Youth on the Move: Mobility, Digital Mediation, and Individualized Life Courses

In many societies, the standardized youth transition—from education to work, partnership, and family formation—has lost much of its normative force. Young people are expected to assemble biographies under uncertainty. Existing debates on life-course individualization have examined school-to-work transitions and family formation in depth, but less attention has been paid to how mobility and digital mediation reshape transition.
This session invites papers that rethink youth and young adulthood through "movement." Movement refers not only to residential relocation or migration, but also to multi-sited belonging, platform-mediated relationships, and forms of connection that make it possible to live across places. Drawing on the mobilities paradigm and Kaufmann's concept of motility, we ask how mobility, digital media, and unequal capacities to move shape young people's residential, occupational, and relational decisions.
We especially welcome papers on rural–urban and counter-urban migration, U-turn and return migration, relational-population initiatives, multi-local living, and digitally mediated decision-making. We are interested in analyses that treat mobility not merely as a demographic or regional-policy instrument, but as a biographical project embedded in inequalities, family ties, work, intimacy, and place. We also welcome critical studies of policies, institutions, and programmes that seek to channel young people's movement—and of how young people inhabit, repurpose, or resist them.
In line with "Global Sociology in Turbulent Times," the session brings East Asian and other non-Western cases into dialogue with Western frameworks of youth, mobility, and individualization. Empirical, theoretical, and comparative papers are welcome.