Migranthood: Youth in a new era of deportationbyLaurenHeidbrink (2020) Stanford: Stanford University Press, ISBN 9781503612075, 240 pp., $25 (paperback).

Abstract

Children & SocietyEarly View BOOK REVIEWFree Access Migranthood: Youth in a new era of deportation by Heidbrink, Lauren (2020) Stanford: S tanford University Press, ISBN 9781503612075, 240 pp., $25 (paperback). First published: 12 September 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12493AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In Migranthood, Lauren Heidbrink makes refreshing contributions to childhood and migration studies. In a rigorous 5-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, Heidbrink reveals how ‘unaccompanied minors’ experience, understand and practice migration by ambitiously tracing children's lives as they enter immigration detention, navigate life in the facilities and integrate back into their communities. The author highlights the structural processes and policies that shape youth migration from Guatemala to the USA by critically exploring the rich histories and legal processes that shape and precede unaccompanied young migrants during this process. Heidbrink uses ethnographic and participatory methods to generate data giving insights on the broader experiences of Guatemalan youth migration. In doing so, the author problematizes how ‘colonial domination, neoliberal capitalism, and securitized approaches to migration management disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples over time’ (p.16). In this sense, the author critically engages in the production of knowledge situated in a context of daily relations and giving visibility to the narratives of migrant youth embedded in historical, geopolitical, economic and generational relations. We consider that this book can strengthen the debates on childhood because it tries to position childhood historically and locally, attending to ‘unique and diverse experiences of youths’ (p.22) and intergenerational dynamics. In what follows, we discuss how childhood was presented in the book and tensions arising from the methodology and the production of knowledge. This is an unusual book review that has emerged as a result of a collaborative project between young researchers in different stages of their postgraduate training at University College London's Social Research Institute. After having identified the main ideas we wanted to develop, we worked as two separate teams that offered each other ongoing feedback. Although our two sections differ at multiple levels (e.g. topics raised, concepts used, voice articulated, among others) we see these approaches complementing each other and congruent with what is being discussed. The result is a review that when considered together generates, we hope, insightful and stimulating debates about how Heidbrink's work relates to broader conversations on these subjects (i.e. migrant children and young people) and to childhood studies as well. DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING CHILDHOOD Lauren Heidbrink draws on years of ethnographic work to highlight the processes and policies that shape youth migration and reveals a disconnect between ‘narratives that romanticise childhood’ (p.75) and the actual lived experiences of young migrants. In order to first address this disconnect, Heidbrink presents prevalent discursive framings of youth migration by scrutinizing and unpacking the way media and institutional discourses actively engage in systematic processes that position migrant children as either ‘victims’ (p.7) of neglectful parents or ‘unauthorised outlaws’ (p.3) who are untrustworthy and in need of control. Such framings assume that Indigenous families are unaware of the risks of transnational migration and pathologize parents for allowing children to migrate to overcome indebtedness. These discourses are based on the assumption that ‘normal’ childhood is characterized by play and innocence and children are best protected within the institution of the nuclear family. Heidbrink criticizes these understandings as being deeply ‘rooted in a romanticised ideal of childhood’ (p.69)—one that claims to be ‘universally experienced and static’ (p.69) yet one that is disconnected from the cultural, social and economic realities of migrant youth and their families. Employing collaborative methods with young migrants (discussed further in the next section) proves to be the author's greatest strength as it grounds the study in a theoretical perspective on childhood that recognizes young people as knowledge producers. By offering a platform for young people to counter narratives of pathologization and victimization, Heidbrink successfully gives young migrants space to deconstruct the oversimplifications that frame their migration and reformulate the very discourses that seek to define them. Centring Indigenous young people's voices, she reconstructs the concept of childhood based on Indigenous culture. She reveals that unlike imaginaries of the American middle class, youth migration is not forced by parents and is often times a negotiated decision with family members and seen as ‘an act of love’ (p.43) and ‘collective investment’ (p.72) into the future. Heidbrink notes that most ‘unaccompanied children’ are 13–14 years old. In their communities, young people of this age are either viewed as adults or about to become adults and have begun to undertake significant ‘social and financial responsibilities’ (p.6). Hence, many Guatemalan young people have counter-narratives about a so-called universal childhood. They disagree with assumptions that they are dependent children and believe that they have the obligation and ability to undertake family responsibilities by providing care work and paid work. Heidbrink's exploration into this disconnect once again echoes the call of childhood sociology to view childhood not as a universal and single model, but socially constructed and rooted in a complex network of local histories, cultural norms and social structures. For Guatemalan Indigenous youth, structural and historical violence such as racism, armed conflict, inter-generational structural poverty and financial debt shape and constrain their understanding and experiences of childhood. Migration has become a response and survival strategy in the face of such forces and is a significant part of Guatemalan childhoods. By demonstrating how Indigenous youth are positioned and position themselves, Heidbrink effectively reveals the conflicting discourses around migration and childhood. We learn that migration is not a problem for childhood, despite the contrary description in Euro-American discourse. Rather it is seen as a process and a rite of passage, which is an important way to practice love and responsibility for families. The book would be of interest to a broad range of researchers studying childhood and migration. Heidbrink's pioneering views also remind practitioners, including NGO workers and policy decision-makers, that current policies will not solve the social issues generated by migration. Policies need to recognize that structural and historical violence is the root of Guatemalan youth's migration. Kaidong Guo, Kubra Kaya. METHODOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND POSITIONALITY In this section, we focus on two tensions in Migranthood that caught our attention. First, we are intrigued by the ways Lauren Heidbrink generated research that is sensitive to the attributes and dynamics of the migration field. Second, we discuss how the author addresses her positioning and its implications for knowledge production. In this regard, we highlight how Heidbrink's book brings to the fore debates about epistemic justice and suggest that ways of framing child migration depend on the contextual, cultural and structural forces that spur it. The participatory research depicted throughout the book provides insights for other researchers. Following Frick (2007: pp.2,3), we understand epistemic justice as a matter of research ethics, where knowledge is entangled with power-laden social interactions. First, we note that Heidbrink effectively turns the conditions of migration and itinerancy she is studying into a way of conducting research about youth on the move. By travelling between the USA and Guatemala, her methodology embraces participants’ migration paths. Second, by adjusting her methodology to be respectful towards participants and enhancing their possibilities to engage with the research in ethical conditions, Heidbrink shows how knowledge production sits in dialogue with social relations. As part of the iterative research process, she changed the focus of her methods, attending to learning from her long term (her first study in the field began in 2006) and daily relationship with the social context and interactions with the research participants, including NGOs, community groups, government officials and young people. A clear and illustrative example of how the transformations in the context led Heidbrink to recalibrate her research methods was when the 2014 humanitarian crisis generated a voyeuristic and spectacle-centred coverage of deported young people. In response to her ethical concerns, Heidbrink stopped conducting observations at airports and government facilities which she felt was not ethical to conduct observations ‘under the heightened and incessant gaze of government bureaucrats, foreign officials, and the international media’ (p. 25). Therefore, she shifted her methodology to mixed methods and community-based research. Following this, she engaged with young migrants in settings where they would have more opportunities to set the terms of their research engagement, involving them in the data generation process. Finally, she skilfully puts young migrants’ narratives in their social and historical contexts, facilitating their narratives’ visibility and bringing their experiences and Indigenous cosmovision into academic debates. Through this approach, readers find up-to-date, in-depth, and problematizing analysis about ‘unaccompanied minors’ from the standpoint of those labelled as such. The positionality of the researcher also becomes relevant when managing relationships with research participants. In reading Migranthood, the question that arose for us is how Heidbrink's role in the field work influenced the construction of participants’ subjectivities and how participants’ narratives were shaped by her presenting them together in the way she did. As the author herself observes ‘society shapes the discourses about people who migrate and the meanings of migranthood’ (p.5). While Heidbrink made transparent how her position as a mother and white anthropologist influenced her experience in the field (e.g. she writes of being parent with ‘mixed-race’ children to explain how that positioning opened up possibilities of encounter and camaraderie with Guatemalan parents), the complexities of how such positions were read by others and negotiated with them were less clear. As young researchers eager to learn from more experienced scholars as Heidbrink, and having dealt ourselves with complex situations in the field, we were left hoping for more elaboration about how these interactions and unequal positionings were managed. Accounting for how everyday constraints and personal involvement impact on data production is a crucial part of the research process. We suggest that this account of constraints and consequences necessarily implies reflexivity in action and elaboration in post-field work publications. In this sense, having the opportunity to learn how Heidbrink managed participants’ resistances, refusals and expectations, and navigated the reproduction of oppressive relations within the research process, would have been of incredible value. This would help other researchers to better consider how methodological and epistemic stances relate to ethical decisions during fieldwork. Andrea Cortés Saavedra, Pavel Rubio-Hormazabal, Solinda Morgillo. Note: This book review came out of a masterclass at University College London led by Dr Rachel Rosen. REFERENCE Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation