5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In youth studies, ‘belonging’ has been applied in heterogenous ways as a lens on mobility, spanning both the tradition of transition and cultures, albeit with different preoccupations. However, it has not necessarily been conceptualised or operationalized exhaustively (Harris, Cuervo & Wyn 2021). It has often been constructed as simply a constraint on mobility, or alternatively, as an inherently good phenomenon - an ambivalence which may, inter alia, lead to ineffective policies.

Looking at practices of youth belonging in a variety of contexts inflected by global processes of mobility can offer alternative and more nuanced analysis. Indeed, mobility shapes the experience of belonging across contexts characterized by different socio-economic factors, but also different territorial and geographical conditions.

This session considers in particular how insularity and ‘island’ imaginaries can shape the resources and aspirations available for local youth, and hence orientations to move and/or migrate. It explores how mobility and insularity might define, together, a dimension of belonging that is in turn processually re-shaped, and that can purposely be contrasted and compared to other realities which have so far been referred to in literature as rural vs urban; global south vs global north; local vs cosmopolitan. The session elicits papers offering approaches beyond these dyadic conceptualizations to bring research findings and new conceptual framings to a global discussion considering ‘insularity’ as a fruitful contribution to understandings of youth belonging in mobility.