Abstract
AbstractIn this article, we contribute to the growing and diverse literature on the lived experiences of children and their agency in the context of migration. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with children whose migrant parents have left them behind, as well as with those who care for them in Vietnam, we demonstrate that the various ways in which they affect migration decision‐making and transnational communication shape the children's imaginations of migration. The context‐specific social construction of childhood, or more specifically adult perceptions of children's agency and needs, in turn structures these processes. We emphasize the need for debates on children's agency to take into account both broader socio‐economic processes at the macro level and the concrete and local scale at which children's lives unfold. By outlining how children's experiences of parental migration are constitutive of their attitudes toward this livelihood strategy, we also argue that the ability of those ‘left‐behind’ to exercise agency is closely intertwined with processes of social becoming and navigation in the transnational social fields constructed for them by adults.
Highlights
For our study we drew on a research project named CHAMPSEA (Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia), which examines the effects of parents’ transnational labour migration on the health and well-being of children in four Southeast
Vietnamese transnational families have relatively easy access to modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as telephones and the internet – the so-called ‘social glue of migrant transnationalism’ (Vertovec 2004) – which allows them to keep in regular contact at a relatively low cost
After a short outline of our methodology and research, we look into the various ways in which Vietnamese children exercise their agency in Children’s agency and its contradictions migration decision making and transnational communication amid the constraints of both the context-specific construction of childhood and of global migration regimes
Summary
For our study we drew on a research project named CHAMPSEA (Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia), which examines the effects of parents’ transnational labour migration on the health and well-being of children in four Southeast. After a short outline of our methodology and research, we look into the various ways in which Vietnamese children exercise their agency in Children’s agency and its contradictions migration decision making and transnational communication amid the constraints of both the context-specific construction of childhood and of global migration regimes. The latter have important implications on how children view migration and the ways they act upon their world (Ansell 2009: 201; Sanders 2001: 28), which, in the particular context of this study, concerns the construction of their immobility or mobility aspirations. In exploring immobile children’s conceptions of mobility, we speak to the new mobility paradigm outlined by Sheller and Urry (2006: 211) in which both sedentary and nomadic accounts matter
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