Becoming Adult on the Move: Migration Journeys, Encounters and Life Transitions

This edited collection situates the migration of children and young people into Europe within a global framework of analysis and provides a holistic perspective that encompasses cultural media, ethnographic research and policy analysis. Drawing on a unique study of young unaccompanied migrants who subsequently became ‘adult’ within the UK and Italy, it examines their different trajectories and how they were impacted by their ability to secure legal status. Divided into three interlinked sections, it begins by examining the cultural repertoires about migration and adulthood to which migrants are sensitized in their countries of origin from a young age. This forms the contexts within which their direct experiences of turning 18 in a different country are explored. These combined insights are framed by an analysis of related policies which bureaucratically and institutionally shape these migratory experiences. This interdisciplinary volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of migration studies, international development, geography, sociology, anthropology, youth studies, law, education, health and wellbeing, social care and cultural studies.

Elaine Chase is Professor of Education, Wellbeing and International Development at the IOE,  University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society.  Her research focuses on the sociological dimensions of health and wellbeing, particularly for communities likely to face marginalisation and discrimination.

Nando Sigona is Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham., UK.  His research interests include undocumented migration, child and youth mobility and camps and urban diversity.

Dawn Chatty is Emerita Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, UK. She is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with refugee young people and mobile pastoral tribes.