Events

This workshop is organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and partially supported by the Asian Metacentre Endowment which is funded through the Wellcome Trust.

While the terms “children” and “youth” are often associated with age-specific stages in the life course, scholars have shown that they are socially constructed categories whose meanings are deeply shaped by historical, cultural, and political contexts. In the context of increasing mobility and diversifying migration pathways in the Asian region, these constructs take on added complexity, particularly as young people face shifting expectations, heightened vulnerabilities and uncertain futures amidst increasing rapid and often turbulent change.

In recent decades, the intensification of mobility and migration has become a defining feature of life across many parts of Asia. These movements impact not just the lives of individuals who cross borders, but also those who remain, with effects that ripple across time and generations. For many children and youth, migration may be directly experienced or indirectly felt, and in either instance, it becomes a significant force influencing their identities, relationships and imagined futures. Childhood and youth thus emerge not as a stable early life stage, but a terrain marked by transition, uncertainty, opportunity and constraint.

Despite the increasing recognition of children and youth in migration studies, much research continues to frame them as temporally ‘bounded’—captured in static moments rather than examined as dynamic subjects simultaneously navigating life course transitions and migration trajectories across space and time. The workshop brings together contributions that attend to the temporal dimensions of children and youth in migration, examining how young people’s lives unfold over time and space, and how their agency, aspirations, relationships and roles may shift across different life stages and migratory contexts. While considering children and youth as part of families and nation-states, the workshop also foregrounds their capacity as situated and relational, presenting them as future-oriented actors who actively contest, negotiate, and potentially reshape the terms of migration. Whether as left-behind children, independent migrants, accompanied “minors”, international students, or as returnees, their lives reflect both the consequences and opportunities of migration.

The workshop seeks to deepen theoretical and empirical understandings of young people’s experiences within migratory contexts in Asia. Drawing on a temporal lens, the selected papers explore how migration shapes children’s and youths’ life trajectories, identities, and aspirations—and in turn, how they may influence intergenerational migration pathways of their families and communities. These conceptually informed empirical contributions engage with the following themes:

• Temporalities of migration and changing aspirations of migrant and “left-behind” children and youth
• Young people as emerging agents in shaping, navigating, or resisting migration over the life course
• The role of migrant networks and migration infrastructures in shaping children and youth’s mobility and aspirations in turbulent times
• Intergenerational influences on migration and aspirations of children and youth

Together, the workshop contributes to a more nuanced, temporal, and future-orientated understanding of children and youth in migration—one that recognises how the ability to migrate, or the pressure to be mobile, can itself be part of the crisis shaping their lived realities and imagined futures.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Theodora LAM
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Bernice LOH
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Prof Brenda S.A. YEOH
Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Dr Kris Hyesoo LEE
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this workshop has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.