Mapping the commodification of global human movement through time and space: young people's experiences of displacement and exile

Studying the historical and temporal perspectives of human movement, specifically the smuggling of young people - and its recent rise, alongside heightened risks to young unaccompanied asylum seekers - will help to better understand the historical legacies and state powers that drive contemporary experiences of victims of smuggling within and beyond the UK. The relationship between highly advanced globalisation and human movement as a growing, often outsourced, 'commodity' and the analysis of young people's experience of displacement, smuggling and resettlement, provides a unique angle on the ways in which human movement is understood as both privatised, exploited and used as a 'good' and a 'service' undermining the international human rights' legal frameworks designed to protect young people from the exigencies of war, conflict and forced human movement. I will ask significant and pressing questions regarding how displaced young people are exploited by smugglers across the EU to gain capital advantage, and what this means for their resettlement in the UK, including educational and social services for these groups.