Young connected migrants: Remaking Europe from below through encapsulation and cosmopolitanization

Abstract

Young connected migrants challenge exclusionary European understandings of white, secular, middle-class European family life. A better understanding of how migrants digitally ‘do family’ across borders and simultaneously use digital media to establish new local connections is urgently needed. Contributing to the emerging research field of digital migration studies, this chapter shows how young migrants digitally articulate their presence in Europe on their own terms vis-à-vis resurgent discourses about the failure of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiments, and Islamophobia. Moroccan-Dutch youth in the Netherlands, young Somalis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and young Londoners of various ethnic backgrounds show they digitally stake out their positionalities vis-à-vis these discourses, both by turning towards members of their own communities living overseas (“encapsulation”) as well as by engaging in intercultural dialogue across cultural differences (“cosmopolitanization) (Christensen & Jansson, 2014).