This paper develops a theoretical framework through which to study the relationship between youth’s circular mobility and their transnational educational trajectories. Two main strands of literature deal with migration, young people and education. The first focuses on the effects of migration on children/youths, focusing either on children who stay behind while their parents migrate (Parreñas 2005; Mazzucato et al. 2014), or children who themselves migrate, even independently of their parents (Hashim 2007). Yet between these two extremes is the possibly more common phenomenon of youths with a migrant background who circulate on a frequent and regular basis between their country of origin and their country of residence (Bledsoe and Soe 2011). Transnational migration studies have argued that people who migrate are engaged in multiple ways with their countries of residence as well as the countries where they or their parents come from (Glick Schiller et al. 1992). This paper uses a transnational perspective to study the type of youth circulation that Ghanaian youths engage in when they travel between Ghana and The Netherlands. The second strand of literature explores the effects of migration on children’s educational achievements (Portes & Rumbaut 2005). Most studies have a strong focus on a limited set of educational performance measures such as grades and class cohorts, and compare these to the achievements of native peers. These studies leave underexplored how the actual experience of circular mobility affects education. Moreover, this narrow focus on educational outcomes does not reflect the possible accumulation of social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) that may be developed when youths are raised transnationally. A transnational perspective allows conceptualizing educational trajectories as being shaped by multiple localities and cultural notions through the acquisition of transnational social and cultural capital. Drawing on ethnographic cases collected amongst Ghanaian youths in The Netherlands, the paper will develop a theoretical framework that brings together the concepts of circular mobility, educational trajectories and transnational social and cultural capital.

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