The re-conceptualisation of ‘aspiration’ in this part occurs at the crucial moment when the individual aspirations of migrant youth are not realised due to systemic barriers, and when they interact with digital media texts circulating in mediated, globally accessible youth cultures. This engagement is followed by the generation of modes of civic mobility such as selfrepresentation in the media, formal politics and other realms with high visibility and influence. Civic mobility here is understood as young people’s political sensibilities and commitment that translate into civic action in the public sphere, which in turn is impacted by context alongside categories of age, ethnicity, class and gender among others (Gordon, 2008).

While the part on empathy was focused on the feelings and sense of responsibility for making change of non-migrants, the present part moves to centre migrants and their agency. It constitutes the heart of the book as it signals a shift from talking about and responding to migrants to granting them the main platform for voicing their emotions and experiences regarding migration. What this part facilitates is an expanded understanding of the notion of aspiration as it is currently used in migration studies. In effect, it builds a framework that theorises aspiration as a mode of claiming space for the self (and related communities of ethnic origin and practice) in civic society such that it becomes a manifestation of ‘collective aspiration’. This kind of aspiration for the community as a whole, particularly for diverse representation across a range of key realms, is also distinct from the previous migrant generation’s relationship to the host society and merits closer attention.

Specifically, the chapters in this part aim to advance the notion of ‘aspiration’ as it is currently used to understand migrant motivations. In doing so, they take Appadurai’s seminal work on aspiration as a strong feature of cultural capacity that enables human beings to engage their own futures (beyond individual choices) as a point of departure (2004). He sees this manifested as actions and performances that have local cultural force (Appadurai, 2004). In a similar vein, following Bourdieu, Stahl et al describe aspirations as ‘(re)produced through the interaction of habitus, a matrix of dispositions that shape how the individual operates in the social world; capital, which is economic, cultural, social and symbolic; and field, that is, social contexts’ (2018, p 6).