Transnational mobility desires and discourses: Young people from return‐migrant families negotiate intergenerationality, mobility capital, and place embeddedness

Abstract

A longitudinal and intergenerational perspective opens up possibilities of novel insights into the socio‐spatial practices and relations that constitute, and generate, transnational youth im/mobilities. This paper draws on research conducted over 10 years with young adults who had migrated to Ireland as children with their return‐migrant parents during the Celtic Tiger period. It explores how, as young adults, they envisage and navigate their unfolding im/mobility pathways. In a context where transnational mobility experience is highly valued and celebrated, they draw on their mobility capital as former migrants to self‐position as knowledgeable mobile subjects. However, precisely because of their personal and family mobility resources, their engagements with discourses of hypermobility are selective—simultaneously claiming the cultural capital of transnational mobility and de‐fetishising it by producing grounded interpretations that value place embeddedness. The paper sheds light on some of the tensions of contemporary youth mobilities in contexts of globalisation, uncertainty, and migration.

Migration and partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland

“…Some of these respondents may identify strongly with nation–states other than British or Irish while others may be more interested in the quality of life in Northern Ireland than issues of governance (Polkowski, 2017). In other cases, the children of return-migrant families may produce their own grounded interpretations of place embeddedness (Ní Laoire, 2020) at odds with the entrenched conflict. Further research should explore further the ways different types of in-migrants relate and position themselves towards the centuries-old conflict in Northern Ireland.…”

Chinese students at U.K. universities: Transnational education mobilities as a stepping‐stone to adulthood

“…Therefore, how transnational migration impacts Chinese youth's transitions to adulthood and how transnational Chinese students navigate their transitions while studying abroad are important areas for study. In addition, as discussed in the previous section, over the last few years, there has been a growing literature exploring migration as a significant marker and maker of youth transitions to adulthood, within western countries in particular (Ní Laoire, 2020; Skrbis et al, 2014). In response, this paper attempts to bring transnational Chinese students studying in U.K. universities into the discussion.…”

“…Mobilities of embodied social actors, ideas and objects further sustain and reproduce the unbounded networks that stretch beyond different places (Larsen & Urry, 2016). Through the lens of mobilities, existing work criticises an oversimplification of students' migration as depersonalised movements over measurable and geometric spaces, and places students' everyday experiences, interpretations and emotions at the centre of discussion (Collins, 2018;King & Raghuram, 2013;Waters & Leung, 2013, 2020Waters, 2017). Theorising students as embodied social actors, researchers use the mobilities paradigm to examine the intersection between students' class, gender, political and cultural backgrounds and the networked relations within which they are embedded in the course of migration (Brooks & Waters, 2017;Waters, 2017).…”

Spatial Mobility Capital: A Valuable Resource for the Social Mobility of Border-Crossing Migrant Entrepreneurs?

“…Unlike the motility perspective, which examines the spatial movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas (mostly) in urban and regional contexts, transnational migration studies focus on individuals crossing national borders. In this strand of literature, some scholars have developed the concept of "mobility capital" to analyse the conditions under which spatial mobility can become a resource for the social mobility of migrants [11,[26][27][28]. Inspired by Bourdieu [29], they argue that not all migrants are equally able to mobilise their country-specific social and cultural resources (e.g., language, education, social networks) across national borders to improve their social position.…”