Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion

When: Wednesday, 5th April at 5PM

Where: Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS (via Westfiled Way)

Format: Hybrid

About

Anita Casavantes Bradford (University of California Irvine) and Francesca Meloni (King’s College London) will discuss Anita’s new book, Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States. The book is the first comprehensive historical analysis of unaccompanied child migration to the United States from 1930 to present day. The book argues that the US response to unaccompanied child migration has been consistently driven by a geopolitics of compassion that prioritises foreign policy and domestic political objectives over children’s best interests.

The event is co-sponsored by the (B)OrderS Centre for the Legal Study of Borders and Migration and the Childhood, Law, and Policy Network.

About the speakers

Anita Casavantes Bradford is Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California Irvine. She is a scholar of immigration, race and ethnicity, foreign relations, critical refugee studies, and childhood. Among her publications are two books – Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States (University of North Carolina, 2022) and The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959–1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) – as well as numerous journal articles.

Francesca Meloni is Lecturer in Social Justice at King’s College London. Her research focuses on contemporary processes of migration and social exclusion. She is interested in the interface between migration, policy, race, and age, and in the impact of legal status on the experiences of belonging and access to social services. She has a background in anthropology and over 15 years of experience conducting ethnographic research in migration contexts in the UK, Canada, and Italy.