TRANSNATIONALE BARNDOMME: Refleksioner over bømemigranter og identitet
Michael Anderson: Transnational Childhood: Reflections on Child Migrants and Identity The article seeks to elucidate some themes pertinent to childhood migrancy from the perspective of children’s reported experiences, in an attempt to challenge “static” conceptualizations of the child in a moving world. Through interpretive analysis of four vignettes about Iraqi refugee children, the author hints at the limitations of contemporary theorising which either homogenises children as the same all over the world, or particularises them as culturally specific in definitively bounded locations. The migrant child, whose identity is transnational and transcultural, challenges both of these conceptualizations. Furthermore, given the opportunity, children prove articulate “expositors” of the dynamic processes inherent in this complexity in their narrative (verbal and behavioural) mappings of themselves. By availing ourselves of their words, actions and imaginations, we can participate in their making sense of a world in movement and their own childhoods as they unfold.