Sponsored by the Children, Youth and Families Research Group and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

Organizers

Stuart C. Aitken and Sam Cortez
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth ad Space (ISYS), San Diego State University, California

This session explores how material borders and youthful mobilities give way to young people’s experimentations with cultural, social and political change. We seek papers that highlight the capacities of children to revolutionize thought and practice through creative re-imagining of boundaries, borders, events, circumstances, and family and community relations.

In what ways are child migration and mobility patterns changing? How are youthful mobilities contextualized by local and state violence? What frontiers of youthful imaginations counteract these constraints and contexts? In what ways do young people engage in political and civic life and how do those practices shape policy making? How are authoritarian borders blurred or transgressed through youthful mobilities? What are the implications for citizenship?

What are the implications of these questions for geographers? In what ways should we be reconsidering spatial relations and the work of childhood? What kinds of policy interventions are apposite at this time?

Papers are invited on – but not limited to- the following themes:

child mobility and child rights
trafficking
unaccompanied minors (independent child migrants)
child mobility as a catalyst for political change
border spaces and revolutionary imaginations
child labor and mobility
migration and safety
national policies on child movement and state violence
child migration and citizenship

Please send title and abstract (c. 300 words) to Stuart C. Aitken, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth and Space (ISYS), San Diego State University, CA 92182, USA (saitken@mail.sdsu.edu) by Feb. 4, 2013