Settling down in time and place? Changing intimacies in mobile young people's migration and life courses

Abstract

Transnational mobility is increasingly presented to middle-class youth globally as a way to secure economic futures in precarious times by enhancing educational and employment opportunities. However, little is said about the benefits and impacts of mobility for social and intimate life and specifically how it is situated within, disruptive of, or incorporated into young people's ideas about relationships as they navigate uncertain pathways to adulthood. This paper critically reviews and integrates migration and youth studies scholarship to consider how contemporary youth mobility can be understood as disrupting standard migration-and life-course conventions about intimate relationships. It focuses particularly on questions of temporality, proximity and synchronicity or orthodoxies of 'the right time' and 'the right place' to 'settle down', in the construction and maintenance of both intimate connections to people and attachments to places. It explores how contemporary youth mobility can be seen to complicate notions of the appropriate staging and chronology for establishing different relationships. It raises questions about synchronicity, continuity and proximity as conditions of intimacy and considers how mobility potentially disrupts gendered and heteronormative life courses to provide both welcome freedoms and new challenges, as well as the emergence of new processes of transnational intergenerational care circulation.

Migrant youth ‘between mobilities’: Sessility as a working concept

“…(2015, p. 391) have argued, migration studies has become increasingly attuned to the relationality of mobilities across time and space, meaning that migration can no longer be analysed ‘as an “event” at one point in time affecting a single decision maker’. Mobility links lives intergenerationally and across time and space (see Harris et al., 2020). As Suarez has suggested (quoted in Feixa & Lopez, 2015, p. 254) children of migrants, and especially the 1.5 generation, are obliged to make their futures out of circumstances they do not choose and are thus ‘pioneers of a vital project launched by their parents… Children are symbolically placed in a social position, violently thrust into a future in the country of destination’.…”

“…More random and complex routes towards adulthood or settlement seem the rule. Mobility is proposed as a solution to juggle unequal access to resources and opportunities with creating opportunities for making one's own pathway in life in a globalized world (Brooks & Waters, 2010; Harris et al., 2020; King & Williams, 2018; Robertson et al., 2017, 2018). Zelinsky (1971, p. 222) classically defined mobility as ‘a widening range of options for locating and patterning one's life’.…”

Space, place and internationalisation of higher education: Exploring everyday social practices in the ‘international’ classroom

“…Articles in Population, Space and Place have contributed new insights into the role of mobile young people as students (King & Williams, 2017), shown youth transition and migration as processes of becoming and unbecoming (King, 2017) and highlighted the interrelationship between mobility and materiality for young academics' knowledge production (Adriansen, 2020). Other articles have pointed to the importance of temporality for transnational youth mobility both in relation to intimate relationships and synchronicity (Harris, Baldassar, & Robertson, 2020) and in relation to emotions and inequality (Cheung Judge, Blazek, & Esson, 2020). The intersection between youth mobility and themes such as processes of becoming, emotions and inequalities are also touched upon in this article, and we suggest international students as an interesting population group to study from a geographical perspective and the ‘international’ classroom worth a spatial exploration.…”

Italian youth mobility: The case for a Mediterranean model of ‘family-centred’ mobile transitions

“…Further, youth from the Global North are usually understood as ‘autonomous’ movers, focused on their own life and lifestyle goals. As a result, the ongoing significance of family and community relationships is seldom featured in this literature (Harris et al, 2020), and potential cultural and social conditions within home countries and families are not often made central.…”