Paper short abstract

This paper explores the localising strategies adopted by Pacific Island migrant youth in Australia. An analysis of these strategies demonstrates the ways in which the local is simultaneously grounded and mobile, parochial and cosmopolitan.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the localising strategies adopted by Pacific Island migrant youth in Australia. As Pacific Island youth have limited access to economic resources, issues of belonging and ownership are often played out in public and prosaic places such as the shopping mall and the street. While this behaviour is often classified by the broader community as gang-like activity, from the perspective of the young people themselves these acts are viewed as ways of claiming entitlement to particular local spaces. These 'gangs' utilize multiple notions of 'the local' to effect these appropriations. They draw variously on ideologies about Pacific Islander ways of being and doing, the real and imagined 'local' of homeland, the contemporary mobility of the people of the Pacific region, and the insignia of global expressive forms. The various localities adopted and reworked by Pacific Island young people demonstrate the ways in which the local is simultaneously grounded and mobile, parochial and cosmopolitan.