Resilience and Resignation among Transnational Roma and non-Roma Youths

ended

Current European policy frameworks seek to foster societal development and individual advancement by getting more people educated, and for longer. At the same time, official programs encourage “learning mobility” as a way to support educational and professional opportunities. Yet, the adversities that underprivileged youths “on the move” are faced with as they strive to comply with these prescriptions clearly reveal the practical limitations of such powerful narrative construction: the issue of whether spatial mobility constitutes an asset or not for young people remains largely unexplored. Building on this, RETRY aims to develop a sophisticated understanding of the drivers of educational and post-educational marginality and inclusion in contemporary Europe. At this scope, it provides a theoretically informed, in-depth ethnographic, multi-sited and collaborative account of a phenomenon that has remains largely understudied so far: the movements into adulthood of underprivileged Roma and non-Roma European youths “affected by mobility”. The overall question of whether, and under what conditions, their trajectories disclose broader processes of social transformation or reproduce structural inequalities is addressed through the elaboration of a spatial and relational theory of resilience and resignation in youth. The theory aims to unveil the complex interplay of structural constraints and individual agency that shapes the multiple interactions between spatial, social, and biographical mobility. At this scope, RETRY addresses specific questions vis-à-vis the impact of welfare policies, community strategies, and personal ties on the transitions of young people striving to navigate towards their desirable futures in a changing and unstable environment.