‘And Then COVID Happened’: The Impact of the Pandemic on Transition Temporalities for Mobile Youth

This article explores how the COVID-19 pandemic affected mobile young people’s experiences of the temporality of transitions to adulthood. Young people are today the most mobile population globally, and mobility has necessarily become integral to youth-to-adulthood transitions. By adopting transition temporalities as an analytical key, we consider the impact of pandemic immobility on the transition experiences of young movers who, when the pandemic hit, found themselves stuck not only in place but also in time. Drawing on in-depth interviews undertaken during the pandemic with transnationally mobile young people (aged 18–30) who left Australia for abroad or moved to Australia from abroad, we explore the temporal impact on transitions of the sudden disruption to their mobility. We examine how experiences of ‘decelerated’ or ‘accelerated’ transitions, and ‘lost’ and ‘suspended’ time, were reflected through refigured staging of adulthood milestones and pathways and changing temporal imaginaries of mobile life pathways. The immobility imposed by the pandemic, which occurred in the midst of a study on youth mobility, became a revealing test case: the absence of mobility highlighted the crucial role of transnational mobility in shaping young people’s transitions to adulthood and imagined futures.