Life in a Cold Lake: childhood, mobility, and social structures

The students of École Voyageur come from two distinct groups: those from military families and those whose parents work in the oil industry, two institutional social networks which have very different gendered representations. In this chapter, I discuss the experience that boys and girls from mobile military familieshave,and draw on the notion of agency to show how these youth contribute to the production and reproduction of the communities in which they are involved. I call upon observations and testimonies collected during fieldwork to show that children of military families at École Voyageur are far from passive actors, but important agents in the creation and maintenance of their gendered social and cultural environment.

Introduction: gender and youth migration

This chapter introduces gender and migration as the main focus of the book collection. It provides some conceptual examination of defining youth, youth in migration, and gender in youth migration. It presents the context of gendered modalities affecting youth mobility and the thematic organization of the fifteen chapters namely, imperial histories, negotiating identities, education, and work.

Syrian youth in Turkey: gender and problems outside the refugee camps

There are 2,841,036 Syrians currently hosted under the temporary protection regime in Turkey. As of January 2017, males accounted 519,029 (18.26%) of the population aged from 19 to 34, while females numbered 407,358 (14.33%) of the same population in Turkey, where the total number of the population aged from 19 to 34 is 926,387(32.60%). Women are the most vulnerable group among the young population who have to deal with issues related to unemployment, single parenting, high number of childbirths as a result of the lack of birth control, abuse-negligence and polygamy in both source and destination countries. They carry a heavy burden as they cannot free themselves from socially accepted values in Turkey. This chapter examines the challenges introduced by the refugee crisis especially for women, and presentsthe challenges faced by Syrian youth while enroute to Turkey and as temporary residents in Turkey. Following the interviews conducted with women, it has been established that majority of them were not able to enter the paid workforce, and could only survive by either marrying or making one of their children enter the workforce who eventually becomes the breadwinner of the family.

Waifs, strays, and foundlings: illegitimacy, gender, and youth migration from Britain, 1870–1930

This chapter studies migration of illegitimate children from Britain to the empire between 1870 and 1930 from two organizations, the London Foundling Hospital and the Church of England's Waifs and Strays Society. Adding the issue of illegitimacy changes the view of child migration in three ways. First, illegitimate children had already moved multiple times before their migration, so this transition might be the end, not the beginning of their travels. Second, many had already lost their families as infants, so had less to lose than other poor children. Indeed, migration might give them back families (especially mothers) they had lost. The shame of illegitimacy, primarily with girls, could be lost. Finally, migration was only one of many factors that harmed these children psychologically. When the children were illegitimate, poverty and family breakdown was a larger problem than leaving the U.K.

Youth perspectives: migration, poverty, and the future of farming in rural Ethiopia

This chapter highlights the opportunities and constraints for rural Ethiopian youth based on gender and class choices to migrate to urban locations. Ethiopia is an important case study because while it has one of the largest rural populations in the world, it is also rapidly transitioning from subsistence-based farming to commercial enterprises. This chapter provides evidence towards the evolving geographies of opportunities that do not homogenize a diversity of rural and urban contexts and experiences of youth by taking a differentiated view of young people who have uneven access to resources and networks. Migration itself is less of a choice made for youth's own benefit or because they do not want to farm, but because of food insecurity, diminishing income-generating opportunities and land sizes, as well as gender discrimination.

Gender gap among second-generation students in higher education: the Italian case

Italy is experiencing a structural and multigenerational migratory presence in which new generations are increasingly obtaining access to the highest social and educational levels, including university. The presence of foreign students in Italian secondary schools has been extensively covered by research (especially regarding their presence in technical and vocational institutes, which formally open up to a university career but often cause a sort of school marginalisation that frequently results in social disadvantage) but little is known about their presence at the university level. It would be simplistic to assume that those students who enrolled at university had never experienced any trouble in their pre-university or university career. In this chapter, the phenomenon of second-generation immigrant students will be quantitatively contextualised, with specific regard to foreign students in Italian universities, and with a descriptive analysis on the impact of gender on education. The aim of the chapter is to analyse the multifaceted educational paths of young people, those under 35 years old, born in Italy to foreign parents (or who moved to Italy later), their expectations and the real opportunities offered to them.

Homophobia, transphobia, and the homonationalist gaze: challenges of young Bangladeshi homosexuals and transgenders in migration

Homosexuals and transgenders in Muslim majority countries go through multiple struggles. In Bangladesh, the governments’ apparent indecision regrading a British colonial rule banning ‘intercourse against the order of nature,’ a problematic stance on fatwa, Islamic laws and, finally, the national abandonment of transgenders tend to shape societal attitudes to and reception of homosexuals and transgenders. This chapter examines some common challenges that young homosexuals and transgenders experience as they migrate from the rural to the urban areas in Bangladesh, particularly the role of religion and how they negotiate the absence of state protection on their rights. As a small segment of them manages to migrate to ‘queer friendly countries,’ this chapter also investigates the struggles of young Bangladeshi homosexuals and transgenders in liberal societies in the ‘queer friendly countries’ where their rights are perceived to be protected.

“Child rescue at home, overseas migration within the empire”1: the Child Emigration Society during the interwar period, 1918–39

Between 1869 and 1967, tens of thousands of British children, mainly from poor backgrounds, were selected for permanent emigration to the British settler Dominions. Crucial in carrying out this social policy were government-funded private philanthropic societies such as for example the Child Emigration Society (CES). This society shaped social welfare policy by organizing the permanent migration of British children to special Fairbridge Farm Schools in the Dominions, where they would grow up and be trained to become farmers and farmer's wives on the land.This chapter examines the underlying motivations and aims of the British government and of the CES to develop, fund, and carry out this social welfare policy during the interwar period. Special focus is placed on the (gendered) experience of growing up on a Fairbridge Farm School. The strategies of action used by the CES in order to gain the support of the wider public, and in the political sphere for their undertaking is analyzed.

Childhood and imperial training, 1875–1914

Between 1875 and 1914, the number of British children assisted by philanthropic institutions to the dominions and crown colonies increased substantially. This chapter looks at juvenile emigrants to examine the relationship between empire, juvenile labor and the category of youth. After briefly examining, the social benefits associated with childhood, the chapter illustrates how emigrants were divided into cohorts, defined by age and work responsibilities. For children who were under the age of eight, emigration provided healthy domestic environments in which they would be nurtured: labor ceased to be associated with emigration. For older children work continued to be the rationale for assisted emigration. Furthermore, the nature of juvenile employment shifted from disciplinary tasks to productive work. Thus, emigration did not restore or protect childhood, but was a means of securing an environment in which the youth might successfully be situated between socio-economic dependency and adult independence.

Young, educated, and female: narratives of post-1991 internal Albanian migration

This chapter discusses the internal migration of young Albanian women to Tirana for educational purposes. Its aim is to investigate how is gender embedded with the process of migration of young women, and the effects of migration in shaping gendered subjectivities and gender relations. The chapter explores how young Albanian women use education as a platform for migration; how they mobilise social networks to achieve their migration objectives as well as to face the uncertainties in the city of destination. It also expands upon the paradox that embodies these women's migration process: migration is a way to escape from gender constraints and social control from kinship and community; however, in the city of destination they face gendered and sexualised prejudices and constraints that underlie the same mechanism than those they escaped from and put them in new forms of precarity and dependency.