Editorial: Transnational youth mobilities: Emotions, inequities, and temporalities

Abstract

This editorial outlines a research agenda for critical exploration of transnational youth mobilities centred on three concepts: emotions, inequity, and temporality. This agenda offers novel perspectives on the interplay between geographies of social difference and the multiscalar forces governing and being made through mobility.Emotions advance theorisations of agency by providing a generative lens to examine how aspirations, social relationships, and political subjectivities intersect to inform young people's lifeworlds and mobilities. Critical analyses of how youth navigate challenging structural conditions are shown to be sharpened by considering the mutually constitutive nature of inequity and (im)mobility. A temporal lens reveals how youth mobilities are driven, experienced, and shaped by structural and social dynamics including, but not limited to, precarity, border regimes, and intergenerationality. We conclude by charting how further explorations into the diverse emotions and temporalities of youth mobility, centred on questions of inequity, can significantly advance scholarly debates within and beyond population geography.

Extraordinary everydayness: Young people's affective engagements with the country of origin through digital media and transnational mobility

“…New research agendas do seek to adequately address—theoretically and methodologically—the increasing complexity, diversity and emotionality of transnational youth mobilities (Cheung Judge et al., 2020; van Geel & Mazzucato, 2018; S. Robertson et al., 2018). By putting youth mobility at the centre of the research and by investigating youth mobility trajectories (Mazzucato, 2015), this article responds to their calls.…”

Changing relationships to the country of origin through transnational mobility: migrant youth’s visits to Ghana

“…In exploring four types of travel -virtual, imaginative, material and corporeal -Urry highlighted the embodied proximity with people, places and moments that physical (or corporeal) mobility enables, which cannot be fully replaced by other forms of travel. Processual mobile methods provide access to these 'fleeting, multi-sensory, distributed, mobile and multiple' meanings of mobility as it unfolds (Büscher and Urry 2009, 103;Cheung Judge, Blazek, and Esson 2020; Sheller and Urry 2006).…”

Reconceptualizing family reunification from a youth mobilities perspective: transnational youth between Ghana and Belgium

“…By focusing on young people's mobility trajectories to investigate the multiple international and national moves young people engage in and how these are experienced in terms of reunifications and concomitant separations from significant others. Our approach allows us to pay attention to migration and reunification as unfolding processes rather than instances in time, heeding recent calls for spatio-temporal complexity in migration and youth studies (Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018;Cheung Judge, Blazek, and Esson 2020; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018). Furthermore, we examine both origin and destination contexts to understand meaningful relationships across borders as well as context-specific understandings of family.…”

“…Youth mobility trajectories are the geographical moves across time and space that young people engage in and the family compositions that result from these moves (Mazzucato 2015). Such a focus on youth mobility heeds recent calls for the inclusion of spatio-temporal complexity in migration and youth studies (van Geel and Mazzucato 2018;Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018;Cheung Judge, Blazek, and Esson 2020).…”