Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, we have experienced multiple intersecting global crises ranging from the socioeconomic crisis of 2008 and austerity, to the migration crisis of 2015, ongoing humanitarian and climate change crises, and recently, the novel coronavirus pandemic. While these crises affect populations as a whole, they result in a multilayering of crisis for those whose lives are affected by conditions of mobility and immobility, such as stateless and internally displaced populations, migrants in transit at the border, Travellers, asylum seekers and refugees in camps and urban areas, post-colonial diasporas, and migrants with precarious legal statuses. Across the life-course, these crises intersect with developmental trajectories and have an impact on the present, but also the imagined and strived-for future of displaced and migrant children and young people. 

Intersecting global crises influence young lives’ trajectories, multidirectional journeys, identities, and representations. They shape relationships with families (nuclear, extended, transnational but also peer-based, child-headed, and alternative family types) and peers, shifting positions within communities (religious, ethnic, political, digital, transnational, and self-defined communities) as well as encounters with a variety of social systems (care arrangements, humanitarian agencies, protection systems)—themselves changing in response to crises. 

This Special Issue on Crisis, (Im)mobilities and Young Life Trajectories proposes to examine under-researched elements and dynamics of the relationship between crises, (im)mobility and childhood/youth, to advance critical perspectives, and to bring current issues and debates to the forefront in a single collection. We seek papers focused on the dynamic and intersectional nature of crisis and shifts or adaptations in children’s and young people’s gendered and racialized lives due to challenges brought about on their (im)mobility by times of crisis. 

Paper should situate the lived experiences of children and young people living in situations of (im)mobility within historical, legal, socioecological, cultural, economic, and political contexts. They should show a critical awareness of the political situatedness of children and young people’s gendered and racialized lives. Contributors could consider challenges but also opportunities emerging from intersecting crises for agency, activism, imagining futures, and wellbeing. We are seeking papers from a variety of fields and using diverse methodologies; empirical studies are preferred, but conceptual pieces and reviews will also be considered, and practitioners’ perspectives and personal narratives are welcome. Papers may include a consideration of the direct impacts of COVID-19 or indirect consequences of responses to COVID-19, but papers examining other intersectional crises are welcome. 

In this Special Issue, we focus on the following areas:

• Transitions, meaning-making, emergent selves and striving in times of crisis and precarity;
• Developmental trajectories in areas such as educational, social, political, cultural, and affective realms amidst crisis;
• Intergenerational and transnational impacts of crisis on children and youth;
• Gendered and racialized identities, representations, and inequalities exacerbated by crises;
• Post-colonial and decolonial perspectives on crises, (im)mobility, and childhood/youth;
• Migrant child and youth activism, mobilization or collective action in crises;
• Young digital lives in times of crises;
• Critical perspectives on young life trajectories, community adaptation, and limits to adaptation in times of crisis;
• Critical psychosocial ways of understanding how children and adolescents deal with crisis;
• Activist and practitioner critical perspectives on responses to crisis;
• Imagining crisis and beyond crisis with and for migrant children and youth.

We welcome contributions from academics’, practitioners’, activists’ perspectives and young migrants’, including personal accounts. We particularly encourage submissions from outside Europe and North America to offer a global perspective, and we are willing to offer assistance to contributors who are non-academics or do not have experience with British academic writing requirements. 

Please submit your abstract and any questions to special issue guest editors, Prof. Dr. Giorgia Dona ([email protected]) and Dr. Angela Veale ([email protected]). 

Prof. Dr. Giorgia Dona
Dr. Angela Veale
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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