Blood Feuds, Rap and Romance: Cultural Conceptions of Albanian Youth Migration

Children and young people from Albania typically form one of the largest groups of asylum-seeking children in the UK. This chapter explores some of the cultural conceptions around migration and mobility which may shape Albanian young people’s decision-making in relation to migration and reflect and/or subvert underlying biases and stereotypes in law and policy decisions. The chapter examines norms and values surrounding Albanian youth migration through the lens of cultural media. Alongside exploring how stereotypes play out in cultural constructions of Albanian migrants historically, it considers in parallel how they feature in a selection of four contemporary films and in the (self-) representation of Albanian unaccompanied youth in a sample of popular social media. To this end, the chapter considers how the dominant discourses regarding Albanian youth migration are reflected and challenged in cultural media in the past and present; and how the consumption of cultural media influences the construction and performance of identity by Albanian youth in different domestic and migratory contexts. It builds on earlier work by Schwandner-Sievers and Nicola Mai which shows how dominant essentialized ideas of Albanians as ‘backward’ and ‘criminal’ can act as powerful forces of social exclusion at individual and collective levels for young people who migrate.