Exploring the “Age Question” in Research on Young Migrants in Southeast Asia

Recent years have seen a blossoming of research on children and young people as migrants in the Southeast Asian context. This article takes the form of a stock-taking exercise of this rapidly growing new field of research. Yet, it also asks “what’s new?” thereby contrasting and comparing contemporary scholarship with earlier work on young people and mobility in the region. The concept of age is central to the exercise of studying children and youth as a specific group of migrants, yet it is seldom subject to much conceptual scrutiny. Drawing on research from across the Southeast Asian region I illustrate how diverse conceptualizations of age can be recognized in various dimensions of the social process of migration and how these conceptual tools help illuminate migration as a relational and generational process.