In recent years, researchers of historical migration have grown increasingly interested in the mobile phases of life characterized by the extraordinary uncertainty of “being in transit” – phases in which people had little or no agency to decide on their further path, mostly in forced migration contexts. Scholars have long worked to raise awareness that migration is anything but a purposeful, linear process, and that decisions and movements migrants make before, during, and after migration are part of their mobile story. So far, however, historians have paid little attention to the “during” part. Thus, they have not paid much attention to the fact that many migrants were forced to cope with long periods of transit, not seldom across the globe. Moreover, research has only recently begun to address migrant groups that seem to have had no or very limited historical agency.

This roundtable will focus on one group rather neglected in the literature: children and young adults who had to come of age in a long state of transit with little or no contact with their families. Some also lived in very strange circumstances – in the northwestern hemisphere, in colonial or semi-colonial spaces, and in rapidly changing political settings due to war and violence. The roundtable will assemble European and North American scholars to discuss the question of how two research fields – the history of migration and global transit, on the one hand, and the history of children and youth, on the other – can be fruitfully connected, and which research strategies and primary sources are applicable or most promising in this endeavor.

The roundtable has three principle aims:

1) Speakers will discuss their research on the competency, agency, and interactions of young migrants in various transit countries and in situations in which they could regain autonomy, control, or allegiance. The researchers will show how they interpret sources of the young migrants’ transit and critically classify missing sources in a global perspective;

2) it will discuss and highlight promising new insights gained from integrating age and transit as aspects of migration more thoroughly in historical migration research and provide an impetus for applying a similar methodology to related areas, such as the histories of emotions, of gender, of families, or of knowledge;

3) it will stimulate a debate about how best to communicate these transit stories and to integrate aspects such as “in-betweenness” and “age” in teaching and digital history projects. The participants will also explain how they use digital research resources and digital methods.