Agentive Transitions in- between Ethnic Communities and Cosmopolitan Landscapes.

Scholarship on transition to adulthood in circumstances of mobility, draw the attention on how sensitivities and practices of belonging play a role in such a fragmentary and tortuous process (Cuervo and Mc.Pherson 2024, Cuzzocrea 2018, Harris 2020). In migratory contexts, the enactment of adulthood occurs through transnational geographies and multiple temporalities, therefore the question of where and in relation to whom it occurs, becomes central in the analysis of “mobile transitions” (Robertson et. al 2017). The relational nature of “belonging” that develops in transnational communities as a form of re-embedding, opens important scenarios to observe how mobile youths’ project of the self is negotiated through circuits of recognition involving notions of respectability and authenticity (Habib and Ward 2020).

When youths from developing countries approach Europe, the system of reception promotes their assimilation as detached individuals, often disregarding the role played by transnational relations and ethnic communities in orienting their trajectories. Eurocentric discourses on loneliness and vulnerability frame adolescents' migration within the legal category of unaccompanied foreign minors, thus reproducing a binarism between the wandering cosmopolite traveller and its racialised “other” in need for guidance and protection. However, the empirical reality of migrant minors in Europe shows that an important percentage leave reception structures in order to benefit of the opportunities offered by their network of co-nationals (Euro-med 2023).

My research explores how Egyptian unaccompanied minors and youths in Milan experience transitions to adulthood within their ethnic enclave, in order to acknowledge how this relational environment influences their trajectories, encouraging or limiting their drive for exploration and self-discovery. Starting with the analytical assessment of ethnic communities as ambivalent and contested “islands of belonging” -both oppressive and enabling, the presentation will bring qualitative findings on how Egyptian youths agentively negotiate their attachment to the community with cosmopolitan aspirations and desire for self-determination.