Child Migration Experiences in Fiction, Film and Visual Art

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 December 2024) | Viewed by 754

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities & Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, PO 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
Interests: literary fiction; migration studies; literature and democracy

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In most socio-legal and anthropological studies, migration is considered a phenomenon concerning adults and requiring organization and control. Children in this context are mainly seen as appendages to adults. Children indeed are mostly migrating in the context of a family, but many also travel alone, or in the unplanned company of other young people. In 1997, the UHNCR put the spotlight on children as asylum seekers with specific life stories and reasons to be on the move. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, child welfare specialists and immigration experts started to work together more closely regarding the diverse and complex conditions of child migrants.

Considering this context, there are urgent questions that come up: What does it mean to be a minor migrant today; what do children experience in situations of displacement? How can we know about and understand children’s experiences and narratives? How do we regard the resilience of children: as a form of resistance or as self-protection in playfulness and creativity?

This Special Issue seeks answers to these questions through the (narrative) analyses of literary novels, films and visual art projects in which experiences of child migration and displacement are represented, explored and imagined. Literary novels such as Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad and Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek evoke the perspectives of children in imaginary worlds that relate to the global context. The artifacts reveal affective and aesthetic components while responding to official social and political discourses and giving insight into children’s particular experiences and dreams. This cultural analysis project aims to offer a contribution to interdisciplinary migration studies, in which artistic projects are often ignored.

Prof. Dr. Odile Heynders
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • child migration
  • displacement
  • experience
  • resilience
  • imagination
  • fiction
  • art
  • film

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

17 pages, 1063 KiB  
Article
Precarious Childhoods in Malayalam Films: Negotiating Precarity and Posthumanism in Ottaal and Veyilmarangal
by Rona Reesa Kurian and Preeti Navaneeth
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 69; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040069 - 21 Mar 2025
Viewed by 271
Abstract
This article considers two Malayalam films, each of which uses ‘the child’ to reflect on ‘precarious childhood’. Ottaal (2014, Dir. Jayaraj) and Veyilmarangal (2019, Dir. Bijukumar Damodaran) present the ontological relationality of their child characters within their context and the political and social [...] Read more.
This article considers two Malayalam films, each of which uses ‘the child’ to reflect on ‘precarious childhood’. Ottaal (2014, Dir. Jayaraj) and Veyilmarangal (2019, Dir. Bijukumar Damodaran) present the ontological relationality of their child characters within their context and the political and social realities of the people in Kerala. The ecological disasters, economic catastrophes, and multilayered forms of social abjection push the children out of human primacy, predominantly through their birth and existence as ‘nameless’ Dalits. The child characters, who contrast with the adults, negotiate a space for themselves amidst the question of belongingness through their relation with animals and the environment around them during the phase(s) of displacement. Borrowing Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’, we expound on their assemblage with the environment through which they are able to survive the complex realities of daily life. Furthermore, the children are singularly and effectively extensions of animal personhood in their inability to determine the terms of their existence. In response to the larger question of precarity and childhood in the context of Kerala, this paper explores how these Malayalam films, by realistically portraying the idea that human primacy is oblivious to its precariousness, address the ecological predicament and the interconnectedness of all living things, emphasizing values of cohabitation and mutual care, which are central themes in posthumanist thought. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Child Migration Experiences in Fiction, Film and Visual Art)
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