Migration Research Group Seminar Series & Childhood and Youth Research Cluster, University of Sheffield present a seminar with two presentations on migration and childhood:

11.15 - 12.45

Presentation 1: Deporting Children. Policy framing, legitimation and intersectional boundary work

Dr. Laura Cleton – Postdoctoral researcher United Nations University-MERIT & Maastricht University

Abstract: Deporting non-citizens is widely perceived as an inseparable part of nation states’ right to control their borders and to determine who can become part of their community of members. Focusing on illegalized migrant children and their families specifically, I argue that this right is complicated by children’s claims to belonging, the overarching children’s rights regime, and the imaginary of children’s innocence. In this seminar, I will draw on findings from my dissertation research that investigated how states that seek to deport children, in the face of such disputes, legitimize the need to do. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with deportation actors in Belgium and the Netherlands, I argue that actors in both countries deliberately draw attention away from the underlying moral-political conflict and the hardships deportation poses for children. Instead, they foreground the diligence of bureaucratic procedures and their compassionate way of working while simultaneously discursively positioning children and their families as dangers to the citizenry in gendered, racialized and classed ways. While these securitizing narratives should serve to sustain the decision to deport, my dissertation finds that their exclusionary potential is mediated by a humanitarian, morally felt need to protect children from potential harm. This can instead delay, adjourn or suspend deportation procedures. My findings therefore complicate current accounts of the workings of securitization and humanitarianism in migration control and highlights the analytical value of intersectionality for studying deportation governance and the production of migrant deportability.

Bio: Dr. Laura Cleton is a postdoctoral research fellow at United Nations University-MERIT & Maastricht University and incoming postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work centres on deportation regimes in Europe, working on “assisted voluntary return” programs (with Reinhard Schweitzer and Sébastien Chauvin), the role of (international) bureaucrats in effectuating deportation, and feminist approaches to migration governance (with Saskia Bonjour and Petra Meier). She acts as Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her dissertation was recently co-awarded with the American Political Science Association Migration & Citizenship section Best Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in migration & citizenship studies defended in 2022. Her research interests include migration governance in Europe, (international) street-level bureaucracies, AVR and deportation, feminist approaches to forced migration and family migration.

Presentation 2: The concept of ‘asylum-seeking children’

Dr Christina Tatham – University of Sheffield

Abstract: This presentation will explore the concept of 'asylum-seeking children'. The presentation will expose the tensions between rights of a child and their status as asylum-seekers under the UK's operant hostile environment. The presentation will then look at how statutory services and voluntary community organisations work with asylum-seeking families to meet their children's needs in spite of multiple layers of deprivation and adversity.

Bio: Dr Christina Tatham is the Programme Director of the MA in Early Childhood Education at the University of Sheffield. Her research is focused on young children’s experiences of, and access to, education in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. She gained her Master’s in Teaching at Griffith University in Australia before returning to Sheffield to work as a primary school teacher in a diverse, inner-city school. Her PhD research at the University of Sheffield explored the multimodal communicative practices of young children in a super-diverse, early years educational setting. More recently, Christina undertook a yearlong project to understand the barriers refugee and asylum-seeking families with young children experienced in accessing education throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The project explored how schools and community organisations helped families to overcome the challenges they faced.

Everyone is welcome to join us either in-person or online. For in-person registration, please see here.

To join online, please fill out this google form where you will receive the joining link here.