ABSTRACT
Young people's vulnerability in the context of transnational migration is both lived and performed, experienced and assigned. Perhaps most important, it is at once compounded and resisted as youth age and move across diverse social, political, and geographic spaces. Constructions of global youth as dependent, non-agentive children implicitly ignore the multidimensional expectations and transnational "simultaneity" of global youth. Many young migrants will encounter restricted or denied access to legal relief, safe migration passage, work-related rights and protections, transnational kin and community networks, education, or health and social services. Vulnerability is powerfully implicated in the image of, the language around, and the actual embodiment of global youth. When considered through the ethics of vulnerability, the process detailed above, namely the circulation of images of young migrants—or specifically, images of very young migrants—both illuminates and unsettles the requirements of humanitarian intervention.
