Youth Circulations traces the real and imagined circulations of global youth.

As anthropologists who research the migration of children and youth, we recognize a glaring disconnect between the nuanced, transnational lives of the young people with whom we work and the active reduction of their lives into abbreviated tropes, such as the vulnerable victim, delinquent, violent threat, impoverished dependent and so on. In collecting and curating photographic representations of transnational youth, we aim to draw attention to this consequential circulation of images, including those that render something--and often, someone--immobile. We also strive to identify and highlight active counter-points, namely occasions in which youth are portrayed or self-represent as complex, agentive, skilled, creative, relational actors. Taken together, this website concentrates on three primary circulations:

  1. Youth themselves circulate. Through transnational movement and global technologies, young people circulate between nations, communities, and virtual spaces.

  2. Global youth are agents of circulation. As transnational actors, young migrants shape and contribute to global flows of people, capital, ideas, and values.

  3. Ideas circulate about global youth. Put forth in the media, in policy reports, and by advocacy and opposition efforts, representations of young migrants are power-filled and consequential, both in and beyond communities of origin and destination.

An ongoing project, the images we collect and feature on Youth Circulations are primarily from mainstream news sources, policy reports and promotional materials. Though we select and organize these images, we ultimately recognize them as contextual, as are their meanings and interpretations. The goal of Youth Circulations is to incite critique as well as conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.

Editors

Lauren Heidbrink

Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. Her research and teaching interests include childhood and youth, transnational migration, performance and identity, law at the margins of the state and Latin America. She published an ethnography on unaccompanied child migration and detention entitled Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Her second book Migranthood: Youth in a new era of deportation (Stanford University Press 2020; en español con CIMSUR 2021) examines the migration and deportation of Indigenous youth to Guatemala. She received a doctorate in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a MA/MS in International Public Service Management from DePaul University. She is the recipient of an American Council of Learned Society fellowship and the Fulbright Schuman 70th Anniversary Scholar Award to conduct comparative research on child migration in Greece, Italy, Belgium, and UK. (See CV.)

Michele Statz

Michele Statz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and affiliated faculty with the University of Minnesota Law School. She is also a 2021-22 American Bar Foundation / JPB Foundation Access to Justice Faculty Scholar. Michele is trained as an anthropologist of law, and her research examines how socio-spatial dimensions of rurality influence access to justice, rights mobilization, and the efforts of tribal and state court judges in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. This research has appeared in Law & Society Review, Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, and American Journal of Public Health, among others, and is generously funded by the National Science Foundation, American Bar Foundation, and JPB Foundation. She is also a member of the LSC Rural Justice Taskforce.

 Michele’s other ongoing work includes interdisciplinary and mixed-media projects on global youth and mobility; reproductive justice; working class identity; rural housing precarity; and immigration lawyering. Her first book, Lawyering an Uncertain Cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the U.S. (Vanderbilt U Press), was published in 2018. Statz holds a PhD in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Comparative Law and Society Studies from the University of Washington. (See CV.)

The content and design of www.youthcirculations.com are copyrighted © 2014 by Lauren Heidbrink and Michele Statz. The images and videos may be copyrighted by third parties. Title 17 § 107 of U.S. Copyright Law indicates that the “fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Specific permission to use these materials may be required; it is the user’s responsibility to assess and/or secure rights for use. Please inform youthcirculations@gmail.com of any potential copyright infringements.