Desire to Meet: Introducing the Generational Migrant

This article demonstrates how public dialogue on the term ‘second/third-generation migrant’, currently used within European Union integration policies, create barriers to transcultural dialogue and democratic participation within Europe. Drawing on 75 semi-structured interviews within Dublin, Düsseldorf, Glasgow, London and Stockholm, our dialogical analysis shows how public dialogue articulates three dimensions of developmental psychology foregrounding the figure of a generational migrant with cognitive, moral and seemingly pathological dimensions. We argue that the ordinal logic implied in the concept of the imagined generational migrant reflects not only a desire to control but crucially an absence of a desire to meet the other as coeval. Understanding this desire to control requires reorienting social representations theory from an epistemic subject engaged in perspective-taking, sharing and resisting cultural knowledge towards an ontological subject with imaginative impulses, and novelistic projections about the generational migrant's cultural being. As the term ‘third-generation migrant’ comes into use such integration logic sustains boundaries between those marked as having a migrant background and those unmarked. We propose that a focus on the desire to control is central to cultural psychology’s capacity to interrogate the parameters of public dialogue as well as policy on migration and integration within the European public sphere.