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This paper explores how physical mobility shapes migrant youth's changing relationships to their or their parents' country of origin. Increasing numbers of youth in the Global North have a migration background and are transnationally engaged in virtual, imaginative and material mobilities. Yet our knowledge of their physical mobility is lacking, having largely been based on retrospective accounts from the country of residence, resulting in depictions of static relationships to a monolithic country of origin. This study takes a processual approach, focusing on mobility trajectories and exploring the sensorial, embodied and emotional aspects of physical mobility as it unfolds. Drawing on 14 months of mobile ethnographic fieldwork with 20 Ghanaian-background young people (aged 15-25) living in Hamburg, Germany, we focus on visits to Ghana to explore how physical mobility changes relationships to the country of origin over time (across several visits) and space (between different places within one visit). We use Urry's typology of proximity to analyse the specific and changing constellations of people, places and moments that constitute visits and thus shape these relationships. We also reflect on the methodological implications of using three mobile methods: mobility trajectory mapping, following mobility in real-time, and before-and-after interviewing.

Trips by migrant youth to their origin country are seen by institutional actors such as teachers and social workers as disrupting youth's educational progress, and some European countries have financial and legal consequences when these trips take place during the school year. We follow Ghanaian youth living in The Netherlands on their journeys to Ghana and study how they experience such trips and are affected by them. Trips allow young people to reconnect with family and old friends, recollect memories, and confront them with poverty in their country of origin, making them resilient and motivated when facing adversities in school in the Netherlands. This study investigates how young Ghanaians' mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16-25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people's educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

existing methodologies for researching the lives of young people affected by migration have thus far oversimplified their physical mobility by focusing solely on their first international migration or that of their parents. However, previous research shows that migrant youth are mobile and that mobility plays an important role in their lives. This chapter presents mobility trajectory mapping as a methodological tool to record and study these varied mobility trajectories of migrant-background youth. Mapping trajectories allows researchers to employ a youth-centric and transnational lens by involving young people in the co-creation of knowledge about their experiences of moving between places, and by learning about the meanings they attribute to these experiences. This chapter presents our experiences in developing and implementing this method with 183 ghanaian-background young people in ghana, belgium, germany and the netherlands as part of the multi-sited, interdisciplinary research project “mobility trajectories of young lives (mo-trayl).” by discussing methodological advantages of mobility trajectory mapping and presenting analytical insights into the nature of transnational youth mobility that it facilitates, we show that mobility trajectory mapping offers an alternative way to research migrant-background youth with potentially deep repercussions for how we understand their transnational lives.

This chapter reviews literature on transnational children and young people of migrant background and identifies promising avenues for future research. Transnational children and young people of migrant background are recent subjects of study and have been primarily researched within a sub-field of migration studies, called ‘transnational migration’. Transnational migration studies have demonstrated that people who migrate remain engaged with their home regions while also establishing lives overseas. Likewise, people in migrant origin regions remain linked to migrants overseas in a multitude of ways. Yet most of this scholarship, which has emerged since the 2000s, has focused on adults. In this chapter we investigate recent scholarship that focuses on the ways in which young people of migrant background are transnational and how transnationalism shapes their lives. The chapter identifies three broad strands of literature. One strand, conducted in migrant receiving countries, focuses on young people who have not migrated themselves but whose parents have - the so-called second generation - and who, by consequence, develop transnational identities. A second strand, conducted in migrant origin countries, focuses on young people who did not migrate but whose parents did - the so-called left-behind - and as a result are transnationally engaged. A final strand looks at young people of migrant background who move, often multiple times, between the country where they reside and their or their parents’ country of origin and analyses in what ways these young people are affected by their mobility. This latter strand is the most recent and deserves more attention in future research.

International migration and family life are frequently difficult to reconcile. Valentina Mazzucato, Djamila Schans, Kim Caarls, and Cris Beauchemin focus on three cases (the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, and Senegal) and show how varied the solutions can be, with some families reunifying in the destination country, others back in the country of origin, and still others not reunifying at all but becoming instead “transnational families.” This article was also published on the INED website in English and in French.

Most studies on migration focus on migrants and the effects migration has on the host society. But for every migrant that leaves his or her origin country, there are also family members and loved ones that he/she ‘leaves behind’. This geographic separation has well-being consequences on both sides and involves complex transnational caring arrangements when it concerns dependent children or elderly. Yet, only in the past decade has research turned its attention to the ‘left behind’ or stayers. This chapter provides an overview of this recent literature and discusses the effects migration has for stayer children and elderly. The chapter focuses on the main topic investigated by these studies, namely, the effect of migration on the well-being of those who stay in the origin country. Well-being is broadly defined as mental and physical health, education, social behaviour, household labour and economic security. Qualitative anthropological and sociological in-depth studies are reviewed, as are larger-scale quantitative sociological, demographic and psychological studies.

This special issue aims to address the gap in transnational families studies by identifying if there are common patterns and effects of transnational family life across countries and regions, using cross-country comparative analyses. In this editorial introduction, we highlight the overarching themes emerging from seven papers, which employ new large-scale surveys specifically designed to collect information about transnational family life across different Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian countries and China. We discuss how these comparative studies offer new ways of understanding transnational families by focusing on their prevalence, composition, the experiences of their members, and how these change over time. We also highlight how differing and changing notions of care over space and a person's lifetime influence how transnational families are created, reproduced, maintained, and experienced. In general, the issue as a whole emphasises the need to take structural factors in both sending and receiving contexts into account when studying the form that transnational families take, how this changes over time, and the general and specific gendered effects they have on different members.

While family reunification has become a major concern in europe, with the view that migrants overuse their right to reunite, this chapter shows that senegalese migrants are largely oriented towards their origin country. Migrants in europe are predominantly engaged in transnational families, their spouse(s) and/or child(ren) being left behind in senegal. They thus live transnational lives, involving comings and goings and various sorts of transfers and contacts. This pattern echoes the multi-residential family systems observed that have long been observed within senegal. Benefiting from the transnational and longitudinal nature of the mafe data, this chapter challenges the widely shared assumption that family reunification in europe is the normal path followed by most migrants. The statistical results show that “living apart together” across borders is a long-lasting arrangement for many senegalese migrants: 10 years after migration, 82% of the married migrants who left their spouses behind are still separated from them; and 88% of those who left a child behind in senegal are still separated from it. It is quite common for such periods of separation to be ended by reunification at origin (i.e. In senegal), when the migrant returns. As regards reunification with left-behind children, this is more common than reunification in europe. On average, migrants who maintain a transnational family life are more vulnerable than other migrants: they are more frequently undocumented, less educated and of lower socio-economic status. In the end, the high prevalence of transnational families appears to be a mixed product of personal (individual or family) choices and policy constraints.keywordssenegalese migrantsmafe datatransnational familiesfamily reunificationdakar regionthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Studying globalization requires a global perspective. Methodologically, this means that investigating phenomena that occur in and influence multiple places, or investigating how phenomena occurring across multiple places are connected to each other. Multi-sited fieldwork is one way to approach this practical problem. It involves designing research which incorporates different places and times into a single researchable question. In this chapter, we present some theoretical considerations and practical possibilities for executing multi-sited research. To do so, we first discuss how globalization can be conceived of through simultaneity and complexity, how phenomena are often taking place in multiple locations through simultaneous interconnection and with complex causes and effects. An important part of globalization research through multi-sited designs is investigating the connections and disconnections of simultaneous and complex activities and events. We also discuss what multi-sited research is, and what it is not; in other words, how some research designs may incorporate multiple locations, yet not effectively be multi-sited studies of interconnectivity. Finally, we give some examples of how multi-sited research can be accomplished. Our examples are taken from our own research, as well as research executed by anthropologists, sociologists and geographers over many different topics in globalization: migration, transnationalism and diaspora; high-level and low-level cross-border economic activity; and elite mobilities on a global scale. While many of these topics can be studied through a single site, each of these, and topics beyond them, has the potential to be studied using multi-sited fieldwork. Drawing on these examples, we give some guidelines and advice on how to prepare and execute a research design that brings new insights to a problem by incorporating multiple sites.

When collecting migrants' life stories, researchers often report on the role of chance encounters in influencing the way migration trajectories have taken shape or how migrants have managed their lives in a new country. Aside from reporting on such encounters, however, there have been no explicit efforts to theorise chance or to make it central to in-depth analysis in migration studies. This paper aims to theorise the role of chance encounters in migrants' trajectories by drawing on insights from the psychology literature of chance encounters and life paths. Our analysis of the role of chance encounters, structured by the interplay between environmental and personal factors, suggests that how people deal with chance is an influential factor in the ways people migrate from the Global South to the Global North and manage their lives in transit. The paper makes use of evidence collected among 46 African migrants in Ukraine during 7 months of field research in 2011-2012 and reflects on the methodological implications in studying chance. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How migration policies affect family mobility and relationships is a new and emerging area of study within transnational family literature. This chapter contributes to this literature by providing an in-depth examination of ghanaian migrant mothers’ encounters with dutch family migration policies and the impacts such policies have on their pathways to family reunion and the consequences for family relationships. The data come from qualitative research with 32 female ghanaian migrants in the netherlands. Adopting a gender-sensitive approach, our study shows discrepancies between the normative frameworks that underlie formal conditions to family reunion and female migrants’ family lives. Moreover, it shows that restrictive migration policies constrain women’s flexibility, a key aspect of ghanaian family life, and shape dependencies and inequalities within families.keywordsdestination countrymigration policyfamily reunionfamily migrationresidence permitthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.