This article introduces a special issue on childhood and migration. It argues that understandings of the ways in which children form belongings and attachments are enhanced by conducting research with children who migrate or who live mobile and transnational lives. The articles in this collection highlight the mobile and translocal nature of children’s lives, from different perspectives and in different global and migration contexts. Taken together, they make a number of key contributions to an emerging literature on the lives of migrant, mobile and diasporic children and young people. They emphasize the situated and contextualized nature of migrant children’s negotiations of home and belonging. In particular, the collection explores children’s and young people’s constructions of home and belonging, often negotiated in contradictory or challenging circumstances and frequently destabilizing powerful assumptions about the nature of migration, mobility and childhood, such as ideals of childhood based on notions of residential fixity.
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In this paper, we examine the experiences of young people born in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) who are part of the 1.5 migrant generation living in "BrexitBritain." We focus on two key themes: (a) young people's feelings of belonging to Britain, their countries of birth and Europe, and the ways in which these have been impacted by the EU Referendum result; (b) young people's future plans, in an intergenerational context, with particular regard to their feelings of belonging and the ruptures of migration and Brexit. Britain's decision to leave the EU caused uncertainty for CEE 1.5 generation young people at a time when many of them were consciously reflecting on their beings, becomings, and belongings. The majority of young people asserted a sense of belonging to Britain whilst simultaneously feeling a sense of "inbetween-ness." Many young people wanted to remain living in Britain, at least in the short term, and felt a sense of belonging to Britain. Our focus on the potential intergenerational impact of Brexit suggests that CEE young people and parents may view possibilities for the future differently; we examine some of the key reasons for these differences from the young people's perspectives. KEYWORDS 1.5 generation, Brexit, Central and Eastern Europe, migration, young people 1 | INTRODUCTION "Brexit means Brexit," the Prime Minister, Theresa May, famously declared in the aftermath of the EU Referendum in June 2016. At the time of writing, in June 2018, Britain has triggered Article 50, and negotiations on Britain's exit from the EU are ongoing. However, the public is still unclear over the details of what kind of relationship Britain will have with the EU once it leaves in March 2019, if the agreed period of negotiations is not extended by agreement with the EU member states. What has become clear, in the time since the 2016 Referendum, is that Brexit is very likely to have significant implications not just for Britain's place in Europe, but also for its demographic makeup and promoted national identity. A significant aspect in the build-up to the Brexit Referendum was the debate on immigration. Questioning the exclusively economic explanation for the majority pro-Brexit vote, Virdee and McGeever (2017) examine the discursive dimensions of the Leave campaign and show how this was built on a narrative which aimed to reinstate the sovereign will of the British people, exemplified through slogans such as "Let's take back control." Indeed, the Leave campaign led by both the UKIP party and sections of the Conservative party focused on a politics of reasserting Britishness as an identity which must be preserved and reasserted in the face of the threat of increasing immigration. Virdee and McGeever (2017) call this a politics of nationalist resentment, which comes in a long history of racialised identities constructed in relation to migrants and feelings of national belonging, and debates on who has a right to belong. StockerThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licen...
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