Migrant youth and the idea of the ‘migrant experience’

Abstract

The article opens a conversation around what constitutes a ‘migration experience’ by identifying and examining various analytical frameworks that constitute an ‘experience’ as migration. Unlike previous approaches to describing young people’s ‘migrant experiences’, I do not take the notion as self-explanatory; rather, what we come to know as the ‘migrant experience’ hides various epistemological and political processes. I begin with an analysis of different conceptualisations of experience such as mediated, unmediated and experience as strangeness. The discussion then moves onto how these inform the spatial/temporal, critical and phenomenological accounts of an event known as the migration experience. The second part of the article demonstrates what empirical analysis may entail when we examine the idea of the migration experience as an analytical category. By drawing on my students’ self-reflective papers on their migration experience, specifically their stories on being Othered in the host and ‘home’ country and their experience of hybrid identities, we open an analytical space that reveals constructive tensions and synergies among the analytical frameworks. In so doing, the article illuminates and contributes to conceptualising the ‘migrant experience’ as both a category of analysis and practice.