Adolescent Arrivals: Navigating Fear and Belonging in New Beginnings

-----

Register: https://forms.gle/YiTv4NwhPVmBRRm46 

---

Unfamiliar with the English language, the customs of the host country, its culture, and educational institutions, immigrant teenagers face unique challenges as they simultaneously learn to adapt to the physical and emotional changes associated with adolescence. The intersection of these experiences not only create a particular type of constrained agency restricting their capacity to meaningfully assert themselves in new environments but provides them with a distinctive vantage point setting them apart from both younger and older immigrants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic data with adolescent arrivals who enrolled in educational settings during highly contested political times, Rodriguez theorizes on the overlapping dynamics of their experiences. Through their voices and narratives, Rodriguez shows how adolescent arrivals create vibrant spaces of belonging through joy and humor as they craft their identities, find reasons to laugh, and build communities on their own terms. Adolescent Arrivals reveals that for immigrant teenagers, survival is not passive adaptation but an active and creative process of world-making.

-----