Reframing the lens: transnational youth, lived religion and rethinking mobility and transnationalism

This article reframes transnationalism, the mobilities turn and lived religion by centring African transnational youth. Drawing on comparative multi-sited ethnography in London and Birmingham (UK), Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos (Nigeria) and Harare (Zimbabwe), and interviews with young people aged 15–35 (n = 169) and key informants (n = 39), it advances three linked interventions: youth-centric transnationalism, layered mobilities and lived religion in flux. It shows how youth curate selective, affect-laden cross-border ties through digitally mediated religious publics; how mobility is lived as simultaneous physical, digital and spiritual movement, including those positioned as “left-behind”; and how religious authority is reworked through hybrid, peer-driven and platformed practices. The article proposes a decolonial reconceptualisation of transnationalism through three principles – agency over inheritance, simultaneity over singularity and relationality over institutionalism – shifting migration-and-religion scholarship beyond Eurocentric, adult-centric and institution-bound models. It shows religion as mobility infrastructure under racialised bordering, shaping aspiration, capability and belonging across North – South sites.