Child and Adolescent Migration, Mental Health, and Language

This book is a very valuable addition to the sociological/mental health field, dealing with children and adolescents caught up in the continually escalating phenomenon of forced and un-forced migration. The book is well written, clear and well formatted, using multiple sources as references, including authorities such as Hanna Arendt, Claire Kramsch, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and others. I would say that it's a must read for anyone working in this field.

Dr. Kaspars Tuters, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

In this excellent, wide ranging book, Fernanda Carra-Salsberg addresses the very timely reality of child and adolescent migration and its relation to trauma, development, language, and mental health. Carra-Salsberg skillfully weaves together the many strands of these topics into a rich tapestry consisting of first hand accounts, detailed descriptions of political, legal and social realities in a number of countries, and in-depth discussions of psychoanalytic and other theories of language, trauma, and development. The author’s voice shines through engagingly in this clearly and elegantly written book, which will be of interest to as wide a range of experts as its many topics suggest, as well as to the general public, who have been very much concerned, and moved, by the plight of child and adolescent migrants.

Dr. Joseph Fernando, Director, Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis

Fernanda Carra-Salsburg’s compelling study calls for new thinking within the emotional situations of migration through focus on what adolescents and children carry and create from memories of displacement that only later become the stuff of memoirs of hope, creativity, and moral life. With grace and attention to philosophies of language and theories of development, and through presenting the intimacies voiced from psycho-social histories of migration and their embodied vulnerabilities, Carra-Salsburg provides literary approaches to mental health that both enliven theories of translation and invite practitioners to get to know the rough edges of experience with the tenders of humanity needed for care, growth, and the promise of learning.

Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, and author of When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning, Albany: State University of New York Press

Fernanda Carra-Salsberg has been a postsecondary foreign language educator since 2001. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, her interest in language, culture, migration, trauma, and identity formations stems from her repeated relocations as a child and adolescent migrant, and from experiences as a foreign-language pedagogue. She teaches English as a Second Language and Spanish to heritage and second-language learners at York University, Ontario, Canada. Widely published, Carra-Salsberg completed an interdisciplinary doctoral degree at the Faculty of Education, York University.