Ticket to ride: national and international mobility as a multi-faceted resource in the life courses of young Italian graduates

Abstract

This paper looks at the national and international geographic mobility paths of young graduates in Italy and their educational and professional trajectories. By departing from the research fields of youth studies, mobility studies and higher education studies, we aim to highlight the multiple meanings and effects that mobility experiences may have in structuring graduates’ future projects and/or desires. On the other hand, we argue that their expectations for both their mobility experiences and careers are also shaped by family socialisation, considering furthermore that the building of embodied and scholastic cultural capitals is spatially differentiated depending on the places where they grow up. The empirical research is based on two rounds of semi-narrative interviews conducted with 51 Italian graduates between 2020 and 2021. For the analysis, we have outlined four types of mobility paths. For each type, we focus on how socio-structural and cultural variables influence the ways the interviewees framed their mobility and professional experiences, desires and projects, focusing furthermore on how the Covid-19 pandemic differently affected their objective possibilities and strategies of mobility between the first and second waves.

Gyvenantys mobiliame pasaulyje: 1980–2000 m. gimusiųjų migraciniai ketinimai ir šeiminio gyvenimo įsivaizdavimas

“…biographical resource) grįžus (Geisen 2010) arba siekti mobilaus gyvenimo (angl. being on the road) kaip idealo (Grüning, Camozzi 2023). Analizuojamas reikšmingų asmenų tinklų vaidmuo, formuojantis migracinei elgsenai (Growiec 2010), broliai ir seserys tiriami kaip instrumentinės, finansinės ir emocinės pagalbos potencialas, kuris aktualizuojasi šeimos nariams gyvenant skirtingose šalyse (Budginaitė-Mačkinė, Juozeliūnienė 2023).…”

Places and mechanisms of belonging and exclusion: Intra‐EU academic migration in a comparative perspective

“…Scholarly debates have mentioned language barriers and informal rules that differ for recruitment processes in national higher education systems (HES) (Musselin, 2004). As a precondition for careers across the EU, some authors stress the importance of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital (Igarashi & Saito, 2014) or of mobility capital (Schäfer, 2022), put differently, the accumulation of mobility experiences throughout life (Grüning & Camozzi, 2023). There are investments in promoting such skills, for instance in the EU's ERASMUS programme.…”