https://beingsouthasian - Studying cultural identity in South Asian diasporic youth, offline and online.

Immigration, while always being a salient feature of human life, has gained considerable prominence in modern society, and while the effects of immigration are realized across ages, children of immigrations are especially vulnerable. By virtue of having to spend their formative years across multiple geographical, political and socio-cultural locations, these young members of the immigrant community are especially vulnerable to the processes of cultural identity creation, experiencing cross-cultural streams in manners more nuanced and complicated than among adult immigrants. Further, within the movements of global immigration, South Asian society constitutes a greatly substantial proportion of the migrant population, and the South Asian cultural identity is robust in its individuality, making it more resilient in the face of competing cultural influences, courtesy of immigration. A steady increase in flows of immigration has also made its mark in the digital realm, with the immigrant communities using digital platforms and outlets to engage with, educate about and seek solidarity from fellow diasporic members, suggested the existence, development and constant evolving of a digital, diasporic sphere. The focus of this research design was on cultural identity within young members of the South Asian global immigrant community, exploring the validity of the robustness of the South Asian identity. Given the digital predispositions of the younger members of the global South Asian Diaspora, in examining cultural identity, this research design further hypothesized that there existed a diasporic, digital space, sustained by concepts of collective, cultural memory. Owing to the discursive nature of the research topics, the study was conducted qualitatively. 10 indepth interviews were conducted with members of a younger sub-diaspora under the South Asian immigrant community. Following a multi-tiered coding approach, and using practices of inductive, thematic analysis, the outcomes of this research design could be conclusively perceived as positively indicative of the three main research aims. Firstly, as former immigrant children, the participants did indeed experience a substantial amount of cultural friction across their childhood. Secondly, the behaviours and performances of South Asian cultural identity were consistently replicated within young members of South Asian diaspora, despite their distance from their native culture. Finally, the members of the South Asian diasporic youth narrated cases of cultural identity performance both, in real life and on an online, digital realm, thereby proving the existence of a Diasporic, Digital Memory.