[URBANTH-L]Working Group on Childhood and Migration

[rrr28 at drexel.edu]

Announcing the inception of a new academic organization, the Working Group on Childhood and Migration.  Members of the interdisciplinary academic research group work to study and to report on issues like how migration changes children’s notions of self, strategies that parents and families use to handle child-rearing when they find they must migrate, and changing notions of childhood across cultures. We are especially interested in informing and reforming how societies can better nurture children’s natural capabilities, inclinations and needs, specifically as they are interrupted or altered by migration journeys.

The Working Group on Childhood and Migration was founded last year during the AAA meeting in Washington, D.C.  Since last fall, we have developed a roster of professors and doctoral students whose research directly pertains to children's well-being under contemporary conditions of globalization, especially when children are migrants or the children of migrants.

Thus far, we have a website where we provide a forum for sharing research with other academics, policy makers and the press.  The website includes a member's directory, a section called research notes which brings out a short and easily readable paper to promote our scholarship and mission to increase awareness of what migration does to and does for families, a bibliography of works of interest, and an art gallery of sorts that features artwork by children in migratory or immigrant families.  
Here's the link to our website:  http://globalchild.rutgers.edu/index.htm

Finally, we also have a listserver for our members, and we are also beginning to plan a small working group meeting in the Philadelphia area some time in 2007 (we may also consider organizing media training for academic scholars who want to interface more effectively with the press).  

Please contact Rachel R. Reynolds (rrr at drexel.edu) if you wish to join the working group officially, or if you merely wish to be subscribed to our listserver.  Also, even if you aren't part of the group, if you hear information of potential interest to our members, please forward that information on to me so I can share.

Hoping to hear from you,

Rachel R. Reynolds
Assistant Professor
Department of Culture & Communication
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 895-0498
rrr at drexel.edu