Mobility, encompassing both social and spatial dimensions, stands as a prominent theme in contemporary youth studies (Cairns et al., 2022). The act of being mobile is a multifaceted process, offering the opportunity to gather experiences, enhance one’s curriculum, discover new prospects, and elevate social status. However, mobility proves to be ambivalent, as it requires adapting to novel contexts and reconfiguring one’s connection to the places considered home.

While existing literature predominantly concentrates on the period of mobility itself (Raffini, 2014; Murphy-Lejeune, 2000; Cairns et al., 2017, 2022; Camozzi, Grüning, and Gambardella, 2021), the consequential phase of return remains understudied. With our contribution to the panel, we aim to address this gap by exploring the meaning of homecoming, shedding light on the often-overlooked post-mobility period in different contexts and their meaning for young people.

To gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of returning home within the trajectories of “youth on the move” (Cairns 2010), we conducted qualitative inquiries into the lived experiences of students in higher education. The first investigation focused on the experiences of first-generation students in German and Austrian higher education, while the second delved into the experiences of students in France and Italy returning from their international Erasmus programs. By merging these two qualitative datasets, we aim to combine research focussing on both social and spatial mobility.

Our analytical framework employs Bourdieusian concepts of habitus and capital (Bourdieu 1977) and the Schütz’s phenomenological perspective on the homecomer experience (Schütz 1945). Through these theoretical lenses, we examine how young students renegotiate the meanings associated with the context they left behind, with a specific focus on their relationships with family, peer groups, places, and their dreams related to life-project planning. Our findings highlight the nuanced role of homecoming, where transformations in habitus become palpable. Within the process of returning home, a negotiation between foreignness and belonging, change and inertia takes place. Our analysis aims to delve into the habitual tensions generated during this process, exploring how they contribute to reflexivity and transformations. This exploration will serve as the focal point of our discussion, relating social and spatial mobility to inequality and social justice.

Addressing the panel’s question of how young people’s mobility, educational paths and social (in)equality are interrelated, the paper presents results from a longitudinal ethnography and interview study with adolescents from a German city. The study follows young people from different city districts throughout their transition from school into vocational training, higher education or unemployment and in different educational settings, e.g. in youth clubs. The study uses a relational framework for studying social class in youth based on Bourdieu (1984, 1987) and by drawing on the concept of symbolic boundaries (Lamont & Fournier 1992; Lamont & Molnár 2002). The paper will zoom in on the aspect of mobility from different angles.

Local mobility within the city and beyond will be illustrated along spatial appropriation and the interaction with institutions, such as schools, universities, youth clubs, museums, etc. Spatial appropriation is also interwoven with affective dimensions of social class intersecting with gender, ethnicity and religion. Social mobility refers to educational trajectories and vocational choices and is strongly linked to family trajectories and past mobility, e.g. migration. Contrasting two groups from my sample, a locally and community centred group of Muslim youth from the working and lower middle classes and a group of white middle-class youth with interrupted or abandoned school careers, different patterns of local and social mobility can be worked out. Whereas the former group aims at social upward mobility, but faces the risk of status reproduction based on their occupational choices, the second group faces a lower social status than their parents due to not following an academic path. Educational institutions such as schools, youth clubs and educational programmes play distinct roles in forming the respective pathways and local and social mobility can be ambiguously connected: Even though the upward aspirations by the Muslim youth are promoted by teachers in school as well as by social workers in the youth club, the strong local connection and in-group orientation accompanied by experiences of discrimination outside the district and anticipated social exclusion can also lead to reproducing occupational trajectories or even to pursuing semi-legal and criminal job careers. On the other hand, for the group of white middle-class youth a fit with the middle-class oriented school system could be expected. The reasons for the school dropout, however, seem to be social and mental health issues. Nevertheless, their appropriation of the local space allows them to find institutional settings they feel more comfortable in, such as alternative educational programmes to eventually catch up on their school exams.

This relational lens on spatial mobility allows to shed light on the way the local and the social space are interrelated. It can be shown how youth mobility is distinctively shaped by families’ past social and local mobility, i.e. class and migration trajectories, but also by educational institutions. Evidently, the structuring force of the local space on the conduct of life and the space of possibilities varies among different societal groups.

This study aims to shed light on EU migrants’ overqualification, occurring when their educational qualifications exceed the skills required by the job performed (abroad), a phenomenon that seems to be particularly spread and relatively understudied. When assessing the overqualification of graduates, Recchi (2016) found a ‘citizenship gap’ between EU migrants and locals in several countries. With specific regard to Eastern (EU13) migration towards Western (EU15) Europe, a negative self-selection of migrants based on their educational level emerged (Ambrosini et al. 2012, Montanari and Meraviglia 2023), together with a huge migrant segregation into low-skill sectors such as construction, agriculture, and the care sector (Ambrosini 2001, Faist 2014).

One can expect that EU13 migrants are at higher risk of overqualification as compared to EU15 locals, as emerged in single destination studies (Altorjai 2013; Kracke and Klug 2021). However, only few examples compare EU13 migrants with their stayer peers (Kahanec and Zimmermann 2016; Grabowska 2016; Barbulescu, Ciornei and Varela 2019). Detecting the overqualification of migrants can be difficult because data are usually collected by destination countries, having scarce information on migrants’ (previous or potential) careers in the origin country. Some exceptions reconstruct the pool of emigrants from a origin country (Sandu 2005) or focus on successive jobs in destination country (Chiswick, Liang Lee and Miller 2005), but they both tend to be country-specific.

Against this background, the OECD (2007) proposed to match the skill level of jobs performed by migrants with their educational background, and Eurostat (2021) defined as overqualified those workers performing a job requiring no more than a high school education while being tertiary educated. By adopting their definition and exploiting the Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) data for the period 2018-2019, this study compares EU13 migrants with three comparator groups: i) migrants residing in the same destination but coming from another origin (EU15 migrants); ii) the local population in the destination countries analysed (EU15 locals); iii) the ‘stayers’ in the origin countries (EU13 locals), a fundamental benchmark for EU13 migrants.

The expected findings address salient research questions such as: Are EU13 migrants better off than EU13 ‘stayers’ in terms of overqualification? Do EU13 and EU15 migrant graduates differ in their probability to perform low skilled jobs? Considering the high segregation of EU13 migrant women in care sector, are they more overqualified than EU13 migrant men? EU13 migrants get lower returns to higher education in Southern Europe, as compared to the rest of Western Europe? By attaining the highest educational title abroad, do EU13 migrants reduce their overqualification risk?

If broadly collected, similar evidence suggests that the gains of free movement are not equally distributed across the EU member states (Kyriazi and Visconti 2023; Afonso and Devitt 2016). A higher probability to be overqualified does not necessarily discourage individuals from migrating (Castro-Martin and Cortina 2015; Janicka and Kaczmarczyk 2016). Nevertheless, the rationale that migrations are always a chance to boost one’s own socio-economic status may be proven wrong in this analysis, at least with regards to Eastern EU migrants in Western Europe.

The corpus is based a continuation of a Phd on the orientation, socialization and professional integration of students and graduates architects at ENSA Nantes (Horsch, 2021), and two quantitative and qualitative surveys aimed at documenting the student trajectories of the Nantes School of Architecture over the past ten years, part of which focuses more particularly on the way in which inequalities are shaped over time, of their trajectory, from childhood to professional integration, via architectural studies. Through this research, we discuss the updating of the determinisms at work, but also what makes it possible to counter them through the figure of the "space defector" (in reference to the class defector). Indeed, the mode of recruitment of schools of architecture favors the admission of students from mainly middle and upper socio-professional classes that all capital (cultural, economic and social) seems to be advantageous compared to the minority of students from the admitted working class. Indeed, the rate of students enrolled at ENSA Nantes in 2016, whose father belongs to professions and higher socio-professional classes is thirty points above the national average (Horsch, 2021, p. 148).

Given these figures, how do people from the working class who wish to become architects manage to integrate these establishments? What can the schools of architecture themselves do to reproduce these inequalities that play out at admission to school? Once these students have successfully entered school, what strategies do they implement to succeed? What levers exist for the institution, those who teach there and those who study there to counter these inequalities? In order to consider ways of understanding what is happening before and during studies in the field of reproduction or distinction, we are interested in the figure of the «defector», as a way of exploring what individuals and the institution «can» to counter determinism, or when determinism/inequalities are not replayed. By «defector», we mean graduates whose two parents come from disadvantaged classes

A first part of the paper will focus on analyzing inequalities in access to studies by a quantitative approach (social origins, origin of the baccalaureate) and by the mode of access to studies (Parcoursup augmented by admission interviews). Then, we will analyze the school and study trajectories of defectors. We will see that these defectors manage to compensate for their socio-cultural differences by multiplying professional experiences during their studies and through the co-optation of teachers. Finally, we will see that if the defectors succeed in their professional integration in the short term, they are nevertheless in a position of reproduction of the canonical exercise of the architect in the form of salary, assuming few responsibilities.

This paper reflects upon the relevance of spatiality in understanding educational transitions and shaping students’ horizons for action. It particularly delves into the impact of the uneven VET provision and planning on students’ opportunities and mobility patterns. As previous research has signalled, educational transitions are key moments to understand the reproduction of social inequalities, which operate through a complex mechanism where systemic, institutional, and subjective layers are interwoven (Tarabini & Ingram, 2018). On the other hand, the educational decision-making process do not happen in a vacuum and must be understood as spatially embedded. Despite some studies have highlighted the intertwining of spatial and social inequalities (Donelly & Gamsu, 2018; Saraví, 2015), as well as the significance of place and belonging in the construction of youth aspirations and identity (Cuervo & Wyn, 2017), a critical spatial approach is still required. Drawing from the spatial turn in social science, place and space are conceived by a relational lens (Massey, 1994), as socially produced and as generators of particular social activities and relations, thereby shaping individuals’ agency and identity (Farrugia, 2014).

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the relational analysis of space by showing how VET provision and planning produce differential mobility patterns among students and across different places. To do so, we developed a mixed-methods approach based on the analytical triangulation of interviews with policy makers (n=14) and the analysis of secondary census data on students’ mobility from the Statistics of Commuting for Non-university Studies (Department of Education, Government of Catalonia). More specifically, through the analysis of mobility indicators, flow matrixes and interviews, we have developed a social network analysis of different educational spaces, in a relational, positional, and cross-sectional way. The findings reveal how distinct educational areas are constructed and how centre-periphery relationships between different places are stablished within specific educational spaces. Moreover, the discourses of policy makers on educational planning and provision will show how these relations are legitimised, through the ways in which they make sense of space. Overall, spatiality contributes to enrich sociological understanding of student’s transitions and the reproduction of social inequalities through educational systems.

Wars cause massive population displacement/mobility which naturally brings social justice concerns for both the refugees and the host country populations. After initial surge of sympathy and outpouring of assistance comes the moment when the initial measures driven by the “good hearted humanism” face reevaluation under the pressures of reality. This presentation is the analysis of challenges faced by the Ukrainian and Polish youth in Polish educational system (primary, secondary schools and colleges). It views the problems caused by “forced mobility” from three perspectives: as issues in intercultural communication; as political-economic issues related to allocation of resources and statuses; and as psychological-behavioral issues arising from the confrontation of perceptions and expectations of the refugees with those held by the host country populations. In the third year of the war in Ukraine we clearly see how the sphere of education turns into litmus test of the legitimacy and feasibility of policies of assistance. Problems in Polish schools resulting from the massive influx of Ukrainian students reveal how concepts of inclusion and social justice, become politicized and instrumentalized which undermines their original intended purpose (for both sides). Data for this study comes from government and NGOs’ statistics, public opinion surveys and oral narratives both from refugees and their host country counterparts (school administrators, NGO representatives, students and parents).