Transnational and diasporic youth identities: exploring conceptual themes and future research agendas

This special issue brings together multidisciplinary and international perspectives on the importance of diasporic and transnational networks for the formation of ethnic identity by migrant youths. Within the context of this issue migrant youths refer to young people (aged 16–35 years) who are themselves migrants or are children and grandchildren of migrants. Our attention to the transnational and diasporic identities of migrant youths is in direct response to policy debates and migration scholarship in this area, which in recent times have focused on the supposed crisis of minority ethnic youths and their perceived marginalisation and social exclusion from a wider society. The special issue broadens the parameters of this debate by exploring not how transnational migrant youths are but more interestingly, we believe, what it means for them to have grown up in a transnational social field. In the special issue rather than simply addressing identity outcomes, we want to emphasise identity processes. This is because we are more interested in understanding the ways the migrant youths are ‘doing transnationalism’ and also through this process ‘doing identity’ (including intersected racial, ethnic, gender, class and sexual identities)