Empathy Across Difference: Migrant Youth and Transcultural Capital

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore the diversity, histories, and social experiences of migrant youth in Melbourne and Toronto and how they negotiate difference and otherness in their everyday lives. By moving away from the tensions and problems that have often been associated with migration and diversity, we explore how migrant youth’s engagement with multiple cultural systems does in fact engender empathy as a valuable form of transcultural capital. As such, we highlight individual agency in negotiating difference in ways that enable migrant youth to understand and accept ‘the otherness of others’ from a critical, self-reflexive stance. In a context of an increasingly interconnected, diverse, but yet unequal world, this ability of migrant youth to navigate and negotiate difference and nurture empathy is not only an important contribution to the practice and labour of living together, but also to an ever more valuable transcultural ethos and practical orientation that should be valued, fostered, and mobilised.