The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) has recently published a report resulting from their June 2010 assessment of skill building programs for youth in Southern Sudan. This field mission sought to identify the needs, challenges, and opportunities for youth training and education, to examine current programs, and to document the skill needs of the Southern Sudanese labor market.
Whether accompanying their family or arriving in the country separated from their parents, migrants under 18 have represented a challenge to liberal-democratic states’ attempts to securitize migration. For Western countries, migrant children liable to removal1 elicit a stark tension between commitments to protecting children and to limiting “unwanted” migration. As a result, children and young people have featured prominently, and often controversially, in numerous policy debates on asylum and migration in European countries.
This paper focuses on the issue of representation and the ethics of research among refugees. It asks: What are the images academics choose to create, what message do they want to get across to readers, how do they do this, and especially: what are the dilemmas and pitfalls encountered along the way?
Contents 1. Putting children first by Murray Last; 2. The protection of children in zones of conflict by Iain Levine; 3. Children uprooted by war: Angola and Sierra Leone by Mary Diaz; 4. The UN study on the impact of armed conflict of children plus UNICEF and UNHCR responses; 5. The protection of unaccompanied children in large-scale refugee and repatriation emergencies by Ulla Blomqvist; 6. Restoring playfulness: El Salvador and Yugoslavia by David Tolfree; 7. Promoting psychosocial wellbeing among children affected by armed conflict and displacement; 8.
Using the ethnographic data collected in a Chinese Christian church in New York City’s Chinatown, this study explores the continuity and change of local tradition in the context of migration and globalization. My find-ings show that the Chinese youth in the church are adapting to the chaotic new socioeconomic environment through their belief and practice that are neither completely Chinese nor totally American in cultural terms, and they participate in making as well as learning the local ethnic tradition.
