Diasporic Youth Research Articles

‘Throwing in my two cents’: Burundian diaspora youth between conventional and transformative forms of mobilization

ABSTRACT Since its independence in 1962, Burundi has witnessed several episodes of civil war and political unrest. The most recent of these, which started in 2015, triggered the migration of approx. 400,000 Burundians to neighbouring countries and the rest of the world. Based on interviews with first- and second-generation Burundian youths living in France and Belgium, this contribution examines how Burundian diasporic youth mobilizes against the authoritarian regime in Burundi. It explores what motivates their engagement, and how they evade control and navigate threats of repression. It also sheds light on different mobilization paths, between rather conventional types of engagement and transformative forms of activism. It shows how Burundian diasporic youth in Belgium and France have developed a reflexive form of transnational awareness building on their hyphenated identities and challenging simplistic binaries, notably by identifying similarities between structures of power and oppression in Burundi and their countries of residence.

The value of communal and intergenerational settings for studying social and emotional learning

AbstractIndigenous Latinx youth living in the United States are culturally diverse individuals whose experiences are often unrecognized. These diasporic youth identify, learn, and develop cultural strengths amid their upbringing outside their Native communities by engaging in integrated communal endeavors informed by Indigenous values. In this article, we present research on how interconnected aspects of diasporic Indigenous practices contribute to the social and emotional development of youth in middle childhood and adolescence. We focus on Indigenous familial and communal experiences that contribute to developmental processes. We provide nuanced perspectives to studying social and emotional learning (SEL) outside the traditional school setting by expanding to communal contexts. We examine comunalidad (communality) and intergenerational practices to consider how transformative SEL can be more inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing and living. Our focus is the cultural strengths these communities bring to the SEL competencies of relationships and social awareness, which are applicable to the development of all children.

Conflicted Identities: Negotiating Belonging among Young People from the Lebanese Diasporas in Montreal

To elucidate the reproduction of antagonist relationships between diasporic populations, conflict transportation theories tend to focus on societal and transnational contexts. This approach often neglects the complexity of people’s lived experiences and risks essentializing diasporic identities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young people of the Lebanese diasporas in Montreal, this contribution reconsiders the interplay between diasporas and conflict by pondering the shifting nature of existence. It argues that everyday encounters and life trajectories play a critical role in how the diasporic youth relate to identity categories, inspiring them to continuously renegotiate and transform what being Lebanese means in their existence.

Reimagining Hindu Mythology for the Diasporic Queer Body: Discursive Materiality in Vivek Shraya’s She of the Mountains

This article explores what it means to be queer, Indian and brown in a diasporic context through the lens of young adult fiction. Western discourses often offer an insufficient set of resources for young protagonists to navigate the specificities of their gendered, sexual and racial landscapes. Vivek Shraya’s She of the Mountains, an Indian Canadian novel, addresses this challenge by layering the story of a queer Indian Canadian young adult within reimagined stories from Hindu mythology and unconventional visual illustrations. This paper argues that while Western discourses can limit the development of the protagonist’s identity, reinterpretations of Hindu mythology and complex visuals result in a confluence of discourse and materiality that prompts new/different ways of being for queer diasporic youth.

#WeWillWin: Mobilisation of Jerusalem's Armenian youth and digital acts of citizenship during the Second Artsakh War

AbstractThis focused digital ethnography explores Armenian diaspora youth mobilisation via hashtag activism concerning a homeland conflict, examining the impact of digital citizenship acts on diaspora nationalism and identity negotiation. Taking Jerusalem's Armenian School as a case study, I analyse the school's use of Facebook amid a global pandemic to coordinate youth mobilisation around the viral hashtag #WeWillWin during the Second Artsakh War between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Ethnographic content analysis was applied to student‐created audiovisual materials, which were contextualised using interviews with schoolteachers and young adults. Considering complex geopolitics within a conflict‐ridden landscape, Armenian youth's audiovisual posts in cyberspace represent empowering, performative statements of identity and citizenship tethered to an imagined Armenian transnation. For diasporic youth facing uncertainty, crisis and marginalisation in local milieus, social media can constitute hybrid spaces between home and homeland for expressions of agency and dissent, identity negotiation and citizenship performance.

Young people's articulations and geographies of diasporic politics: Perspectives from the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian diasporas

This paper examines the geographies of how young people, aged 11–25, in the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian diasporas in the Midlands region of England articulate notions of formal and informal politics. In doing so, it connects work on diasporic politics with work on the geographies of diaspora, young people's politics, and, in particular, diasporic youth politics. The paper discusses how young people have views on politics and on being political but feel that they struggle to have their voices heard by those in positions of power. At the same time, it paints a picture of how these participants articulate such feelings of politics in complex, multi-scalar, multi-directional ways. In doing so, they are potentially creating new spaces to feel and be political. The paper therefore stresses that it is important that diasporic politics takes into account the views of young people and that assumptions should not be made as to where such politics are located.

Young People in the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas: Emotional Attachments to Multiple Homelands

Abstract This essay examines how children and young people aged 11–25 in the Jewish, Greek and Palestinian diasporas in England feel towards homelands, by exploring the range of emotions that homelands elicit. Using qualitative research with young people and their parents, the essay discusses and complicates assumptions around the relationships between diasporic youth and their homelands from the perspective of mainly second- and later-generation young people. In particular, the essay contributes to the growing realisation of the importance of emotions in diaspora, as it focuses on the complexities of belonging, attachment and identity. It adds to work which stresses the need for flexible notions of diaspora, in which people are positioned differently: in this case, young people who very much feel part of a diaspora and have differing and sometimes complicated relationships with the idea(l) and reality of a defined homeland.

Methodological reflections on curating an artistic event with African youth in a Norwegian city

In this article, we remember experiences of our participation in an artistic event for youth of African descent in a Norwegian city to reflect on the potential of arts-based methods for exploring migrant and diasporic youth identities. Reflecting on the process of curating an event titled Afrikanske Dager in Drammen (African days in Drammen) involving young Africans in a Norwegian city, we demonstrate the methodological potential photography making, exhibition and dance performance. We show how processes of collaborative photography making provide spaces for participants to negotiate and think through identity and self-representation. We tease out the potential of dance choreography and performance as avenues for participants to embody and retell old histories from the archive of African presence in Norway. We discuss how the event making process was the site of unstable hierarchies where roles and positions constantly changed and highlight the power relations involved in the collaborative production of knowledge from artistic practice.

Between Return and Resistance: Rap as a Means of Access to Engagement and Empowerment Among French Hmong Youth

This article aims to discuss how diasporic Hmong youth express nostalgia and resistance through rap music, transmit collective memory, encourage young people to question social and political structures, and engage in public life. Based on fieldwork in France, this article explores how French Hmong rap artists convert their nostalgia, experience and in-betweenness into the sound space. This article also demonstrates how French Hmong rap artists construct an alternative discourse in which young people are able to show solidarity. As a result, this article provides some insights into navigating the popular culture of an underrepresented community and its belonging, nostalgia and resistance.

Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship by Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda

Reviewed by: Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship by Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda Aída R. Guhlincozzi Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship. By Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $27.00 paper. In Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship, authors Dyrness and Sepúlveda slowly unravel the bundle of culture, language, and socioeconomic experiences that contribute to the thoughts on citizenship developing in the minds of Latin American youth. By researching Latin American student perspectives on both sides of the diaspora—those who stay and those who leave—the authors capture the ways in which Latin American students receive the global structural forces and weave them into their daily lives. Instead of treading familiar territory of the US–Latin American relationship, the scope of the book incorporates the experiences of Latin American immigrants located in Spain, alongside the immigrant experiences of Latin American students in the United States and El Salvador. Using the site of multiple educational institutions for the students participating and co-researching in the different countries enables the depiction of unique microcosms of the cultural, social, and political messaging the next generation of immigrant youth are receiving as they develop into global citizens. In attention to the discussions around race and Latinx identity, the authors take an approach drawing from the participant conversations had with students about navigating identity and race in their different contexts. The authors do not necessarily construct specific definitions of racial, national, and ethnic categories to draw on throughout the book; instead, they ground the discussions of these categories in the lived daily encounters of the participants to illustrate the larger forces at play, and to illustrate how a form of racial capitalism twists through the boundaries of any context. The authors ground their findings in literature on diasporic youth behaviors and Latinx Studies research on citizenship and themes of belonging. With a deftness and informed perspective, the authors pull the reader into the different cases to sit alongside the students and researchers and hear their stories. Then, the stories and conversational snippets are contextualized with the research and broader perspectives on how these are representational of the global structural forces at play. [End Page 85] On its face, the book appears to be an excellently written contribution to a specific literature focused on immigration and Latinx youth. But the book is also a contribution to the broader discussion of how societies and communities incorporate—or do not—people from places different than the home context and the crater-sized impacts these seemingly everyday minute choices can have. Further, the authors provide us with a contemplation on the social and economic ties between countries that many people would rather conveniently forget, and how critical are the conditions these are formed in. [End Page 86] Aída R. Guhlincozzi Geography; Women's and Gender Studies University of Missouri–Columbia Copyright © 2022 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora

Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.

Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III, Border Thinking: LatinX Youth: Decolonizing Citizenship

Reviewed by: Border Thinking: LatinX Youth: Decolonizing Citizenship by Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III Gabriela Buitrón Vera (bio) Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III, Border Thinking: LatinX Youth: Decolonizing Citizenship. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 278. In Border Thinking, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III examine the ways Latinx diasporic youth dismantle rigid notions of citizenship. The book exposes how colonial discourses of the West cast Latino youth as either threats to the nation or unable to assimilate into discourses of the nation-state. Dyrness and Sepúlveda challenge such binary narratives by drawing from decolonial, Chicano, feminist theory, and participatory action research, as they contend that “diasporic youths’ connection to homeland and host countries offers them a critical perspective on national citizenship” (10). Border Thinking proposes that Latinx diasporic youth are well-equipped to redefine citizenship, particularly through the nurturing of their democratic yearnings and critical perspectives within pedagogic spheres and collective action. The book’s makeup reflects various Latino diasporic youth experiences with migration (in Latin America, the US, the Caribbean, and Spain),1 and studies how experiences with migration give diasporic youth new perspectives in decolonizing citizenship. Dyrness and Sepúlveda examine these perspectives by drawing on an array of active participatory research practices. These methods of engagement include “testimonio, poetry, participatory research, role play, interviews group [End Page 277] dialogues, identity mapping, and more” (28). These methods help diasporic youth reflect on their personal experiences and connect that knowledge to the political and the communal. Border Thinking’s five well-connected chapters present acompañamiento (borderlands allyship) in the form of pedagogic or activist solidarity that generate la facultad, “the capacity to see in surface phenomena, the meaning of deeper realities.”2 Chapter 1, “Acompañamiento in the Borderlands,” for instance, examines the role of humanizing pedagogy. Drawing from thinkers like Freire, Valenzuela, Valencia, and Spring, this chapter challenges rigid notions of nation-state narratives of Otherness. The chapter addresses Mexican migrant youth experiences navigating high school in a Northern California institution. Later, it highlights how educators who are not trained to be borderland allies can reproduce a system of marginalization that casts their students as uncultured and problematic, instead of agents of change. Dyrness and Sepúlveda assert that it is through acts of acompañamiento that educators and borderland brokers honor the stories and complexities of the Latino diasporic youth. One way of honoring these rich cultural complexities, the chapter claims, is by decentering educational achievements as the only measure of success. Chapter 2, “In the Shadow of the U.S. Empire,” explores the impact of the US interventions in the lives of youth from El Salvador. Using an ethnographic lens, this chapter examines how two schools in San Salvador introduce or omit notions of citizenship in the classroom. Significantly, what Dyrness and Sepúlveda observed is that in both schools (an elite and a low-income institution) students were socialized to imagine themselves as either neoliberal entrepreneurs or future undocumented or TPS holders in the US. These forced classifications damaged students’ sense of self because they were led to imagine a future of dispossession. Yet, through participatory research practices, Dyrness and Sepúlveda challenged these binaries, and students voiced their democratic yearnings and articulated desires for their future through communal dialogue. The disciplining narratives of Spanish nationalism on immigrant youth identities (156) are explored in chapter 3, “Negotiating Race and the Politics of Integration.” This chapter specifically examines how diasporic youth negotiate race and politics of integration in Madrid. To analyze this, Dyrness and Sepúlveda conducted citizenship workshops for diasporic youth. The participatory methods they used helped migrant youth articulate the frictions they faced with educators and national discourses that explicitly denied racialized conflicts. This chapter sheds light on how immigrant youths’ experiences with racism were silenced and misunderstood by national and official discourses, rendering them as problematic or unable to assimilate. Chapter 4, “Transnational Belonging,” likewise, analyzes how Latinx youth migration narratives challenged nation-state binary discourses. The diasporic youths’ comprehension of their fluid identities becomes crucial to [End Page 278] challenging rigid notion of citizenship. The final chapter, “Feminists in Transition,” inspects how transnational...

Strategic Solidarities: Cultural Festivals, Relational Encounters and Diasporic Youth Identities

ABSTRACT Cultural festivals have grown in diversity, scale and popularity in many migrant-receiving societies in recent years and schools have increasingly become involved in supporting these for intercultural exchange and celebration. While prior research has found that cultural festivals play a significant role in maintaining and enhancing cultural traditions, much less research has focused on the role that festivals play as sites of conviviality, cross-cultural encounters and solidarity – especially for school-aged young people. In this paper we examine three school-focused cultural festivals held in Aotearoa New Zealand, paying particular attention to how the diverse relational solidarities encouraged through cultural festivals shaped the identities of diasporic youth. A theoretical lens of solidarity was used to analyse the relational bonds formed through festival attendance, and how these might foster new possibilities for identity formation in multicultural nations. Our study revealed how three forms of solidarities (ethnic, trans-ethnic and school-based) served to affirm traditional cultural practices and identities, as well as strategically craft new, often plural identities. We reflect on the productive and inventive nature of such solidarities and how festivals provided a space to articulate counter-narratives about diasporic youth and assertions of status, belonging and citizenship.

Walking between two worlds: Bollywood cinema and the New Zealand-Indian identity

ABSTRACT Using thematic analysis, this qualitative research interrogates the influence and relevance of Bollywood cinema, Indian Hindi movies considered both a brand, a cultural artefact, and a complex industry, in shaping the cultural identities of Indian diasporic youth in Auckland. This research unpacks the extent to which Bollywood films as mediating artefact might offer connection, concatenation, or complication to diasporic youths as they negotiate and locate their hybrid cultural identities through their daily lived experience away from India. Diasporic youths called out the dissonance, they felt between depiction of Indianness in Bollywood and their way of life now. Others, when invested in specific and contextual Bollywood phenomena in their lived experience through dance performances and subsequently reaping monetary or social benefits, presented a different perspective. To them, Bollywood cinema offered a desired comforting manifestation and celebration of their Indianness. The findings thus far affirm that the myriad of views, sometimes conflicting, still underscore the vitality and vibrancy of Bollywood cinema amongst diasporic youths in Auckland.

Negotiating identity in the diaspora: the role of South Asian youth organizations

ABSTRACT One of the significant ways through which the youth manifest their solidarities and identities in the diaspora is the creation of youth organisations. These organisations although occupy a physical space, transcend borders and forge connections and networks with the homeland and other co-diasporics living across the world. With the example of four South Asian youth organisations and their activities in the United States, this article tries to examine how these organisations reinforce the youth identities by forming virtual networks based on single or multiple affiliations. Use of the social media by these youth organisations – whether sharing information about various socio-cultural and educational events in the Facebook or using the online hashtag in Twitter to raise awareness and mobilisation on subtle issues or creating blogs on various innovative projects and connecting them with their official webpages – is one of the important hallmarks that distinguish them from the traditional diasporic youth organisations.

Rethinking, Returning, Repossessing

ABSTRACT Exhuming the legacy of a state that exists only in apparition and in the flesh, I study the footprints of diasporic youth migrating back to Vietnam, intergenerational hostility among kin, soldiers battling the demons of “future Vietnams,” and feminists and queers fighting for sanctuary within “Little Saigon.” I rethink how heteropatriarchy and patriotic hypermasculinity produced the gendered sexual violence that recurs in the name of community.

From Seoul to Copenhagen: Migrating K-Pop Cover Dance and Performing Diasporic Youth in Social Media

This article examines the practice of the Danish K-pop (Korean pop) cover dance crew CODE9 as an example of the rapid cultural exchange on the Internet that reshapes the diffusion of dance styles and ideas. CODE9 demonstrates K-pop as a “migratory dance practice,” forming a transnational dancing community with modern technology at its center. By adapting and embodying K-pop, CODE9 creates a “Thirdspace” in between reality and fantasy, between being oneself and being a Korean idol. With CODE9, K-pop moves in and out of Denmark, through the practice of watching, learning, performing, and then circulating dance online.

Picturing translocal youth: Self‐portraits of young Syrian refugees and young people of diverse African heritages in South‐East England

AbstractYoung refugees and diasporic youth often have multiply located senses of self. Using a creative visual methodology, recently arrived young Syrian refugees and young people of diverse African heritages born in the United Kingdom (aged 16–20) produced digital self‐portraits to express their translocal subjectivities. Young Syrians represented themselves as “bilingual becomings”; learning English occupied their minds and was key to their imagined futures, but their hearts were often associated with the homeland they had lost. In contrast, speaking English was sometimes taken for granted in the art work produced by young people of African heritages, which portrayed hybrid, multilingual selves and translocal relationality. Both groups embraced signifiers of national, religious, and cultural identity but through their silences and omissions, dis‐identified with exclusionary notions of “Britishness,” nationhood, and citizenship. Their self‐representations provide hopeful counter‐narratives to hegemonic sociopolitical discourses that position “Black African” youth and Muslim young men as a “threat” and “illegitimate” citizens.

Diaspora Identity and a New Generation: Armenian Diaspora Youth on the Genocide and the Karabakh War

AbstractIn this article, we explore the role of the early 20th-century Armenian genocide and the unresolved Karabakh conflict of the 1990s in identity shaping among the new generation of Armenian diaspora—those who grew up after the establishment of the independent Armenian state in 1991. We draw on original interviews with diasporic youth in France, the United Kingdom, and Russia—diasporas that were largely built in the aftermath of the genocide and the Karabakh war. Diaspora youth relate to these events through transmitted collective memories, but also reconnect with the distant homeland’s past and present in new ways as they engage with new possibilities of transnational digital communication and mobility. Their experiences of identity shed light on how the new generation of diasporic Armenians defines itself in relation to the past; how this past is (re)made present in their interpretations of the Karabakh conflict and in everyday behaviors; and how diasporic youth experience the dilemmas of “moving on” from traumatic narratives that for a long time have been seen as foundational to their identity.

Third Gender Politics: Hijra Identity Construction in India and Beyond

Indian law has only recently stopped criminalizing what was perceived as deviant homosexual behavior and started extending full citizenship rights to its queer populace. The government’s attempts to regulate sexual behavior was often steeped in antiquated Orientalist colonial practices that rendered non-binary subjects voiceless. Indian youth who identify as hijras, a third gender who are usually born male but present as female, often experience alienation and stigmatization both at home and in diaspora. This leads to what I call ideological diaspora – internal diaspora founded in cultural and physical exile even at home. Systematic marginalization makes hijras subaltern subjects, which affects the lives of diasporic youth trying to create dialogic identities. While hijras are usually either absent or objects of ridicule in Western media portrayals, looking at rather than through the third-gender subject is one way to allow the assertion of identity. This may take place through sensitive portrayals of hijras in film and novels, or through publications and autobiographic texts that allow for complex narratives and voice. Third-gender youth growing up in ideological and/or literal diaspora need these representations to feel a sense of community and move from being seen as Other to “another.”