Children and Borders

This edited collection brings together scholars whose work explores the entangled relationship between children and borders with richly-documented ethnographic studies from around the world. The book provides a penetrating account of how borders affect children's lives and how in turn children play a constitutive role in the social life of borders. Providing situated accounts which offer critical perspectives on children's engagements with borders, contributors explore both the institutional power of borders as well as children's ability to impact borders through their own activity and agency. They show how borders and the borderlands surrounding them are active zones of engagement where notions of identity, citizenship and belonging are negotiated in ways that empower or disempower children, offer them possibilities and hope or alternatively deprive them of both. With innovative cross-fertilization between Border Studies and Childhood Studies, this volume illustrates the value of bringing children and borders together.

Spyros Spyrou is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the European University Cyprus and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University, Belfast. He also directs the Center for the Study of Childhood and Adolescence, Cyprus and serves as the President of the International Childhood and Youth Research Network.

Miranda Christou is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cyprus and a board member of the Center for the Study of Childhood and Adolescence, Cyprus. Her research interests focus on the negotiation of history and collective memory and issues of borders and youth transnational networks.