PAPER – “In this country you can’t … have like a full tradition …, it’s a little bit of everything”: Dialogs of identity for 1.5 and second generations in Australia.

The experiences of 1.5 and second-generation children of immigrants are often conflated with those of first-generation migrants or collapsed as homogenous within the category of generational status. In this article, we suggest that these young people occupy a unique ontological position from and through which they navigate their life world and negotiate contexts that shape and constrain their subjectivities. Informed by dialogical approaches the current study sought to understand the dynamics of identity and belonging for ethnicized and racialized 1.5 and second generations in Australia. Data analysis of semistructured interviews conducted with 17 young people who are 1.5 and second-generation individuals lead to the construction of two key themes that capture the dynamics of identity and belonging. The main themes are (a) dialogs of otherness and belonging and (b) agentic border crossing. The findings provide insight into the unique experiences of these young people who often have a border consciousness that enables them to discern the dynamics of difference in their negotiation of everyday settings. The findings also shed light on the emotional and interpretive labor involved in navigating various spaces and contexts that continued to be saturated with essentialist and homogenous understandings of ethnic and multicultural identities. The implications of the study are discussed in terms of discourses of race and whiteness that continue to shape experiences of various diasporas in minority world contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)