Transnational young people: growing up and being active in a transnational social field

Abstract

This chapter reviews literature on transnational children and young people of migrant background and identifies promising avenues for future research. Transnational children and young people of migrant background are recent subjects of study and have been primarily researched within a sub-field of migration studies, called 'transnational migration'. Transnational migration studies have demonstrated that people who migrate remain engaged with their home regions while also establishing lives overseas. Likewise, people in migrant origin regions remain linked to migrants overseas in a multitude of ways. Yet most of this scholarship, which has emerged since the 2000s, has focused on adults. In this chapter we investigate recent scholarship that focuses on the ways in which young people of migrant background are transnational and how transnationalism shapes their lives. The chapter identifies three broad strands of literature. One strand, conducted in migrant receiving countries, focuses on young people who have not migrated themselves but whose parents have - the so-called second generation - and who, by consequence, develop transnational identities. A second strand, conducted in migrant origin countries, focuses on young people who did not migrate but whose parents did - the so-called left-behind - and as a result are transnationally engaged. A final strand looks at young people of migrant background who move, often multiple times, between the country where they reside and their or their parents' country of origin and analyses in what ways these young people are affected by their mobility. This latter strand is the most recent and deserves more attention in future research.