Diversifying analytical categories for studying youth with and without migration background: an example of mobility-based categories

Abstract

This article develops mobility-based categories for studying young people with and without a migration background. Most research on migrant youth uses the category of ethnicity, defined by a young person’s country of origin or that of their parents, or the category of generation, with migrants defined as first, second or 1.5 generation. But 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. Mobility can entail migration, but also other kinds of trips such as study abroad, vacations, gap years, and family visits. 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. Using insights from the transnational and mobilities turns in the social sciences, this article argues that we need to develop new analytical categories that capture the various ways in which young people are mobile. Such mobility-based categories promise to shed light on young people’s lives in three ways. First such categories allow investigation of various elements of commonality and difference between youth, irrespective of where they or their parents come from. They allow us to go beyond the nation-state lens that still guides most large-scale migration research and to explore within-group differences. Second, mobility-based categories take young people’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 entails a process rather than a one-time move. The article explores what mobility-based categories could look like, based on a recent, large-N, primary data collection project on secondary-school student’s mobility in three European countries and one African one.