Introduction: Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/Mobilities in the Asia-Pacific

Young people in the Asia-Pacific increasingly move around for work, education and leisure, and combinations thereof. Asians make up 41 per cent of international migrants worldwide (United Nations 2017) and the region represents diverse flows of both inbound and outbound, short- and long-term migrations. Settler nations with aging populations, like Australia and New Zealand, strategically seek to draw on the mobility aspirations of burgeoning youth populations elsewhere in the region as a migrant labour force but also as consumers of education and tourism experiences. Emerging economic powers like China and India seek to send vast cohorts of young people abroad to obtain skills, and simultaneously attract diaspora returnees and highly skilled foreigners back to work and invest. The increasing reach of multinational corporations across the region creates new opportunities for the circular mobilities of professionals, tracing new patterns of movement alongside traditional migration routes for manual labourers and domestic workers. Intra-regional mobility is increasingly important for youth. For example, while more than half of all tertiary international students globally are from Asia (UNESCO 2013), East Asia and the Pacific are an increasingly significant destination region, hosting 19 per cent of all international enrolments (UNESCO 2016). Further, new virtual mobilities, such as cross-border education programmes and digital outsourcing, position immobile young students and workers – as well as those who prefer to ‘stay’ rather than ‘move’ – into transnational and transregional networks and processes even as they remain in place.

Despite the embedding of cultures of mobility into the lives of many mobile and immobile youth in the Asia-Pacific, contemporary youth mobilities research has been strongly focused on the European Union (EU) (see for example, Marcu 2012; Cairns 2014, 2015; Frändberg 2014; Van Mol 2016; King and Williams 2018), where intra-regional youth mobility is governed by the specific frameworks of EU regionalism (and, post-Brexit, their potential fragmentation). Earlier work on young people and transnationalism in turn tended to focus on the experiential mobilities of Western and predominantly White youth, such as Australians and New Zealanders in London (Conradson and Latham 2005, 2007) or British youth in Australia (Clarke 2004, 2005). A focus on the Asia-Pacific provides not only a contrasting regional case, but also serves to test out and critique some of the concepts that have emerged from the study of youth mobilities in and of the West in different cultural, and indeed cross-cultural, contexts.

In this issue, scholars working with diverse groups of youth across the region of the Asia-Pacific closely examine the different ways young people aspire to be mobile, enact these aspirations and experience their consequences. The collection highlights the actual impacts of different constellations of im/mobilities on young people’s experiences, including how these are configured in relation to immobility, friction and other ‘less-than-mobile’ states of being (e.g. Cresswell 2010); and how contemporary processes of youth mobility are constituted through specific places – via the prevailing political and economic regimes, but also via emplaced cultural logics of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

Several interdisciplinary fields are implicated in the understanding of youth im/mobilities, including youth studies, migration studies and the study of international student mobility (ISM). This issue seeks to open a dialogue between these fields, drawing on a mobilities paradigm to set a renewed research agenda around youth and im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. The papers collectively contribute new empirical and conceptual insights to an emerging interdisciplinary space of ‘youth mobility studies’ (Raffaetà, Baldassar and Harris 2016; van Geel and Mazzucatto 2018; Robertson, Harris and Baldassar 2018), with an empirical focus on the increasingly complex and variegated im/mobilities occurring within the Asia-Pacific region.

In this introduction, we outline the conceptual terrain that binds together the varied empirical analyses in the issue, through a discussion of ‘mobile aspirations’ and youth and adulthood across cultures and spaces. We then turn to three specific and significant thematic areas surrounding mobile aspirations and youth in the Asia-Pacific that the papers in this issue address, namely: educational mobilities and differentiated landscapes of class; ‘mobile femininity’ and the negotiation of gendered life scripts; and temporary migration regimes and the indeterminacy of futures. We address the individual contributions of each paper across these three themes.

Mobile Aspirations: Youth and Adulthood across Cultures and Spaces

Across the Asia-Pacific region, mobility, whether rural-to-urban or transnational, has become an important social marker for understanding the ‘transition’ to adulthood. At the same time, the meanings surrounding youth as a passaging from childhood to adulthood are both varied across places and cultures and undergoing significant transformations in tandem with broader economic and social changes in the region. Scholarly research on youth mobility remains, however, largely underpinned by Western concepts of youth transitions and becomings. One of the most influential contemporary concepts in Western life course scholarship, Jeffrey Arnett’s (2000) ‘emerging adulthood’ describes the late teens and twenties as a liminal life-stage of autonomy and self-exploration prior to settled adulthood. As a cultural construct, the unsettledness and exploration of ‘emerging adulthood’ suggests that this period is the desirable life stage for various kinds of mobility for work, leisure, learning and pleasure. While emergent adulthood is relatively established in the cultural imaginaries of the West, it is still in itself an ‘emergent’ phenomenon in many parts of Asia, becoming most established in urban and middle-class milieus. As Martin (this issue) notes, economic and social change in Asia, most notably the rising ages of marriage and increasing participation in tertiary education are contributing to a ‘stretching’ of youth, often understood as the period in between adolescence and marriage. While this broadens the options and choices for some young people, as Jeffery and McDowell have argued (2004), the crossing over of Western notions of youth transition into non-Euro-American contexts can have marginalising effects on young people in the developing world who may experience difficulty living up to, or may indeed reject or contest, these ideals.

The Asia-Pacific is thus a site in which different understandings of youth as a life-stage are currently co-mingling and transforming in cross-cultural encounters, constantly shifting even as social and economic transformation reshapes local understandings of what it means to move towards adult life. Addressing the lives of young people in diverse Asia-Pacific contexts allows for critical orientations towards the portability, or lack thereof, of dominant concepts like Arnett’s (2000), and others, across places and cultures. Taken together, the papers in this Special Issue reveal the empirical value in theorising life-stages in flexible ways that can bring to light diverse cross-cultural and cross-generational meanings surrounding ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ (Baldassar and Sala 2017). The authors by and large conceptualise youth as an in-between position in which people are moving towards and making adult lives – as a space and time that is both liminal and transitional – rather than a fixed and chronological age range. They unveil in the process the complex social and cultural conditions that shape how people in different contexts understand this life-stage.

The concept of ‘mobile aspirations’ is our jumping off point in this introduction to develop these understandings of youth as ‘liminal and transitional’ in the context of new cultures and practices of im/mobility in the Asia-Pacific. The concept provides a way to frame the intersections of two significant strands of contemporary youth experience which shape the lives of young people who are physically on the move as well as those who remain in place. These are: the way youth is imagined as a period of capacity and desire for mobility before the assumed ‘settled-ness’ of adulthood; and the contemporaneous imagination of youth as a period of ‘futurity’ – in which ‘becoming’ and the making of adult lives are paramount to the social and cultural construction of ‘youth’ as a life-stage and an identity. We posit ‘mobile aspirations’ as encompassing how youth aspire to be mobile, yet also how they construct and create other aspirations for their futures (around education, work, marriage, family or lifestyle) through desires for mobility. ‘Mobile aspirations’ also implies that aspirations are themselves mobile – that they move and transform across places, times and cultures. While not all the papers in this issue focus primarily or explicitly on aspiration as a concept, the idea of ‘mobile aspirations’ as a link between processes of ‘desiring mobility’ and ‘making futures through mobility’ is evoked in different ways in the various contributions through the plans, desires, anticipations, possibilities, expectations and ambitions that shape young people’s imaginaries and experiences of im/mobility across different social and cultural contexts.

Further, aspirations are more than individual plans and desires – they are collective, cultural and embedded within political, discursive and institutional frameworks at local, national and regional levels. Across the Asia-Pacific, young people’s mobilities are increasingly connected to aspirations for both economic security and social autonomy, not just for individuals but for populations of youth. Current national policy frameworks throughout the region tend to encourage youth to be mobile. This reflects the widely-accepted view of ‘aspirational’ transnational mobility – that international experiences will provide young people with enhanced life chances and competitive job skills, as well as benefit national and local communities more broadly through remittances, skills transfer, cultural diplomacy networks and an increasingly cosmopolitan and agile workforce (Robertson et al. 2018).

Aspirations for mobility are, however, equally underpinned by senses of cosmopolitanism and interconnectivity, and senses of increasing precariousness of local and emplaced social and economic security. As Naafs and Skelton (2018: 1) note, ‘while many Asian youth have the possibility of aspiring towards very different futures than their parents could have imagined at the same age, the routes into such futures can be more risky, demanding and insecure’. As such, aspirational positionings of mobility as the pathway to upward social mobility and increased cultural capital can obscure the way mobility serves to reinscribe enduring patterns of social division, and how different forms of mobility are unevenly experienced by different groups of young people depending on complex social conditions across the different places they move between. Further, in a context in which mobility is often seen to confer differential advantage or social capital, there are consequences of immobility for contemporary youth. As such, this collection highlights the divergent ways that aspirations for mobility work through the structures (familial, cultural, religious and institutional) that govern young people’s lives, and the way that the possibilities for and outcomes of im/mobility are often starkly differentiated across different social groups and contexts. Like Stahl et al. (2017) the papers in this collection largely consider the act of aspiring as a process of negotiation of various societal and institutional discourses and recognise that the ‘virtuousness’ of hypothetical mobility ‘depends on the who, the where and the how’ (Carling and Collins 2018: 917).

Aspiration is also conceptually useful as it links and simultaneously problematises the two primary fields that coalesce around an emergent ‘youth mobilities’ research agenda: youth studies and migration studies. The contributions in this Special Issue not only bridge the fields of migration studies and youth studies but fill crucial lacunae in the spaces where they intersect. Youth studies has often focused on young people as emplaced, rather than mobile subjects and has tended towards Northcentric and methodologically nationalist approaches (Nilan 2011; Robertson et al. 2018). In turn, migration studies, with a few exceptions (e.g. Coe et al. 2011), seldom foregrounds youth experiences (Cairns 2014), tending to focus on adult migration in theorising migrants’ belonging and identity formation. In terms of research within Asia-Pacific contexts, there are some specific empirical gaps. While labour migration and marriage migration are on the increase in the region, the focus in emerging research on transnational parenting and transnational families tends to exclude young people’s voices over those of their parents (Khoo and Yeoh this issue). Similarly, while there is a prolific scholarship on international students from Asia, student mobility’s connections to other forms of mobility and to immobility, and to the lifecourse more broadly, are yet to be fully explored (Findlay et al. 2018; Prazeres 2017).

In migration studies, aspiration has recently been positioned as a ‘driver’ of mobility, in terms of ‘aspirations to migrate’. Importantly, as illustrated in Carling and Collins’s work (2018), aspiration is used to highlight ‘states of feeling and circulation of affect’ (913) in migration processes and is integral to constructing the temporality of migration as future-oriented and ongoing. In youth-focused research, recent work in Asian contexts has predominantly explored aspiration in terms of young people and their families aspiring towards employment and education opportunities and outcomes (Koo 2012; Kölbel 2013; Brown et al. 2017; Khoo and Yeoh 2017; Naafs and Skelton 2018). Conceptually, Zipin et al. (2015) have crucially rethought aspiration for young people beyond discourses of human capital and economic competitiveness, showing how aspirations are grounded in multiple logics that emerge from populist–ideological mediations, biographic–historical legacies and emergent senses of future potential. In this Issue, we bring together these strands of literature to understand what constitutes the dynamic processes through which youth make and remake their futures while they are ‘on the move’ or ‘in place’. Here, aspiration can serve to stretch the analytic boundaries, particularly the temporal edges, of ethnographic research. It foregrounds not just the current social conditions of our interlocutors, but their becomings, imaginings and possibilities – how they understand and reach for particular futures, and how these futures may or may not be realised. Yet, at the same time, following Crivello (2015), we reveal how aspirations do not only pertain to abstract futures – rather, aspirations actively influence present actions and realities and are constituted through particular spaces.

Culture matters to the interventions we raise here and to the ‘youth mobilities’ agenda more broadly. First and foremost, while local demographic and economic pressures (such as rising education aspirations and population increases) impel young people to move for education and employment opportunities (Hettige 2005), they are also driven by the ‘globalisation’ of youth aspirations. Young people are influenced by circulations of global culture in terms of what they aspire to (Skrbis et al. 2014), although such aspirations are classed and therefore ‘out of reach’ for some (Chun and Han 2015; Brown et al. 2017; Naafs 2018). Secondly, questions of culture shape how the value of youth mobility is framed in different social contexts. Research that sees mobility as enabling youthful exploration and self-discovery, as a means to extend the period of youth or to ‘suspend’ the start of adult life, often focus on White and middle-class youth such as Amit’s (2011) work on young Canadians, Frändberg’s (2015) on Swedes and Wilson’s (2006) on New Zealanders. This reflects culturally embedded discourses of youth as a period of autonomy and self-focus within Western cultures. Young Asians, in contrast, are more often configured as caught within the collective and calculative strategies of the Asian transnational family for flexible economic accumulation (see for example, Fong 2011; Tse and Waters 2013), even though this is increasingly being challenged (Cheng 2018 ; Collins and Ho 2018). Cultures of youth mobility are in reality, however, increasingly cross-cutting and intertwined. Narratives of self-discovery and self-actualisation can exist in concert with desires to accumulate economic and cultural capital and fulfil familial obligations, for both marginalised and middling youth (Cheng 2014; Yoon 2014; Beazley 2015). In fact, the meanings and values that underpin im/mobility move across time and place as people move and transform as different cultures of im/mobility rub up against each other. Finally, culture and interculturality matter not just empirically, but also epistemologically to the development of the youth mobilities field. Pam Nilan (2011) demands that youth studies must cross cultures because ‘dominant interpretive paradigms describe most accurately young people in the nations and cultures where these paradigms are produced’, and these nations and cultures remain predominantly Western. The cultural mobility and critical mutability of youth studies concepts is even more pressing when the young people being researched are themselves moving across and between national and cultural borders.

Educational Mobilities and Differentiated Landscapes of Class

Three papers in this Special Issue focus on educational mobilities, a dominant mode through which the transnational mobilities of Asian young people have been explored in the existing literature. The majority of research on Asian international students, however, focuses on traditional flows from Asia to universities in the Anglophone West. These papers in contrast address intra-Asian mobilities as well as students remaining in place to study who are nonetheless significantly impacted by aspirations for social and geographic mobility. Taken together, these three papers importantly challenge dominant narratives of education, mobility and aspiration, rethinking education as ‘upward mobility’ and educational mobility as ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’.

Yi’En Cheng’s paper (this issue) provides a critical and evocative contribution to the expansive body of work on the educational mobilities of middle-class young Asians. As Cheng notes, in the educational mobilities literature ‘mobility continues to be the privileged lens of critical analysis whereas immobility fills up the interpretive space of a negation or lack.’ Cheng’s paper, in response, draws on Anna Tsing’s (2011) concept of friction to explore how mobility and immobility function as ‘co-constitutive elements in the making of educational experiences’ for young Singaporeans who engage in transnational educational in situ in Singapore through private, overseas accredited degree programmes. Cheng argues that Singapore’s ‘globalising aspirations’ as a nation-state require middle-class Singaporean youth to invest in their own mobility aspirations. Thus, even as they remain ‘in place’, transnational degree students develop meanings around mobility and immobility that are significant to the way they imagine their futures. However, despite the ubiquity of ‘mobile aspirations’, complex hierarchies of value privilege students who study overseas or attend local public universities over transnational private degree students who are squeezed out of Singapore’s competitive higher education system. This creates various ‘educational frictions’ – including striated velocities of social mobility and complex renderings of classed subjectivities.

Johanna Waters (this issue) also turns to some of the less acknowledged dimensions of educational mobilities in the Asia-Pacific – in this case, examining the ‘profound structuring effect’ of ‘domesticated’ international education within Hong Kong. Drawing on over a decade of research across multiple projects, Waters argues that international education in Hong Kong ‘has become a key differentiator of social, economic and personal success in the territory’, yet is itself highly differentiated. The paper illustrates this through exploring the tiered distinctions between domestic education at national universities (via success in high school examinations); overseas education (via moving aboard to study) and transnational education (TNE) (via accessing ‘foreign’ academic credentials in Hong Kong). These differentiated routes ‘result in profoundly different opportunities and outcomes for young people’. Domestic education and overseas education are both highly valued, yet TNE is so devalued that some qualifications, Waters argues, become more akin to the production of ‘waste’ than ‘value’. Through this analysis, Waters brings im/mobility politics to the fore, showing that the mobility capital (the inherent value in being mobile) of overseas education mitigates the ‘failure’ of not gaining a domestic university place, yet the institutional cultural capital of locally obtained foreign qualifications does not. It is not just the tangible outcomes of careers and earning capacities that are shaped by these hierarchies – young people in Hong Kong are ‘consumed by dominant narratives of higher quality, and lesser quality, humans’ that ascribe moral and personal value to these educational routes as ‘successes’ versus ‘failures’. Waters highlights important components of mobile aspiration – internalised ideals of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ – that render the structures that make educational (dis)advantage hidden.

While Waters and Cheng have unpacked the class differentiated educational mobilities within Hong Kong and Singapore, Peidong Yang (this issue) compares classed mobilities across differing sending and receiving contexts – ‘high achieving’ student-migrants from China who come to Singapore via ‘foreign talent’ migration policies and ‘low performing’ youth from India who seek out English medium medical education at second tier/provincial Chinese universities. Yang explores how, in the context of widening participation in international education throughout Asia, class and academic ability are intrinsically linked in differentiating mobilities and their outcomes, and how hierarchies of destination emerge in relation to class differentiated student flows. Yang lays out a detailed comparison of the multiple layers of structural conditions that shape the physical, social and cultural mobilities of these divergent groups of young people. This comparison unveils how, although both groups travel internationally to access education with aspirations for social mobility, MBBS Indian students (an emergent and ‘aspiring’ form of student mobility from the insecure lower section of the Indian middle class) remain largely socially and culturally immobile, constrained to the campus while in China, and with employment outcomes highly contingent upon return. ‘Foreign talent’ Chinese students (an entrenched and privileged form of student mobility from socially advantaged backgrounds in urban China) meanwhile, do not experience drastic social mobility, but are rather able to successfully move from one middle-class sphere to another, and, despite some constraints from migration policies and local xenophobia, function successfully and cross-culturally in Singaporean workplaces. Yang importantly reminds us of the potentially differentiated impacts of market-driven versus state-driven mobilities – showing how state and market, along with students’ own ‘differential starting social positions’ play a large role in structuring opportunities and outcomes within an increasingly diverse international education space.

‘Mobile Femininity’ and the Negotiation of Gendered Life Scripts

Asian women’s experiences of gendered migration processes have most frequently been explored via transnational mothers and/or domestic workers, as well as marriage migrants. Fran Martin and Choon Yen Khoo and Brenda Yeoh’s papers break significant new ground in understandings of feminine life scripts and mobility for young Asian women. Martin (this issue) explores the lives of young, unmarried Chinese women studying in Melbourne, Australia, showing how mobility creates a temporal and spatial ‘zone of suspension’ in which the meanings that surround youth, femininity and intimacy are renegotiated. Martin’s particular focus is on how the post-90s generation of urban and middle-class Chinese women mobilise their geographic mobility to rethink the life course to include the possibility of pre-marital intimate relationships. Martin importantly draws on, yet also critiques, Arnett’s (2000) ‘emerging adulthood’ as a liminal period of self-exploration (including sexual exploration) prior to settled adulthood. Ideas of a ‘stretched’ and autonomous period of youth are increasingly present in contemporary urban Chinese youth cultures. Yet Martin’s analysis of how her interlocutors grapple with the ‘time out’ and ‘freedom’ to explore pre-martial sexual relationships and co-habitation afforded by the liminal time of educational mobility suggests that we must be wary of uncritically mobilising such scholarly concepts of youth across geographic, gendered and ethno-cultural divides. Martin argues that the apparent ‘freedoms’ of both an extended life stage and transnational mobility remain undercut by ‘the dominant gender scripts’ of China’s post-1978 Reforms Era which ‘continue to produce coercive forms of gendered normativity’.

Khoo and Yeoh’s paper (this issue) also deals with the nuances of how cultural scripts around feminine roles and the life-course frame young women’s mobility projects, in this case in the lives of young women in rural Java. The paper shows how marital and migratory aspirations intertwine for these young women, who have grown up in migrant-sending villages where women’s participation in transnational labour migration has produced tangible changes in gender roles within domestic life. This ‘culture of migration’, in which the mobility of women from the village is increasingly normalised, sits alongside, and often in tension with, national Indonesian normative gender ideologies as well as local ethno-religious Javanese norms of feminine life. Khoo and Yeoh provide a particularly important perspective in this Special Issue, in that their work is situated in a cultural context within which aspiration has a markedly different ontological framing than in the Western contexts that have shaped many previous scholarly understandings of youth aspiration. For these Javanese women, youth is a liminal space in between their ethno-religious duties as daughters in the natal family and as wives in forming their (future) martial households. Aspirations are not open sets of individualised desires and possibilities – roles as wives, mothers and homemakers remain cosmologically ‘pre-destined’ and women’s immobility is still largely culturally valorised. Yet, as aspirations for mobility are increasingly habituated within the villages, gender scripts are themselves recalibrated to ‘include migration as part of women’s normative responsibilities so long as these are seen as improving family welfare.’ Aspirations are thus complex, emergent and ambivalent as young women contemplate the intertwined life events of marriage, motherhood and migration. Despite vastly different empirical contexts, Martin and Khoo and Yeoh’s contributions both argue that despite the possibilities for rescripting feminine identities and lives that mobility offers, the patriarchal quality of gender relations often remains unchanged – for young women on the move, resisting the gender norms of where they come from is a risk-ridden process within which restrictive policing of femininity reasserts even from afar.

Temporary Migration Regimes and the Indeterminacy of Futures

Temporary migration is a key avenue for transnational youth mobility in the Asia-Pacific, in a regional context in which migration is becoming increasingly about transience rather than permanent settlement (Gomes 2016). Contributions to this Special Issue from Francis Collins and Kumiko Kawashima importantly highlight the indeterminacy of youth futures under contemporary temporary migration regimes that value workers in the early stages of adult life yet often fail to secure their futures in either sending or receiving countries. These two contributions show how temporary migration is often far from a discrete and bounded period of mobility but is instead linked to ongoing aspirations to stay on or keep moving. Collins’ (this issue) focus on young people living in Auckland, New Zealand on temporary visas reveals the emotional and aspirational dimensions of ‘provisional migration’, and the particular role of the emotional valence of hope in driving and sustaining youth mobility even in the face of disruptions and difficulties. Collins highlights the multiple ways that hope surfaces in how young people continue to ‘move towards the ambiguous aspirations involved with youth migration’ despite their uncertain futures in New Zealand. Hope is an intersubjective emotion that circulates between young migrants, their parents, and other actors such as education and migration agents. It is also firmly embedded within provisional migration regimes that postpone the acquisition of rights and serve to funnel aspirational young migrants into the international education sector as consumers as well as into the precarious labour market as workers. As such, hope can intermingle with negative emotions such as doubt, frustration and anxiety and ultimately work to construct marginalisation. Collins’s work shows clearly the intersections of the emotional and structural in how aspiration and bodies remain on the move within wider discourses of youth as a ‘hopeful’ period in life.

Kumiko Kawashima’s (this issue) interlocutors, Japanese temporary migrants employed as digital service workers by multinational IT corporations in Dalian, China, similarly face uncertain futures. Kawashima explores narratives of (im)mobilities in the lives of these young and mid-life Japanese workers to reveal the mutually constitutive trajectories of migration and the life course. Mobility provides a temporary respite from the often crushing pressures of normative life-course aspirations in Japan, which are exacerbated by recession-era changes to youth labour markets. Dalian provides a ‘suspended existence’ within transnational time–space, a ‘rupture in the perceived linearity of life’. Yet, despite short-term boosts in their spending power and social status facilitated by their move to Dalian, limitations on the digital service workers’ successful re-entry into the Japanese labour market block not only paths to class mobility but also to the normative adulthood that many still aspire to – namely stable employment, financial security and marriage. Kawashima’s focus on individuals at the ‘edges’ of youth and entering middle life illuminates the longer-term impacts of youthful mobility in the realisation and reimagining of adulthood. Many of her interlocutors remain in life-course and professional ‘limbo’ in Dalian or reshape their aspirations towards ongoing mobility to another out-sourcing locality in Asia, rather than returning to Japan. Kawashima not only decisively unpacks the role transnational mobility plays in life-course planning in a context of unstable class mobility, but also complicates understandings of transnational labour by problematising assumptions around the privileged mobility of corporate professional workers.

Conclusions

The papers in this Special Issue provide timely empirical insights into how cultures of mobility increasingly shape young people’s aspirations, decisions and values in the Asia-Pacific, and how they simultaneously reshape and rescript the meaning of youth across cultural and geographic borders. Foregrounding differentiated class landscapes in educational mobility, ‘mobile femininity’ and gendered life scripts, and the indeterminacy of futures through migration policies, the contributions also collectively enable some fruitful conceptual re-imaginings for the emergent research field of youth mobility studies.

We have argued in this introduction for the concept of ‘mobile aspirations’ as a means to develop understandings of youth as a ‘liminal and transitional’ life-stage in the context of new cultures and practices of im/mobility – bridging and building upon work on ‘aspirations to migrate’ in migration studies and ‘aspirations for adult life’ in youth studies. Youth is imagined as a period of capacity and desire for mobility before the assumed ‘settled-ness’ of adulthood as well as a period in which future adult lives are continually made and remade. Mobile aspirations thus concern individual and collective aspirations for young people to be or become mobile, but also the inter-relationship between im/mobility and aspirations for other social markers of successful passaging to adult life.

Here, as the papers in this issue reveal, mobility can reinscribe the normative markers of successful adulthood, or make them harder to reach, creating various frictions and suspensions. Yet mobility can also become a vehicle through which young people actively adjourn life-course expectations or aspire towards alternative routes and possibilities. Both normative and ‘alternative’ aspirations and the possibility of their realisation remain significantly gendered and classed; they are often in ongoing negotiation across complex mobility pathways and projects. The papers also serve to highlight the importance of transforming social and economic conditions in all the spaces that make up young people’s transnational, or even global, landscapes of aspiration – sending and receiving country policies and economies, highly localised cultural conditions, globalising scapes of youth culture, and the specific generational positioning of cohorts of youth. Further, papers in this issue do not simply gesture to immobility as mobility’s binary. They take seriously the lived entanglements of mobility and immobility and their consequences. Mobility is often still privileged in relation to immobility, but it can also create its own precarities and marginalities. In addition, different forms of mobility are very much valued differently, and the same mobility trajectories can have radically different spatio-temporal outcomes for different subjects, creating striated routes and velocities, blocked futures, liminal presents and renegotiated life scripts.

Finally, even though this Issue focuses on youth mobilities in the Asia-Pacific context, the papers should ideally be read in tandem with existing scholarship about youth mobilities in and of the West in a bid to develop comparative insights and build productive conversations. At the same time that papers in this collection depict textured lives that are locally and regionally specific, the processes and forces that shape ‘mobile aspirations’ in this part of the world may resonate with those operating from afar, including the increasing precaritization among sections of youth worldwide amidst neoliberalizing geo-economic conditions that impact upon young people’s mobility projects. It is also important to acknowledge that this collection alone does not encompass the diverse forms of mobility and immobility experienced by young people in this region, including ‘unfree’ migrations that are exploitative, illegal, or illicit (Huijsmans and Baker 2012); those occurring under violent geopolitical regimes which disrupt young lives and their families (Ball and Moselle 2016); or the everyday border-crossing practices that are the reality for many youths seeking livelihood sustenance (Huijsmans 2018). As such, the Special Issue represents a partial understanding of im/mobile young lives in the Asia-Pacific but at the same time hopes to begin a longer dialogue on the connections between youths and im/mobilities, as well as what these relationships can tell us about contemporary political, economic, and cultural change.

ORCID

Yi’En Cheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8897-0372