Up to 110,000 Portuguese a year left their homeland in the period following the implementation of Troika austerity measures. The UK was the most popular destination, with a third of arrivals now holding degrees- the highest proportion in Europe and double what it was 10 years earlier. This paper focuses on how the latest generation of transnational families use communication technology and digital networking at a time of swiftly evolving social and technological change. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with university-educated Portuguese migrants in London aged 23-40, and with their families in Portugal, I will explore how communication technology has shaped their experiences. Employing anthropological concepts of relatedness and personhood, I will focus specifically on the changing nature of transnational living in an increasingly polarised, neoliberal world and what it means to be a Portuguese transnational family in Europe in 2017.

Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this paper brings into dialogue empirical material from young, highly educated Portuguese migrants in London, theoretical work on desire in migration studies and sociological approaches to theorising aspirations. The paper argues that young migrants' narratives of migration shed important light on the working of aspirations in the processes of becoming through migration. Such orientations towards the future are shaped by young migrants' engagements with doxic and habituated logics producing aspirations. The analytical lens of desire illuminates the role of discursive self-positioning, emotions, and the embodiment of lived experiences of migration in the enacting of particular migrant subjectivities and associated aspirations. In a context in which competing discourses of generation constitute important registers of meaning about migration and aspirations, mobilising generation discourses is a key temporal practice in young migrants' constructions of narratives of migration.

Reflecting about 8.1. Networks (2018).