This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary analysis into the lives of migrant children and youth over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day. Adopting biopolitics as a theoretical framework, the authors examine the complex interplay of structures, contexts and relations of power which influence the evolution of child migration across national borders. The volume also investigates children’s experiences, views, priorities and expectations and their roles as active agents in their own migration. Using a great variety of methodologies (archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews) and sources (drawings, documents produced by governments and experts, films and press), the authors provide richly documented case studies which cover a wide geographical area within Europe, both West (Belgium, France, Germany) and East (Romania, Russia, Ukraine), South (Italy, Portugal, Turkey) and North (Sweden), enabling a deep understanding of the diversity of migrant childhoods in the European context.

Child Migration and Biopolitics : Old and New Experiences in Europe

OF DISSERTATION TRANSFORMING EMERGENCIES: THE RISE OF A HUMANITARIAN IDEOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1959-1987 This dissertation is situated within the historiography of humanitarianism in U.S. Foreign Relations and seeks to make better sense of when and how Americans choose to act in humanitarian encounters. To fully explore the dynamism of modern humanitarianism, this work traces its meteoric rise between the years 1959 and 1987 and analyzes key ideas that propelled forward the movement. It argues that conceptions and perceptions of children were the central ideas that spurred emotional, financial, and security investment in emergencies abroad from the American public. A variety of actors, including large and small NGOs, government agencies, and the media, grappled with the meanings of childhood as a means to advance forward different understandings of humanitarian efforts. Each of these meanings had a decisive and at moments divisive influence in debates around the U.S. role in its interactions with the world vis-à-vis humanitarianism. By the end of the years under study, these arguments had cemented an ideology in which the American people expected U.S. involvement in crises raging throughout the world. This work explores that journey.

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Transforming Emergencies: The Rise of a Humanitarian Ideology in the United States, 1959-1987

All kinds of peoples, previously marginalized in favor of the actions and thoughts of elite policy makers, now fill foreign relations histories. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, workers, and many others have been shown to be indispensable—if informal—diplomatic assets. And yet, diverse as this cast of characters has become, notice one thing they share in common: their adulthood. It is as if human experience with foreign affairs only begins with the age of majority. What might be gained once we appreciate the influence of young people, as both audience and agent, in the long history of America's entanglement with the wider world?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/0643E55FD154FE166CBB4C2A207764B0/S2515045619000257a.pdf/div-class-title-children-are-hiding-in-plain-sight-in-the-history-of-u-s-foreign-relations-div.pdf

Children Are Hiding in Plain Sight in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations

During the Kenyan Emergency of 1952–1960, one of the most violent episodes in the history of the British Empire, humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state to shore up British power. This article examines how aid agencies that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period participated in colonial violence. Far from condemning the brutality of the imprisonment and torture during the Kenyan Emergency, aid organizations were deeply implicated in parallel projects for women and children that sought to achieve the same objectives: the remaking of Kikuyu hearts and minds and the weakening of anticolonial resistance. Far from acting as a check on colonial violence in an era of burgeoning rights discourses in 1950s Kenya, self-proclaimed “impartial” internationalist organizations, while claiming to uphold values of universal humanity, worked as auxiliaries to the colonial counterinsurgency. Taking their cue from military counterinsurgency in 1950s Malaya, humanitarians sought to win “hearts and minds” and undertook material provision for imprisoned anticolonial activists and their families on behalf of the colonial state. They did so by importing new humanitarian expertise developed in wartime Europe and adapting it to fit within racist, colonial norms. In providing this allegedly impartial expertise, humanitarian organizations lent credence to the myth that rehabilitation in Kenya was a progressive program enacted by a liberal empire to modernize its subjects, rather than a ruthless attempt to stymie anticolonial resistance by any means necessary. In this case, postwar humanitarian internationalism did not challenge colonial brutality but enabled it.

/pdf/rehabilitating-an-empire-humanitarian-collusion-with-the-45p100r40v.pdf

Rehabilitating an empire: Humanitarian collusion with the colonial state during the Kenyan emergency, ca.1954-1960

After the end of World War II, the welfare workers of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and, from 1947, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took care of d...

Bordering and Repatriation: Displaced Unaccompanied Children from the Polish–Ukrainian Borderland after World War II

After World War II, American organizations launched efforts to improve the lives of foreign children, from war orphans in Europe and Japan to impoverished youth in the developing world. Providing material aid, education, and emotional support, these programs had a deep humanitarian underpinning. But they were also political projects. Sara Fieldston's comprehensive account Raising the World shows that the influence of child welfare agencies around the globe contributed to the United States' expanding hegemony. These organizations filtered American power through the prism of familial love and shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations.The American Friends Service Committee, Foster Parents' Plan, and Christian Children's Fund, among others, sent experts abroad to build nursery schools and orphanages and to instruct parents in modern theories of child rearing and personality development. Back home, thousands of others "sponsored" overseas children by sending money and exchanging often-intimate letters. Although driven by sincere impulses and sometimes fostering durable friendships, such efforts doubled as a form of social engineering. Americans believed that child rearing could prevent the rise of future dictators, curb the appeal of communism, and facilitate economic development around the world.By the 1970s, child welfare agencies had to adjust to a new world in which American power was increasingly suspect. But even as volunteers reconsidered the project of reshaping foreign societies, a perceived universality of children's needs continued to justify intervention by Americans into young lives across the globe.

Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century

4. Raising Little Cold Warriors

Journal Article Maps and Mini-Imperialists Get access Mahshid Mayar. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire.Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 239 pp. $32.95 (paperback). Sara Fieldston Sara Fieldston E-mail: sara.fieldston@shu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, dhad031, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad031 Published: 17 May 2023 

Maps and Mini-Imperialists

Journal Article A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War Get access A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. By Kori A Graves. (New York: New York University Press, 2020. 301 pp. $45.00.) Sara Fieldston Sara Fieldston Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 1, June 2023, Pages 172–173, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad116 Published: 01 June 2023 

Sara Fieldston

Papers

Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century

4. Raising Little Cold Warriors

Maps and Mini-Imperialists

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War