Paper short abstract:

Drawing on two research projects with youth transnationally mobile between Europe and West Africa, this paper argues that youthful transnational engagements – particularly those mediated through digital technologies – deserve further study and outlines an agenda for future research in this area.

Paper long abstract:

Among African diaspora communities in Europe, there are significant numbers of young people who are engaged in circulatory and complex mobility patterns, including leisure mobilities and educational sojourns to the ‘homeland’. Yet the lives, mobilities, and sensibilities of young people are little considered due to a focus on ‘crisis narratives’ around African migration and adult-centric bias in previous research. Drawing on two research projects with transnationally mobile young Belgian-Ghanaians and British-Nigerians, this paper aims to put young people’s transnational engagements and mobilities central by focusing on a ubiquitous and powerful, yet mostly ‘hidden’ factor in migration scholarship: digital technology and social media. We demonstrate the importance of digital media in the lives of young people who grow up between diaspora and ‘homeland’ and who forge their own distinct relationships to their countries of heritage. Digital media (or the absence of it) mediates young people’s transnational engagements in varied, embodied and affectively powerful ways. In some instances, young people’s leisure, pleasure, and independence is enabled by technology, in other instances, constraints on digital media are central to intergenerational contestation over morality, belonging and education. Crucially, digital media is an arena (as both tool and shared interest) in which diaspora youth forge new peer relationships in the ‘homeland’. Furthermore, analysis of digital media and return mobilities illuminates the emergence and negotiation of new transnational subjectivities and imagined futures. Overall, the paper argues that these youthful, digital, transnational engagements deserve further study, and suggests an agenda for future research in this area.