Capturing agency in different educational settings. A comparative study on youth perceptions of mobility-framing structures

Abstract

The geographical mobility of young Europeans takes place within institutional realms that frame young people´s educational and vocational situations. These institutional framings provide unequal preconditions for going abroad. Starting from an action-oriented theoretical approach, the aim of this work was to explore young people´s international moves within different mobility settings. Based on 52 qualitative interviews with mobile youth from three mobility fields in three countries (students from Luxembourg, employees in Norway and Luxembourg and apprentices from Germany), the dynamic concept of context-sensitive mobility-related modes of action (MRMA) was developed. The applied analytic framework reflects the fact that individual perceptions and actions relating to going abroad differ greatly according to the young people’s specific current educational/vocational situations. Moreover, the comparative approach sheds light on different dimensions of inequality caused by these framing systems.

Introduction to Special Issue on Inequalities and Youth Mobilities in Europe from Comparative Perspectives

“…Mobility is a wish, desire, a norm, a criterion; however, non-return or losing human capital, defining lives based on labour market flexibilities, can create further precarious conditions for young people and reinforce unequal transformations in diverse localities. Challenges and opportunities are present when a mobility scheme has taken place: how young people interpret their mobility experience depends on "mobility cultures, institutional support, access to mobility funds, mobility windows/temporality, room to manoeuvre vs. institutional penetration" (Schlimbach et al 2019). All these aspects draw attention to changing strategies to achieve agency before, during and even after mobility.…”

“…Each article in this special issue gives a voice to a different theoretical perspective, explaining mobility phenomena with spontaneous and descriptive structures as well as causal inferences. The articles complement each other and offer a broader picture of youth mobility, both within the EU and beyond: Schlimbach et al (2019)…”

“…Inequality research in youth studies has been predominantly preoccupied with the role of socioeconomic backgrounds. The article by Schlimbach et al (2019) contributes to the discussion around social inequality and education. This comparative work explores the variety of young people's actions in mobilities by contextualising them according to their institutional and biographical settings.…”

“…All these contributions ensure that we investigate modes of agency (Schlimbach et al 2019), the micro perspectives on youth mobility (Kmiotek-Meier et al 2019;Hemming et al 2019;Dabasi-Halász et al 2019), household perspective (Bastianon 2019), effects of social networks on thoughts of moving (Herz et al 2019) and the transnational aspect of mobility as delineated by Diaz-Chorne et al (2019). Emphasising the layers of intersection between different levels of inequality, the authors in this special issue discuss the fact that inequalities cannot be explained by viewing through just one theoretical lens, e.g.…”

PIONEERED: Elaborating the link between social and educational policies for tackling educational inequalities in Europe

“…These have been selected, as they are classical approaches being frequently employed in quantitative (mainly the first, less often the latter) and qualitative research (the latter). However, the PIONEERED conceptual framework is open and allows for additional conceptual frameworks, such as agency approaches (Schlimbach, Skrobanek, Kmiotek-Meier, and Vysotskaya 2019).…”