Digital Workshop
"Pieces and Bits From The Past: Children’s Agency in Migration" (In Search of the Migrant Child Network)

Organizers: PD Dr. Bettina Hitzer (HAIT)/ PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT)/ Dr. Swen Steinberg (Carleton University, Ottawa / German Historical Institute Washington with its Pacific Regional Office at University of California Berkeley)/ Dr. Sheer Ganor (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis)

About the Workshop: The second digital workshop of the global network “In Search of the Migrant Child: Global Histories of Youth and Migration between Knowledge, Experience, and Everyday Life" explores children’s agency in times of migration. While children and past childhoods are often the object of historical studies, this workshop aims to shift its perspective to children’s opportunities for individual and collective agency. How can migrant children express their agency, how are they limited by the agency of others? How were notions of children’s agency altered or changed over time? The workshop examines various historical and social constellations in which children were either enabled or hindered to act on their own behalf, exploring the setting of the family, care institutions, and other places and spaces of childhood before, during and after migration. The workshop asks for the circumstances which empowered children to shape their daily lives and to make important decisions that concerned their upbringing, their care and their well-being as migrants. By means of diverse case studies, this workshop aims to scrutinize how children’s agency came to be seen as the child’s right.