The Oxford Handbook of Child-Centered Approaches to Migrant Children aims to bring child-centered approaches as applied to researching child migration to the forefront of academic and policy debates on this topic. The chapters included in this volume cover the key debates in the field and provide important insights about recent developments in areas that inform use of the child-centered approach.
The concept of the child-centered approach is widely recognized in the social sciences and humanities, including sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, social policy, and law. This approach, whether applied in research, policymaking, or practice, is based on children's agency and participation and focuses specifically on their experiences, perspectives, and voices. To this end, the child-centered approach privileges children when designing research questions, providing descriptions, making interpretations, and carrying out analyses.
By pairing the child-centered approach with concepts such as agency, voice, well-being, participation, and intergenerational justice that are used in contexts relevant to migrant children, this
Handbook presents the major theoretical premises, epistemological approaches, and models used in different social settings and spheres, including research, education, and the political realm. It also describes the experiences of researchers in applying child-centered methods and approaches to their work and highlights the importance of ethical considerations and continuous reflexivity in relation to child-centered knowledge production. The
Handbook additionally highlights the complexity and diversity of transnational childhoods from around the globe, as well as presenting the experiences of different migrant groups, including undocumented and irregular migrants, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and left-behind children. Lastly, it examines the fundamental legal principles and aspects of participation in relation to specific procedures, policy areas, and legal categories relevant to migrant children.
Barbara Gornik is a Senior Research Associate at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia. Her main research interests are anthropology, human and children's rights, nationalism, and child migration. Until June 2022 she worked as Academic Co-coordinator of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action "Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe" (MiCREATE). In 2021, she became a member of the Scientific Research Council for Humanities, a permanent expert body of the Slovenian Research Agency. She is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the LSE's Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.
Zorana Medaric is a sociologist and a research associate at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia. Her research interests include migration, childhood studies, qualitative research and child-centred approaches, with a particular focus on the experiences of children in migration contexts. From 2009 to 2021 she was a researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Tourism Studies at the University of Primorska. As a researcher, she has been involved in various national and international projects, including Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE), Europe's first longitudinal comparative birth cohort study of children's and young people's wellbeing.
Mateja Sedmak is Principal Research Associate and the Head of the Institute for Social Sciences at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia. Her research interests include ethnic and intercultural studies, migration and integration, sociology of everyday life and sociology of family. She is Vice President of the Slovenian Sociological Association and the head of the Section for Intercultural Studies. She has led many international projects, including the "Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe" (MiCREATE) RIA Horizon 2020 project. She is also National Coordinator of "Growing Up in Digital Europe" (GUIDE) research infrastructure, Europe's first longitudinal cross-national birth cohort study.
