Conceptualizing Wellbeing in the Context of Migration and Youth Transitions

This chapter offers a conceptual framework for rethinking wellbeing through a political economy lens in the context of migration and multiple transitions. It then considers the relevance and application of these conceptualizations of wellbeing to the lives and circumstances of unaccompanied migrant young people undergoing multiple transitions. The fact that young people on the move have unequal access to the resources they value as constitutive of their own wellbeing makes their different trajectories in the context of migration undeniably political. This means that wellbeing lends itself to a political economy analysis, something that is somewhat lacking in current work in the field. The chapter highlights the limitations of prevailing and dominant understandings of wellbeing, in particular their propensity to depoliticize it when its pursuit is fundamentally political, and to individualize it when it is inherently relational.