The Politics of Wellbeing in Transition: Young Adults Seeking Futures in the Context of Migration

The Politics of Wellbeing in Transition examines the factors that can either help or hinder of young people’s health and well-being through the lens of migration and migration control. It draws on data from a three-year-long study that examined former unaccompanied migrant children and young people with varying immigration statuses as they made the transition to adulthood. The accounts of the lives of young people from Afghanistan, Albania, and Eritrea presented in this book reveal the complexity realities that lie behind the concept of wellbeing within contexts of fluctuation and uncertainty; and how the ability to secure subjective well-being is governed by factors including country of origin, ethnicity, class, caste, and gender. By situating this work within an interdisciplinary analysis of wellbeing and how it has been conceptualized to date, this book highlights the limitations of existing understandings and how they might better capture the realities of what wellbeing means for lives in transition. At the same time Chase demonstrates the inherently political nature of wellbeing as a theory and a domain of policy and practice--to understand the promotion of well-being in the context of youth migration means critically engaging with issues of power, social justice, inequity, and discrimination.