CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 16 MAY 2025
Date : 11 Aug 2025 – 12 Aug 2025
Venue : Hybrid (Online via Zoom & AS8 04-04)
10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260
National University of Singapore @ KRC
Contact Person : TAY, Minghua
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. Thus, this workshop invites 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.
This workshop aims to deepen theoretical and empirical understandings of young people’s experiences within migratory contexts in Asia. We welcome papers that draws on a temporal lens in exploring 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. Conceptually informed empirical contributions along the following themes are particularly welcomed:
- 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
This workshop aims to present 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.
SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (300 words maximum), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 16 May 2025. The abstract should include as appropriate a discussion of the paper’s main aim(s), conceptual framework/theoretical contribution, research methods and data, and key findings. Please also include a statement confirming that your paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise your paper for potential inclusion in a special issue of a journal. Please submit your proposal using the provided form below.
Authors of selected proposals will be notified in early June 2025. Presenters will have to submit a draft of their papers (about 4,000-6,000 words) by 11 July 2025. These drafts will be circulated to fellow presenters and discussants in advance.
The workshop will be available for both in-person and online participation. Depending on the availability of funding, the organizers may offer overseas participants financial assistance, which could include full or partial airfare and up to three nights of accommodation. If you require funding support, please indicate this on the proposal form.
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
Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM) 