Critical and Intersectional Perspectives on Immigrant Youth Cultural Identity

The task of exploring the process of the cultural identity formation of immigrant youth is a difficult one. Firstly, immigrant youth originate from a variety of nations, cultural backgrounds, and migratory experiences, each with its own unique historical, cultural, political, and socioeconomic context. Secondly, cultural identity formation has traditionally been studied from a number of different theoretical and empirical approaches, a reality which has resulted in a lack of a unified and interdisciplinary theory of identity formation. The leading theories on this topic have arisen predominantly from psychology and from empirical, quantitative approaches. Yet, proponents of this discipline have called for identity formation to be analyzed from a more critical and contextualized historical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and systems perspective. This commentary will summarize the different approaches to research on youth cultural identity (including critical approaches), outline the need for a systems perspective, discuss some of the gaps in this approach, as well as opportunities for possible research on cultural identity formation, through the systems model.