Transnational Lives, Loves, and Longings: Children Writing the Visceral Border Within the Threat of Immigration Policy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 2: Translingual, Transnational, and Stateless Narratives

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the presence of children’s experiences of living the border/lands across three years of second graders’ school writing. We draw on theories that disrupt binary framings of “borders”, both national and affective, as children conveyed connections within distances and joys within loss and longings. Analyzing children’s writing across genres, both thematically and through close readings of illustrative examples, we show how children spoke to deep connections across borders within the ever-present threat of the material and symbolic violence of immigration policies. We argue that narratives of migration in classrooms must be supported within and as school-valued literacies and require a deep recognition of how children are positioned by larger systems of inequity and racism.

Authors

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder

• Ellie Haberl, University of Colorado - Boulder