A forthcoming edited volume with Routledge, Citizenship Challenges for Children and Youth: Migration, Identity, and Legal Exclusion Across Historical and Contemporary Contexts, brings together historical and contemporary perspectives on the citizenship challenges faced by children and young people across different geographical settings.
The volume examines how migration, borders, documentation, nationality laws and bureaucratic practices shape young people’s access to rights, identity and belonging. Taking a broad chronological perspective from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the contributions show that many of the challenges often presented as uniquely contemporary have deeper historical roots. The book therefore places present-day debates on migration and citizenship in a longer history of legal exclusion, mobility, documentation and institutional responses to children and youth.
The chapters address a wide range of issues, including undocumented status, statelessness, education, international adoption, family reunification, welfare exclusion, asylum, access to legal identity and the consequences of unstable or missing documentation. At the same time, the volume foregrounds young people’s voices, agency and activism, examining not only how children and youth are affected by legal and bureaucratic systems, but also how they negotiate, resist and challenge them.
A further aim of the volume is to explore the role of institutions such as schools, courts, welfare systems, state administrations and NGOs in either reinforcing or challenging exclusionary practices. Bringing together contributions from different disciplines and regions, the book highlights the specific ways in which children and young people experience citizenship, migration and belonging, and the methodological and ethical challenges involved in researching these experiences.
The volume developed from collaboration across HIDDEN Working Groups 2, 3 and 5, particularly the Training School on Contemporary Citizenship Challenges for Children and Young People held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in September 2025 and the workshop held at the NTNU Brussels Office on 12–13 May 2026. These activities brought together scholars working across historical and contemporary contexts and laid the foundations for the edited collection.
Editors: Michael J. Geary, Susan Beth Rottmann, Beatrice Scutaru and Aisling Shalvey.
