Children, youth, and the everyday ruptures of migration

Migration and movement across multiple borders characterize the current global moment. As people move about the globe, continuity and change are intertwined, resulting in what we understand to be "everyday ruptures." Migration is inherently characterized by rupture-a break, change, distance, division- and it necessarily includes the everyday: even in, during, or perhaps because of cases of acute disruption, social life persists. Paradoxically, rupture is often situated within or occurs alongside the mundane; in some circumstances it may even be animating, stimulating the imagination or changing the course of a life (Kerrigan 2008, 2). The theme of "everyday ruptures," then, captures the seemingly contradictory processes shaped by, on the one hand, disjunctures and breaks and, on the other, the consistency that accompanies everyday life. The chapters in this volume pay attention to both these dynamics-rupture and the everyday- and offer the ethnography of lived experience as evidence of the ways disruption and daily life work in tandem.