Transnational youth mobility through trajectories and temporalities

The physical mobility of young people affected by their own or their parents’ international migration – whom we call ‘transnational youth’ – has been under-researched due to assumptions about young people’s sedentarism and the dominance of a nation-state perspective. This Special Issue brings together eight articles on transnational youth mobility studied through the lenses of trajectories and temporalities, including cases from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The articles analyse various types of transnational youth mobility over time and space, by contextualising mobility experiences in young people’s broader life courses (trajectories) and focusing on the way in which young people experience time in relation to their mobility (temporalities). This introduction presents the five main conceptual and methodological advancements of these investigations: de-nationalising the study of youth mobility; embedding youth mobility in (infra)structures; viewing mobility as processual and non-linear; capturing the embodied and emotional nature of youth mobility; and experimenting with methodological innovations relating to visualisation methods, ‘following’ mobility, and youth-centricity. This introduction proposes a research agenda for conceptual, theoretical, and methodological developments that can shed greater light on the role that physical mobility plays in the lives of transnational youth in the Global South and North.