Introduction: Situating Children of Migrants Across Borders and Origins

Starting a new life in the South? Swiss, Dutch and Flemish ageing in Morocco: a lifecourse perspective

“…More specifically, it considers that an individual's life is composed of a series of transitions or life events which are embedded in trajectories or careers (or status passages) that give them a distinct form and meaning (Elder, 1994: 5; Kulu and Milewski, 2007: 568). This perspective was mainly elaborated by Glen Elder (Elder, 1994; Elder and Giele, 2009), whose work gives a theoretical direction that can be summarised in five principles: (a) life-long human development , meaning that cognitive development evolves during the entire lifecourse in interaction with other principles of the lifecourse paradigm; (b) timing , underlining that the consequences of a life event or transition depend on the age at which they are experienced; (c) linked lives , meaning that lifecourses of related persons are interdependent and affect each other; (d) agency , meaning that individuals develop expectations, have a certain degree of choice, and act intentionally in relation to the opportunities and constraints structured by the institutional contexts in which they live; and (e) time and place , indicating that lifecourses are shaped by institutional and historical contexts (Bolzman et al ., 2017). We will pay special attention to the timing dimension because it has a central influence on the motivations of migrants and thus on the outcomes of migration in terms of social relationships, and was particularly helpful towards structuring our empirical data.…”

“…This is one of the originalities and central aims of our article: to understand, from a lifecourse perspective, the main motivations that have brought Swiss, Dutch and Flemish migrants to live in Morocco and the social relationships they established in this new context. The lifecourse perspective is starting to be used more extensively in migration studies (Kulu and Milewski, 2007;Kley, 2011;Wingens et al, 2011;Findlay et al, 2015), but has been explored more in the context of internal migration (Bernard et al, 2014), South-North high-skilled professional migration (Kirk et al, 2017;Kõu et al, 2017), East European-West European migration (Croitoru, 2018;Vlase and Voicu, 2018), return migration (Bettin et al, 2018) and second-generation trajectories (Bolzman et al, 2017;Gomensoro and Bolzman, 2019). There is almost no evidence on the use of the lifecourse paradigm in North-South migration studies.…”

Engaging with the Country of Origin and Its Past amongst Second-Generation Youth of Bosnian Descent in Switzerland

“…One of the primary research issues is the level of socio-economic integration of migrant youth in the so-called "host society" as well as transnational practices of the second generation (Levitt/Waters 2006;Wessendorf 2010;Haikkola 2011;Crul et al 2012;Richter/Nollert 2014). 2 The old paradigm of "cultural assimilation" or "acculturation", which presupposes that migrants and their descendants would distance themselves from their country of origin and its culture towards the societal culture of the dominant society and thus to a single, clear-cut identity with growing socio-economic integration, is being increasingly criticized by researchers (Levitt 2009;Riegel/Geisen 2009;Weiss et al 2014;Bolzman et al 2017).…”

Second generation from refugee backgrounds in Europe

“…4 Scholars, using the terminology of second-generation refugees take the risk of naturalising a category that does not exist and should be avoided in this sense. On the other hand, this notion helps to highlight and examine a particular experience; in this sense, it is useful (Bolzman, Bernardi, & Le Goff, 2017).…”