Migrant youth ‘between mobilities’: Sessility as a working concept

Abstract

Conventionally, young people today are seen to be benefited by opportunities for mobility and disadvantaged by staying in place. We seek to advance critiques of this binarism by exploring the mobility and attachment aspirations and experiences of the 1.5 generation: those who migrate as children accompanying their parents. Building on calls to better understand the complexity of both mobility and staying in place for migrant youth, we analyse the experience and aspirations of a young Italian woman of Indian background who finds herself ‘between mobilities’, navigating her life amidst her parents’ migration and settlement plans and her own aspirations for both mobility and emplaced belonging. We introduce the concept of ‘sessility’, taken from plant biology, to explore how forms of mobility and agency can be enacted in place, depending on the extent to which the environment supports capacities and aspirations.

How Young Italians Negotiate and Redefine Their Identity in the Mobility Experience

“…Ref. [44] show that young people who find themselves "between mobilities" develop a concept of belonging and culture that is built on the basis of practices that simultaneously connect their place of origin with new communities. Beyond the different conceptualizations developed to define the identity of young migrants, all these categories are united by having a common vision based on the idea that identity is a social construct that is constantly negotiated and reworked, especially within the migratory experience.…”