Research aims
This project aims to:
1. Map transcultural capital and its impact on migrant youth’s negotiation of cultural identity;
2. Explore how migrant youth understand, negotiate, and interpret transcultural capital for their own social purposes;
3. Analyse whether (and yes how) transcultural capital can impact political attachment vis-à-vis the host state often defined in terms of ‘common territory, common language, common past and future, and a homogeneous racial and ethnic identity’.
In addressing these aims the project proposes to recalibrate the concept of transcultural capital as an analytical framework to understand how migrant youth foster ‘multiple ways of being and belonging and in understanding how [they] make sense of their identity’[2], particularly in relation to cultural connectivity and transnational mobility. This emphasises the knowledge and skills that migrant youth access and develop as potential assets, for themselves, their communities, and the societies in which they live; rather than viewing migrant diversity as a source of estrangement, disengagement and disillusionment leading to civic and social exclusion.
[2] Moskal, M & Sime, D (2015) 'Polish Migrant Children’s Transcultural Lives and Transnational Language Use', Central and Eastern European Migration Review, vol. 5, pp. 35-48.