Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Categories used in migration research hide the physical mobility that young people engage in; both for those youth who migrate within Africa and beyond and those whose parents do but they do not. This paper proposes mobility-based categories to shed light on young people’s mobile lives in 3 ways.

Paper long abstract:

This paper develops mobility-based categories for studying young people with and without a migration background. Most migrant youth research uses the categories of ethnicity, defined by the country of origin of the youth or one or both of their parents, or generation, defined as 1st, 2nd or 1.5 generation. These categories hide the mobility that young people engage in; both for those youth who have migration in their biographies and those who do not. Using insights from the transnational and mobilities turns in the social sciences, this article argues that mobility based categories can help shed light on young people’s lives in three ways. First such categories allow investigating other elements of commonality and difference between youth, irrespective of where they or their parents come from. This allows going beyond the nation-state lens that still guides most large-scale migration research and investigating within-group differences. In a globalising world the ability of young people to move is increasingly a marker of difference and therefore needs to be considered when studying young people’s lives. Second, mobility-based categories take youth’s past and present mobilities into account, allowing a temporal understanding of how mobility affects their lives. Finally, mobility-based categories are a way to operationalize the notion that mobility is a process rather than a one-time move. The article exemplifies what alternative mobility-based categories could look like, based on a recent, large-N, primary data collection project on secondary-school youth’s mobility in three European and one African country.