisions such as the profit-oriented workings of algorithms that differentially value some users over others and bottom-up user practices that both sustain and subvert value-laden mechanisms.

In the face of the contemporary so-called “European refugee crisis,”’ the dichotomies of bodies that are naturalized into technology usage and the bodies that remain alienated from it betray the geographic, racial, and gendered discriminations that digital technologies, despite their claims at neutrality and flatness, continue to espouse. This article argues that “young electronic diasporas” (ye-diasporas) (Donà, 2014) present us with an unique view on how Europe is reimagined from below, as people stake out a living across geographies. The main premise is that young connected migrants’ cross- border practices shows they ‘do family’ in a way that does not align with the universal European, normative expectations of European family life. The author draws on three symptomatic accounts of young connected migrants that are variably situated geo-politically: 1) Moroccan-Dutch youth in the Netherlands; 2) stranded Somalis awaiting family reunification in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and, 3) working, middle, and upper-class young people of various ethnic and class backgrounds living in London. Narratives shared by members of all three groups indicate meta-categories of the ‘migrant,’ ‘user,’ and ‘e-diaspora’ urgently need to be de-flattened. To do this de-flattening work, new links between migrant studies, feminist and postcolonial theory and digital cultures are forged. In an era of increasing digital connectivity and mobility, transnational families are far from deterritorialized – boundaries and insurmountable distances are often forcibly and painfully felt.

The question of how we can live together with difference is more urgent than ever, now that more than half of the world’s population live in cities. For example, the majority of London’s inhabitants are ethnic minorities. Following Massey (2005), city dwellers negotiate a situation of intense “throwntogetherness,” as they live in the proximity of ethnic, racial, and religious others. Shifting the dominant focus of media and migration scholarship from transnational communication toward local everyday practices, this article develops the notion of digital throwntogetherness to chart relationships between geographically situated digital identifications and the urban politics of cultural difference and encounter. The argument draws from in-depth interviews with 38 young people living in Haringey, one of the most diverse areas in London, and builds on digital methods for network visualizations. Two Facebook user experiences are considered: transnational networking with loved ones scattered around the world and engagement with geographically proximate diverse digital identifications.

This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants stranded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia feel about staying in touch with loved ones abroad using Internet-based transnational communication. Left-behind during transit migration from Somalia to overseas, at this moment they can only digitally connect with contacts living inside for example dreamed diasporic locations in Europe. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group and concept maps drawn by informants the ambivalent workings of affects spurred by transnational communication are explored. The intense feelings of togetherness originating in Skype video-chat, mobile phone calls and Facebook use are conceptualized with the notion of transnational affective capital – one of the only sources of capital the informants have. The ambivalence of transnational affective capital is scrutinized by exploring whether such connectivity routines offer trust, enable anxiety management and promote ‘ontological security’. Alternatively, the question arises whether transnational communication may further exacerbate ontological insecurity: discomfort, unsettlement and increased anxiety related to the precarious situation of being stranded.

The domain of higher education – a space enacted at the nexus of knowledge production, spatial attributes and embodiment - is not a mere mute, neutral and external backdrop of knowledge circulation and identification, but a distinct expressive culture filled with ideologies, hierarchies and politics. In this article we mobilize the notion of space invaders to acknowledge the everyday experiences of ethnicized and minoritezed students, exposing challenges and changes in educational institutions and knowledge domains. Transposing space invaders to the Dutch context we scrutinize ethnic, gendered and religious post-secular exclusionary norms these students experience in at Utrecht University, institutional strategies adopted for dealing with these invasions and the type of tactics ethnicized and minoritized students (migrant, ethnic minority and international exchange students) pursue in order to contest them. The dynamics experienced among the informants at Utrecht University reveal growing tension in the wider Netherlands higher educational system: the increasing emphasis on international competition, commercialization and privatization clashes with previously commonly held egalitarian ideas (Torenbeek & Veldhuis 2008; Reumer & Van der Wende, 2010)) on education as a uniformly accessible site for upward social mobility. The argument builds on empirical, ethnographic-inspired fieldwork among 40 students conducted in the context of the EU Framework 7 funded project Mig@Net: transnational digital networks,migration and gender.

This paper presents findings of ongoing research of an interdisciplinary research program concentrated on how new digital media practices involving the Internet impact on the lives, identities, learning and socialization of migrant youth. The focus is put on second-generation ...

[extract from article] My exploration through the
paedophilic frontier will centre
on three self-defined areas of discourse,
which I label the explicit,
implicit and hidden discourses. This
way, a systematic analysis of actors,
networks and its conjunctions can
be conducted within an all-encompassing
framework. At first, an analysis
of the explicit (anti)paedophilic
discourse will be given. This will
be juxtaposed by the implicit discourse,
which seems to have penetrated
our contemporary culture.
The implicit discourse is followed
by an investigation into the hidden
discourse. Certain paedophiles
show to be completely aware of
the implicit discourse that’s present
within our society. The hidden discourse
focuses on the underlying,
concealed paedophilic voices.

This chapter offers reflection on doing digital migration studies. Digital migration studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field focussed on studying migration in, through and by means of the internet. As the so-called European refugee crisis demonstrates, the scale, intensities and types of transnational migration and digital networking have drastically changed in recent years. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally transformed migration processes and vice versa. Top-down management of migration flows and border control is increasingly dependent on digital technologies and datafication, while from the bottom-up migrants use smart phones and apps to access information, maintain transnational relations, establish local connections and send remittances. In the first half of the chapter, drawing on (Candidatu et al., 2018) we distinguish between three paradigms of digital migration studies: (1) migrants in cyberspace; (2) everyday digital migrant life; (3) migrants as data. In the second half of the chapter, we offer the methodological research principles of relationality, adaptability and ethics-of-care to operationalize digital migration studies with a commitment to social justice. Challenging unjust power relations is important both when studying vulnerable groups as well as studying elites. The many experiences, obstacles and opportunities we found in the literature reveal that the future of digital migration studies lies at the intersection of big and small data, there is great urgency in triangulating quantified patterns with in-depth narrative accounts and situated experiences.

How do young people come-of-age as posthuman subjects? How do their already ideological and disciplined techno-bodies normalize and contest dominant ideas of what it means to be human? As new hardware and software alter their environments and everyday practices, young people navigate the opportunities that these shifts afford in their quest to stake out their livelihoods and identities. In their rites-of-passage toward adulthood, young people can draw on new metaphors and performances stemming from biotechnological advancements, including wearable technologies, smartphones, quantified self applications, genetic engineering and neuropharmacology. Reflections such as Bostrom's 'Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up' (2013) illustrate the all too common teleological narrative of progress and human enhancement. Hope is projected onto future generations' accumulation of posthuman capacities. In this scenario, as the human-technology, nature-culture symbiosis steadily advances to completion, posthuman potentialities will actualize and naturally enhance health, cognition and emotional well-being and bring about universal equality and peace. However, although most young people in today's worlds are cyborgs in some form, the deterministic and universalizing notion of posthuman youth subjectivity must be problematized. Feminist and postcolonial technoscience offer a corrective here in an identification of posthuman youth as a socio-technological assemblage, differently constituted in an intersectional grid of power relations. In this entry we address posthuman youth by unpacking the geopolitical micro-politics of four key stages in the technological lifecycle: manufacturing, marketing, use and disposal. In this way, we demonstrate how the posthuman experience of youthful technobodies differs widely. Depending on specific configurations of vectors such as gender, 'race', class and geographical location, technologies operate as practices of privilege or marginality. Manufacturing First, considering the beginning of the supply chain of gadgets, it is urgent to acknowledge the precarious lives of a substantial segment of posthuman youth and children. For example in particular locations in the Global South, such as the conflict zones in the Democratic Republic of Congo, young people are forced to manually mine minerals like cassiterite, wolframite and coltan. These blood minerals are then used in the construction of consumer electronics. Subsequently, in Foxconn and Pegatron factories in China and India, young rural migrants make up the main labor pool. They work excessively long shifts on the assembly line performing tedious, repetitious tasks assembling smartphones and other consumer electronics. These are then glossily packaged as the tools of learning, work, play, and socialization for wealthy, predominantly white, Western youth. As a counterpart to the tough physical labour of mineral extraction and manufacture, virtual sweatshops are another emergent phenomenon in the Global South. In these sweatshops, labourers perform basic routine work to build up credits and increase the virtual value of game characters and avatars. The Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMOG) World of Warcraft is most well known for the emergence of 'gold-farmers' who gain in-game currency sold globally for real money. Benefiting from global economic inequality, affluent users in the West who wish to save time can buy these ready-made characters to get a head-start in their gaming and move up to higher levels. Nobody aspires to these very real and embodied instances of contemporary posthumanity, and these processes often remain invisible in dominant academic and corporate narratives of shiny and sleek human augmentation.

How and why do technologies die? Why have users come to accept the short lifespan of hardware and software? Technological obsolescence prompts the question of how technologies, as socio-technical assemblages, grow less relevant -- a question that becomes increasingly important as technological lifecycles seem to speed up according to the logics of exponential progress. Moore’s law, for example, posits that computing power doubles roughly every two years, implying a continual acceleration of technological obsolescence. But obsolescence in practice outstrips such a deterministic reduction, especially since it is often explicitly designed into technological artifacts as an economic imperative of accelerated consumption.
Illustratively, as a result of excessive consumption, the global quantity of electronic waste (e-waste) produced in 2014 was 41.8 million tons, only 6.5 million of which was collected by official take-back channels in nations across the Global North (Baldé et al. 2015, pp. 20-25). The remaining flow of e-waste is processed in informal, unsafe, and environmentally unprotected settings, largely across locations in the Global South (LeBel 2012).

Analyses of planned obsolescence thus offer a broader critique of consumer society that position our desire for the new within a series of late capitalist power dynamics that shape contemporary subjectivity. The new is defined against slower, dumber, backward, dirtier, noisier and/or uncool technologies which often reflect racialized, classed, and gendered schemes of classification. The values embedded in technological design reflect exclusionary normative ideals about such subjectivity, and so in this entry, we develop an account of obsolete technologies from the perspective of feminist science and technology studies in order to link the concept of the posthuman with the unproblematized and often celebrated social death of various technologies. Specific artifacts considered fall under three broad categories: 1) planned obsolescence, e.g., Apple’s hardware and software; 2) celebrated inventions that never became widely adopted, e.g., Google Glass; and 3) mass technological fads that quickly died out, e.g., the XO laptop. In each of these, obsolescence serves as a rupture that opens up onto the ideological substrates of design while also informing our imaginaries of the posthuman

Popular accounts of datafied ways of knowing implied in the ascendance of Big Data posit that the increasingly massive volume of information collected immanently to digital technologies affords new means of understanding complex social processes. As a rejoinder to existing modes of talking about Big Data and what it means for social research, this chapter suggests an epistemological intervention from a critical, anti- oppressive stance that seeks to reinstate people within datafied social life. Rather than taking as its premise that Big Data can offer insights into social processes, this approach starts from the perspective of the people caught up in programs of social sorting, carried out by computational algorithms, particularly as they occupy marginalized positions within regimes of power-knowledge (to use Foucault’s term). As a specifically situated case study, we examine the ways data are mobilized in European border control and how this phenomenon can be studied, framed through the eurocentric legacies of population measurement in colonial disciplinary surveillance. The connection between power and knowledge here is meant to implore researchers to consider how their deployments of Big Data, even from critical perspectives, may serve to replicate structures of discrimination by denying less “data-ready” ways of knowing. To that end, the conclusion of the chapter suggests some alternative methodological avenues for reinstating people – specifying who the “we” permits – in light of Big Data supremacy.

Social media provide a particularly fascinating entry-point to explore diasporas because diaspora and digital communication platforms are both characterized by paradoxical processes of space and time compression. The links between the two processes have only received increased attention during the last few years, although the current total number of transnational migrants would amount to a country that would rank among the first ten in size globally. Diasporas online raise questions about the core dynamics of cultural globalization spurred by the developing World Wide Web and transnational migration flows: do they ultimately globally connect or divide humans; enable opinion formation, voice, mobilization and protest or new forms of surveillance and censorship; homogenize and balkanize the Internet or promote diversity; promote democratization or reinstall hierarchies? Evidence for all these processes is emerging and movements in both directions have been observed (Bernal, 2010). This article first provides a definition of the notion of diaspora and outlines historical developments in transnational media use of migrants predating the contemporary use of social media. Subsequently, examples and political implications of social media use of diasporic and migrant populations are charted.

in this chapter I want to connect feminist technoscience to postcolonial
intersectional thinking in order to argue for intersectional cyberfeminism.
Reading prior scholarship on migrant youth digital performativity of
self through an intersectional lens, I highlight how intersectional cyberfeminism
offers a means for a grounded and richer understanding of the technological
affordances/restrictions and agency of the user in the contemporary
multicultural online/offline context.

"On the surface, social media platforms seem to provide an equal opportunity for all users to participate in public debate over a neutral communications infrastructure. Yet the commercial motives behind sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter seriously undermine the political promise of platforms in rendering users into commodities through what are effectively practices of online surveillance. The consequence of having commercially owned public spaces can be seen especially in politically turbulent situations, when corporate control over the means of communication tends to side with powerful private and authoritarian interests as opposed to the public interest. In this way, platforms are not neutral; they structure and regulate political discourse and freedom of expression."

This Special Collection “Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe” historicizes, contextualizes, empirically grounds, and conceptually reflects on the impact of digital technologies on forced migration. In this introductory essay, we elaborate digital migration as a developing field of research. Taking the exceptional attention for digital mediation within the recent so-called “European refugee crisis” as a starting point, we reflect on the main conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges for this emerging field and how it is taking shape through interdisciplinary dialogues and in interaction with policy and public debate. Our discussion is organized around five central questions: (1) Why Europe? (2) Where are the field and focus of digital migration studies? (3) Where is the human in digital migration? (4) Where is the political in digital migration? and (5) How can we de-center Europe in digital migration studies? Alongside establishing common ground between v...

Cosmopolitan imaginaries in the Dutch foreign affairs programme Metropolis: a production analysis This paper researches the intentions and motivations that guide media producers to position different cultural perspectives in their programme. The Dutch documentary programme Metropolis functions as a case in point because the programme presents stories from people around the world produced by local journalists in collaboration with Dutch producers and editors. Its main aim is to confront Dutch audiences with diverse worldviews on a given topic. Against a theoretical background on media as a source of social imaginaries and cosmopolitanism, this study combined participatory observation, in-depth interviews and textual analysis to understand the choices these producers make. The analysis shows that while the programme’s goal is to show different cultural perspectives on a given topic, the diverse worldviews of the correspondents are mostly presented through a dominant Dutch perspective ...

This introduction contextualizes thirteen papers included in the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special collection examining the interrelationships between media, migration, and nationalism. This collaborative project was initiated during the Media, Migration and the Rise of Nationalism seminar held in Tokyo in 2018. The seminar was organized around the themes of cosmopolitanism, migration control, transnationalism, and contact zones. This selection covers and brings together long-standing and unresolved debates, which will allow media and migration researchers to engage in a multiperspectival reconsideration of how politics, mobility, and mediation intersect and co-shape each other. In this article, we first position ourselves in relevant debates by charting implications and shared characteristics underlying the recent economic crisis, climate crisis, refugee crisis, and COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 of the article focuses on cosmopolitanism. This thorny scholarly debate ...

The process of adjusting to a new country may carry important stressors for refugees. In the light of neoliberal policies, refugees are expected to become resilient in a local arrival infrastructure and perform a specific subjectivity based on gratefulness, adaptability, and digital sensitivity to successfully integrate. Drawing on a qualitative, in-depth case study with Syrians living in the Netherlands, this article explores the impact of the retreat of the welfare state and unfolding digital transitions on resilience tactics of marginalized people like refugees. While recognizing the systemic violence and historic trauma many refugees have experienced, we focus on how refugees are expected to and develop ways to become resilient. Three digital resilience tactics are discussed: digital social support, digital health, and digital identities. Social support was mainly sought from family, friends, organizations, and social media platforms, whereas refugees’ engagement in meaningful d...

Serving as the introduction to the special issue on ‘Migrant narratives’, this article proposes a multi-perspectival and multi-stakeholder analysis of how migration is narrated in the media in the last decade. This research agenda is developed by focussing on groups of actors that are commonly studied in isolation from each other: (1) migrants, (2) media professionals such as journalists and spokespersons from humanitarian organizations, (3) governments and corporations and (4) artists and activists. We take a relational approach to recognize how media power is articulated alongside a spectrum of more top-down and more bottom-up perspectives, through specific formats, genres and styles within and against larger frameworks of governmentality. Taken together, the poetics and politics of migrant narratives demand attention respectively for how stakeholders variously aesthetically present and politically represent migration. The opportunities, challenges, problems and commitments observ...

Digital migration scholarship has foregrounded how migrants (refugees, forced migrants, expatriates among others) use smartphones and social media to technologically mediate co-presence with loved ones and friends abroad. Aural, visual and haptic affordances give shape to feelings of co-presence, triggering various affects. Affectivity refers here to bodily sensations like joy which can be circulated among migrant families and friendship groups, through digital networks. Paradoxically, maintaining bonds as well as keeping face can be felt as emotionally taxing, triggering negative affective intensities such as fear, anxiety, shame and guilt. Still, the young refugees I have interviewed feel strongly compelled to transnationally connect because they strongly care. Therefore, this research note proposes the notion of digital care labour to attend to the emotional, digital labour involved in maintaining transnational connections between people living at distance, in starkly diverging m...

Young migrants – particularly refugees – are commonly the object of stereotypical visual media representations and often have no choice but to position themselves in response to them. This article explores whether making young migrants aware of the politics of representation through media literacy education contributes to strengthening their participation and resilience. We reflect on a media literacy program developed with teachers and 100 students at a Dutch “International Transition Classes” school. The educational program focuses on visual media production using smartphones, raising critical consciousness and promoting civic engagement. Ethnographic data analyzed include field notes, a focus group with teachers, in-depth and informal interviews, student-produced footage, and a 10-minute ethnographic film. In our increasingly polarized mediatized world, better recognition of how the needs of certain young people diverge depending on how they are situated in racialized, gendered, ...

"in this chapter I want to connect feminist technoscience to postcolonial intersectional thinking in order to argue for intersectional cyberfeminism. Reading prior scholarship on migrant youth digital performativity of self through an intersectional lens, I highlight how intersectional cyberfeminism offers a means for a grounded and richer understanding of the technological affordances/restrictions and agency of the user in the contemporary multicultural online/offline context."

Personal and intimate consequences of cultural globalization have received little critical attention in comparison to scholarship on politics, finance, or the environment. Taking digital technology practices of young adult expatriates as an entry point to understand the emotional and affective consequences of transnational mobility, in this article we research the interrelated cultural politics of emotion, migration, and digitization of middle-class mobilities. Presenting a case study of digital experiences of young adult expatriates (aged fifteen to twenty-five years) living in the Netherlands, we seek to better understand how emotions and affects of middle-class transnational mobility are mediated through digital technologies. Our empirical argument draws from thirty-one semistructured, face-to-face in-depth interviews with young adult expatriates and smartphone photo-elicitation exercises. We develop the notion of transnational digital intimacy practices to address how transnatio...

Upon arrival to Europe, young migrants are found grappling with new language demands, cultural expectations, values, and beliefs that may differ from global youth culture and their country of origin. This process of coming-of-age while on-the-move is increasingly digitally mediated. Young migrants are “connected migrants”, using smart phones and social media to maintain bonding ties with their home country while establishing new bridging relationships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality which alerts us socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, gender and sexuality impact upon identification and subordination, we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all gay young adult migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between desired migrants – such as elite expatriates and heterosexuals – and those living on the margins of Europe – ...

This blogpost explores the workings of Europe from the perspective of human (im)mobility, digitization, datafied discrimination and transnational digital connectivity. The focus will be on top-down strategies of migration management through data and bottom-up tactics of re-making Europe from below through transnational connectivity. First, I tease out Fortress Europe’s social sorting at the border, which shows lingering traces of colonial-era human classification, measurement, and ordering, which were pioneered and mastered on subject populations in its peripheral territories throughout the last centuries. Secondly I argue, that digital practices of migrants show how Europe is reimagined from below: transnational migrants stake out a living across borders while simultaneously using social media as a contact zone by engaging in intercultural exchanges with local others.

Aiming to contextualise accelerating migration across multiple borders as a de ning feature of the contemporary moment, this anthology provocatively takes as its central premise that children are important actors in mobility and migration. The inter-disciplinary volume is edited by Giorgia Donà, Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the University of East London and Angela Veale, Lecturer in Applied Psychology, University College Cork. The editors posit that children and youth are under-researched in migration and mobility studies and in broader ‘research on globalization’ (p. 11). Young people therefore remain largely invisible in ‘our conceptualization of the world’ (p. 11). The editors productively develop a new critical vocabulary with the aim to make children and youth more visible as active participants and decision-makers in migration processes. They are interested in teasing out the relations between children and family life trajectories, migration and mobility. For this purpose, they develop the notion of ‘mobility-in-migration’ to account for ‘multidirectional and multitemporal movements that occur within individual, family and community migratory “arcs”’ (p. 236).
Drawing on this concept as a clear red-thread, the 11 chapters include focus on various forms of distinctly situated forced and pleasure mobilities that are understood within large, long-term migration waves. Rather than focusing on static, bi-directional, large-scale migration  ows, they are interested in accounting for the complexity of migrations that encompass local, circular, return and rural-urban ‘ongoing, multidirectional movements’ (p. 8).
The anthology is a true inter-disciplinary accomplishment, demonstrating the merits of much-needed dialogue on issues of migration between scholars from various  elds, including anthropology, migration studies, political economy, economics, demography, sociology and geography. Written by both early-career and established scholars working in the UK, Ireland, the USA, Australia and Sri Lanka, the chapters provide rich child-centred empirical knowledge on child and youth migration in Africa, South America, the USA, Asia and Europe.