Journals

The ARI Inter-Asia Roundtable series is the annual flagship event of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore. Transnational Migration and Children in Asian Contexts is the theme of the second in the series, held on 2-3 August 2010 by ARI’s Asian Migration Cluster.

Why the theme of transnational migration and children in Asian contexts? Transnational migration has long affected the lives of Asian children in complex and multi-faceted ways. Under the most recent waves of globalization, the speed, volume and flows of Asian migration have increased tremendously. Migration has become part of the childhood experience of many of the region’s children. Yet there has been relatively little academic interest in the phenomenon as it relates to Asian children and childhoods. This Roundtable is an attempt to address this imbalance and to point to ways of understanding, researching and impacting Asian children involved.

The Inter-Asia Roundtable on Transnational Migration and Children in Asian Contexts also takes up the challenge of developing diverse and critical accounts of children in migratory circumstances which capture the diversity of regional experiences in Asia, and in so doing, destabilises the intellectual and practical hegemony of well-honed western models of children on the move. While giving serious consideration to the view best developed in western-based research that children have social agency and can no longer be treated as adults-in-waiting, the Roundtable also emphasizes the interplay between structural construction of children’s identities and agency on the one hand and situated practices in real-world contexts on the other.

The 2010 Roundtable features five thematic panels, each focusing on a different group of children: left-behind children of migrant parentes; children migrating for education; children migrating for work; trafficked children; and children adopted across national borders. A special concluding session on Policy was also included, given the significance of policy recommendations and implications of child migration.

Three publications are the outcomes of the Roundtable: a Policy Brief, issued as an in-house publication of the ARI Inter-Asia Roundtable Series 2011; a ‘Conference Report: Inter-Asia Roundtable on Transnational Migration and Children in Asian Contexts’, in Children’s Geographies, 2011; and a Special Issue on Transnational Migration and Children in Asian Contexts, Children’s Geographies, 2011.