PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – The Wenner-Gren Foundation has awarded funding to Júlia Vich-Bertran, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC). The funds will support a two-day workshop titled “Transnational Childhood Fields: Relatedness, Belonging, and Governance” to be held at the PSTC next year. 

Vich-Bertran, a second-year postdoctoral trainee at the PSTC, and Jessaca Leinaweaver, an associate professor of Anthropology and Vich-Bertran’s PSTC faculty mentor, will collaborate to organize the event. The workshop topic aligns with Vich-Bertran’s own research, which sits at the intersection of kinship, migration, and transnationalism, investigating the shifting meanings of family and national belonging in today’s globalized world by analyzing transnational kinning practices.

“Twenty-five years after the transnational turn in migration studies, the contemporary global context calls for different analytic tools to understand how migrants' transnational understandings and practices are now being challenged,” said Vich-Bertran. “Despite growing academic interest, scholars still lack a cohesive perspective on what it means to ‘be’ a transnational child today.”

The workshop will tackle this challenge head-on by bringing together scholars who study different kinds of child transnational journeys that have been treated in isolation from one another, and by finding commonalities in how children live and construct their transnational social fields. It will focus on how children “create relatedness, understand belonging, and experience governance in contemporary multicultural societies,” Vich-Bertran said. “We aim to comprehend how the new global political contexts affect how children caught in transnational lives experience their situations and to contribute to new anthropological theory adequate to understanding the current dilemmas related to transnational childhoods.”