By Rachel Benchekroun, Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) UCL Social Research Institute

Whilst living on the coast may offer certain advantages, research shows that young people in coastal communities face poorer outcomes in education, employment and health than their peers in non-coastal towns (CMO 2021, HOL 2019, Agarwal et al. 2018, Wenham 2020). But how do young people feel about their coastal towns and their futures?

Image 1: Beach in NE Lincolnshire

We worked with young people from Grimsby and Cleethorpes to research this further. Six Young Researchers co-designed the research, interviewed residents, and helped analyse the data. Throughout the process, the Young Researchers were also supported by Pippa Curtin (the Voice and Influence Co-ordinator, North East Lincolnshire Council) and local lead for Young Advisors. Together we’ve been discovering how young people feel about their towns, their views on the opportunities available to them, and their aspirations for themselves and their towns.

Across two linked projects in 2021 and 2022, we carried out interviews and focus groups with a total of 39 young people aged 16 to 25. We also interviewed 30 older people aged over 60 to compare their experiences of growing up in the local area in earlier decades. We used participatory methods such as mapping, photo elicitation, life maps and a community walk.

Here is what we found out about young people’s perceptions and aspirations.

Move, return or stay?

Most of the 16- to 18-year-olds we interviewed felt they needed to move away to a larger town or city to access higher education, develop specialized knowledge and skills, and find a well-paid job: ‘The jobs that we want to do, we can’t really do here.’

This was especially important to young people considering professions – such as law, medicine or academic research – as well as roles in the creative sector. We refer to this group as ‘movers’.

For young people like 17-year-old Alex, the lack of local opportunities for certain kinds of career, and the relative geographical isolation of Grimsby and Cleethorpes, meant they would need to move to a bigger town or city:

‘You’ve got to go into the city, specifically London, to be able to participate in [specialised] jobs. And that is something we are lacking as a coastal town, kind of on the edge of everything. We are too far away from London – which I think is such a disadvantage.’

Image 2: ‘Future life map’ created by Katy, aged 17

Many young people saw moving to a city as the only way to achieve their personal and professional goals. Some even planned to move abroad to develop their careers. This can be seen in the ‘future life map’ created by Katy, aged 17 (see Image 2).

Several young people were clear that once they moved away, they would not return to their coastal town: (‘I can confidently say that I don’t wanna come back.’). For a small number, however, moving away was necessary only to develop skills that they intended to bring back for the benefit of the community, for example in the role of youth worker or teacher. This group, whom we refer to as ‘returners’, seemed to be motivated by values of social justice. For example, Kayla (18), told us:

‘I just want to help the youth of Grimsby and to show that no matter where you’re from or no matter what background, you can always make something of your life and do amazing things. […] We shouldn’t have less opportunities just because we’re at this end of the country or just because we’re in this postcode, do you know what I mean? We all deserve the same opportunities, not just the bigger cities.’

A third group of young participants (‘stayers’) were those who did not plan to move away, whether temporarily or permanently. Several, like Lisa (18), had actively decided to stay:

‘I think I like living here, and I just don’t think I really want to move away and be that far away from my family. I feel like there’s what I need here to like progress with my life rather than moving away.’

For these young people, maintaining regular contact with their family and other support networks was important, and they felt they could achieve their education and career plans locally.

Other young people were vague about their future plans – perhaps because of uncertainty about whether to continue with post-compulsory education, what kind of job or career they hoped to do, or what the pathway to achieving this looked like.

Our research has shown that experiences of growing up in Grimsby and Cleethorpes have changed significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. When older residents were teenagers, there had been plenty of local well-paid work for school-leavers, so the majority of young people stayed in the local area – and felt a strong sense of belonging. But changes to the local economy in recent decades mean that local jobs for young people nowadays are more likely to be precarious and low paid. The marginal location of coastal towns, limited transport networks and the availability of resources, including support networks, intersect with the realities of the local economy to shape young people’s decisions about whether to move away, return, or stay put. This has implications both for the futures of young people and the future of their coastal communities.

This research was funded by UCL IOE Seed Funding, UCL Grand Challenges and the Pro-Vice Provost (UK). These findings are taken from our forthcoming Emerging Findings report, which will be published next week.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 1st June, 2021, 12 noon UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

The fifth and final webinar in this series focuses on the distinct mobility experiences of young unaccompanied asylum seekers and the challenges they face after they arrive in the UK.

Dr Elaine Chase and Dr Rachel Rosen seek to understand youth mobilities (and immobilities) within the context of violent and discriminatory immigration systems and structures which also shape largely restrictive welfare regimes.  They argue that the most urgent issues we need to understand are not the factors driving young people to move/stay, but rather their experiences of and interactions with immigration and welfare systems and structures once they arrive in the UK/Europe. COVID-19 has added another layer of complexity to all this (impacting on access to asylum procedures/ justice/rights etc).  In such contexts, aspirations frequently become collective endeavours to reshape the immigration/welfare landscape through collective voice and forms of advocacy.

Presentation 1: Lives on Hold our Stories Told (LOHST): Unaccompanied migrant young people’s perspectives on the impact of COVID-19 on their lives and wellbeing

Dr Elaine Chase, UCL Institute of Education

Previous work has shown how the wellbeing outcomes of unaccompanied migrant young people arriving in the UK, particularly as they make the transition to institutional ‘adulthood’ at 18, are structured by complex immigration, social care and related policies.  Hence, vulnerabilities in the context of mobility and migration are fundamentally politically-induced (Chase and Allsopp 2020).  COVID- 19 has added another layer of complexity to the lives of young people seeking the right to remain in the UK and build their futures here.  This presentation will capture the approach and early findings from a peer-research study into the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s access to legal and social support and on their lives more generally- LOHST. It illustrates how contexts of ‘crisis’ can be generative of endeavours to reshape the immigration/ welfare landscape through collective voice and advocacy.

About the author: Elaine Chase is an Associate Professor in Education, Health Promotion and International Development at UCL Institute of Education. Elaine’s teaching and research focus on the sociological dimensions of health, wellbeing and rights of individuals and communities, particularly those most likely to experience marginalisation and exclusion. Elaine is particularly interested in the interface between policy, practice and context. Current research focuses on the wellbeing outcomes of children, young people and families subject to immigration control and on educational wellbeing in contexts of mass displacement.

Presentation 2: ‘Between waithood and alternative futures: children and young people on the move’

Dr Rachel Rosen, UCL Social Research Institute

Accounts of children and young people young people who have come to the UK on their own through precarious migration routes have aptly demonstrated that their futures are held hostage by a restrictive migration regime. Prolonged periods of uncertain waithood for regularised status, combined with anti-migrant sentiments in the UK’s hostile environment, can foreclose imaginaries of the future in what anthropologist Nicolas De Genova refers to as an ‘enforced presentism’.

In this paper, I do not dispute the detrimental effects of restrictive migration regimes on the futures of separated child migrants. Instead, in thinking with research data from Children Caring on the Move (CCoM), I seek to complicate such understandings. Heeding recent warnings not to collapse migrants into the temporality of waithood or futureless lives where regularised status in a national order is the route to a stable future, I attend to young migrants’ care for and about others while they wait. Doing so, I argue, provides insights not only into waithood and its afterlife, but reorients conceptualisations of young people’s future to the uneven possibilities and practices for imagining and constructing alternative futures.

About the author: Rachel Rosen is an Associate Professor at the UCL Social Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersections of unequal childhoods, social reproduction, and migration in neoliberal border regimes. She co-leads the ESRC-funded Children Caring on the Move project.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr. Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 25th May, 2021, 12 noon UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

The fourth webinar of this series will focus on student mobility within the UK and youth attitudes towards international mobility (their own and that of Others).

In the first presentation, Dr Michael Donnelly (University of Bath) and Dr Sol Gamsu (University of Durham) discuss how university students’ geographic movements within the UK (re)produce social, economic, racial and ethnic divisions.

Next, Dr Avril Keating examines how young White British youth talk about international mobility and argues that these attitudes are fraught with contradictions that stem from the mixed messages young people receive about mobility, migration, multiculturalism, citizenship and individualism.

Presentation 1: Spatial structures of student mobility: Social, economic and ethnic ‘geometries of power’

Dr Michael Donnelly (University of Bath) and Dr Sol Gamsu (University of Durham)

We present here findings from an ESRC-funded study which addressed the geographic movements of university students internally within the UK context, examining how these are constitutive of broader societal division, stratification and processes of social reproduction. Using Giddens and Massey and drawing on a unique multi‐sited qualitative dataset, we examine how these flows can be understood as embedded within narratives of ‘the self’ that are situated within a particular spatial structuring of social, economic, and ethnic difference. In our presentation, we also discuss the methodological questions raised by our study on researching difference across space, offering the ‘mapping tool’ we developed as part of the research as one means of eliciting deep-seated spatial imaginaries held by groups and individuals.

The use of this mapping tool to collect data across multiple case study localities provided a unique opportunity to observe the simultaneity of social relations across space, mutually shaping, and reshaping each other over time. We illustrate how embedded within imagined mobility narratives are deeply unequal structures of economic power, (re)producing oppressed and dominant positions across social and geographic space. Geometries of race and ethnicity are also shown to structure the ways in which different ethnic groups look upon the geography of their university choices. The patterning of these imagined spatial flows around the United Kingdom at the point of university entry can be interpreted as one further manifestation of deep‐seated geometries of power that pervade social life.

About the authors:

Michael Donnelly is an Associate Professor at the University of Bath and is mainly interested in the sociology of education, especially links between education and social stratification, inequality and wider societal divisions. His current research addresses education and Indigeneity, examining the ‘collectivising’ and ‘individualising’ discourses present within the Mexican higher education system (funded by ESRC). Michael’s previous UK-based research has addressed the role of geography in higher education and labour market transitions and the ‘school effect’ on university destinations (also funded by ESRC).

Sol Gamsu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Durham. He is a sociologist and a geographer of education with a strong commitment to the politics of education and envisaging alternative futures for education and society more broadly. His interests lie at the intersection of sociology, geography and history and the central theme running through his work is how structures and experiences of power and inequality in education are reproduced over time and through different local and regional geographies. Prior to this, he was a postdoc at the University of Bath working with Michael Donnelly on the ESRC-funded project, the Geographies of Higher Education: spatial and social mobilities.

Presentation 2: Mobility for me but not for Others: the contradictory cosmopolitan practices of contemporary White British youth

Dr Avril Keating (UCL)

This presentation seeks to problematise the perception that young people are committed cosmopolitans by highlighting some of the contradictory and contingent practices that young White British youth engage in. To do so, I explore a contradiction that emerged in my recent projects when young people talked about mobility and migration, namely how some White British youth want (and assume) freedom of movement for themselves but are opposed to freedom of movement when it involves immigrants coming to Britain. Here I argue that this can be viewed as an effort to enjoy the benefits of a cosmopolitan lifestyle (particularly through geographical mobility) while nonetheless wishing to limit opportunities for cultural Others to do likewise. This manifestation, I suggest, should be seen as a one-way form of cosmopolitanism that is not just contradictory, but also a reflection of the mixed messages young people in Britain receive about mobility, migration, multiculturalism, citizenship and individualism. This presentation draws from an article that is forthcoming in Sociology.

About the author:

Avril Keating is the Director of the Centre for Global Youth and an Associate Professor of Comparative Social Science at UCL Institute of Education.  Avril is a sociologist of youth and citizenship and her current research focuses on (a) youth attitudes towards cultural Others and what this tells us about who gets to be a citizen in contemporary Britain (b) the relationship between place, resources, and mobility aspirations for young people growing up in coastal towns. She also has a long-standing interest in citizenship education, youth civic engagement and the Europeanisation of citizenship education policy.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr. Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 18 May, 2021, 9am UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia-Australia Migration and Everyday Time

In this week’s seminar, Dr. Shanthi Robertson explores the lives of middleclass Asian young people who arrived in Australia during the first decades of the 21st century on temporary visas. Belonging to a generation for whom ‘global’ life experience (often in the form of transient mobilities for study and work rather than classical settler migration) has become culturally normative, these mobile young people have specific expectations about how their mobility will facilitate their trajectories into adult life. However, as the paper seeks to show, these aspirations and imaginaries of transnational mobility play out in diverse and uneven outcomes, particularly in the unfolding of migrants’ biographies over time, as well as in their everyday lived experiences of time in different places.

Drawing on extensive narrative interviews and visual ethnographic material, this paper focuses on how experiences of cultural, social and embodied time are shaped by the migration process. Using the concept of ‘chronomobilities’, which draws on ideas of ‘time-regimes’ (the macro and mesoscale temporal conditions that shape contemporary social life) and ‘time-logics’ (the way individuals narrate and make meaning of their lived experiences of time) the analysis reveals how migrant experiences and biographies are changing under the socio-temporal conditions of modernity and how multiple lived experiences of time structure relations to work, place and intimate life.

About the author:

Shanthi Robertson is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and an Institute Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, specializing in migration and diversity, youth studies and urban social change. She has completed an Australian Research Council (ARC) fellowship on Asian temporary migrants to Australia and is currently Chief Investigator on three ARC Discovery and Linkage projects that focus on: the economic, social and civic outcomes of transnational youth mobility for young people moving into and out of Australia for work, leisure and study; the role of autonomous technology in the social inclusion of migrants living with disability in Sydney; and the changing social civic practices in Sydney suburbs with high numbers of Chinese heritage residents. Her most recent publications appear in Geoforum, Current Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Journal of Youth Studies. Her second book, Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia-Australia Migration and Everyday Time, was published by Bristol University Press January 2021.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr. Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 11 May, 2021, 12 noon UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

The second webinar of this series will focus on education mobilities in East Asia. To start the session, Prof Johanna Waters will share her findings on how families discuss their daily trans-border commutes for schooling, drawing on primary research with families in Hong Kong. Focusing on the prevalence of tiredness and exhaustion, Johanna argues that corporality and emotions in education mobilities are under-explored in the literature.

Jiexiu Chen will then present findings from her research in China on rural students’ experiences of settling down in the city. Building on Bourdieu to examine migration across social boundaries, Jiexiu proposes four orientations of habitus to demonstrate individuals’ tendencies to maintain continuity or embrace changes: urbanised habitus, liminal habitus, permeated habitus, and twisted habitus.

After the presentations, Dr Cora Xu (Durham University) will identify cross-cutting themes and will invite questions from webinar participants.

Presentation 1: Cross-boundary mobilities for education in East Asia: tiredness and exhaustion

Professor Johanna Waters, UCL Geography

My talk foregrounds and unpacks the significance of education for the mobilities of children in contemporary East Asia, drawing principally on primary research with families, undertaken in Hong Kong and across the political border with Mainland China (Shenzhen). Focusing on the example of cross-boundary schooling, the presentation explores households’ experiences of a daily trans-border commute, stressing the prevalence of tiredness and exhaustion in families’ narratives of their quotidian practices. The corporality and differentiated experiences of everyday mobilities for education are rarely explored in the extant literature and yet this has been one of the striking aspects of our findings. In this talk, I will briefly explore how families discussed cross-boundary schooling – the emotions and feelings evoked within our qualitative accounts.

About the author:  Johanna L. Waters is Professor of Human Geography and co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL. She has worked for a number of years on aspects of transnational families, education and migration, with a particular interest in East Asia. She is presently editing a book with Brenda Yeoh (NUS) on Migration and the Family (forthcoming with Edward Elgar) and is looking forward, in the next few months, to the publication of Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities (Waters, J. and R. Brooks, 2021, Palgrave). Johanna is proud to be elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Presentation 2: Urbanised, liminal, permeated, and twisted: four orientations of habitus in rural students’ transitions to urban life

Jiexiu Chen, PhD candidate, UCL Institute of Education

 In the Chinese context of a stratified education system and significant urban–rural inequality, rural students generally face limited possibilities for social mobility through higher education. Despite these structural constraints, some exceptional rural students manage to get themselves enrolled in urban universities. Drawing on 50 rural students’ life history interviews conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, and Ji’nan in 2018, I adopt Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to explore these students’ subjective experiences of migrating across social boundaries.

In this webinar, I will focus on rural students’ experiences of settling down in the city as well as their identity struggle between their rural origins and their current status as urban residents. I propose four orientations of habitus to demonstrate individuals’ tendencies to maintain continuity (rural) or embrace changes (urban) at the time they were interviewed: urbanised habitus, liminal habitus, permeated habitus, and twisted habitus. I find participants’ narratives generally demonstrate a degree of fluidity or conflict in their habitus transformation process, and the elements of these different possibilities are likely to concurrently exist. Their unique habitus reveals the geographical and emotional traces of their individual trajectories, like the experiences they encounter at different stages of their life and the forms and amounts of resources they accumulate along the way. Moreover, most participants tend to maintain close ties with their rural families, as repaying parents is one of the essential requirements of filial piety in the Chinese tradition. I suggest the contradictions and ambivalences aroused from the tension between rural origins and urban life appear in a nuanced form and reveal the distinctiveness of the Chinese rural context.

About the author: Jiexiu Chen is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. She was awarded a full PhD scholarship by the China Scholarship Council’s National Construction High-Level University Postgraduate Project. Her research interests include social mobility, urban-rural migration, cross-cultural adaptation, and higher education policy. She has an emerging journal article and book publication on rural students’ social mobility experiences and international scholars’ cross-cultural adaptations in China.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 4 May, 2021, 12 noon UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

The first webinar of this series will focus on rural/urban youth mobility and international student mobility in India.

To start the session, Prof Supriya RoyChowdhury and Prof Carol Upadhya (NIAS, Bangalore, India) will present their findings on the migration of rural youth to the city to take up (often low-paid, insecure) jobs in the services sector, persuaded by government-funded, private sector-run skills training centres to ‘raise their aspirations’.

Next, Dr Peidong Yang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) shares insights into international student mobility, drawing on his ethnographic research on Indian youths pursuing English-medium medical degrees at a provincial university in China. He argues that ‘rationalistic’ explanations of Indian students’ educational mobility do not give the full picture: instead, he draws on the notions of compromise and complicity to explain behaviour and interactions.

Following the presentations, Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) will draw out key themes and will invite questions for our speakers from webinar participants.

Presentation 1: Taking the Train Back Home:  Migrant Service Workers in Bengaluru

 Prof Supriya RoyChowdhury and Prof Carol Upadhya (both NIAS, Bangalore, India)

This presentation draws on a two-year study of youth from marginalised rural households who have been recruited by skill training and then placed in low-end service sector jobs in Bengaluru, India. We describe the processes of ‘mobilisation’ employed by NGOs to convince young people with 10^th standard education and above to join short-term skill courses. While their expressed goal is to ‘raise the aspirations’ of youth from low-income families, once they enter training the effort is to ‘lower their expectations’ because the courses cannot equip them for the type of employment they desire – secure, well-paid government or public sector jobs. We highlight the tension between the aspirations of these rural youth who are channeled into the new service economy on the promise of social mobility, and the realities of these jobs and urban life – leading to peripatetic ‘career‘ paths in which they cycle frequently between the city, their hometowns or villages and other sites, in search of better employment or additional training or education. The instability of their life courses reflects the conditions of work in the new service economy in India, which is marked by fluidity and precarity and whose employers benefit from the availability of a large pool of potential workers from outside the city. The presentation reflects on how youth from low-income households try to forge strategies of social and spatial mobility in pursuit of their own aspirations against the background of the crisis of unemployment in India.

About the authors:

Supriya RoyChowdhury is currently Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. Her book, City of Shadows: Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Carol Upadhya is Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, where she heads the Urban & Mobility Studies Programme. She co-edited the volume Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (Routledge, 2018).

Presentation 2: Compromise and complicity as “extra-rational” logics of international student mobility: the case of Indian medical students in a provincial university in China

Dr Peidong Yang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Existing scholarship on international student mobility (ISM) often draws on Bourdieu to interpret such mobility as a strategy of capital accumulation and conversion used by relatively privileged individuals/families to reproduce their social position and advantage. This perspective stems from and also reinforces a rationalistic/calculative understanding of student mobility. In this talk, I focus on an empirical case that scarcely exhibits “typical” characteristics of student mobility: Indian youths of less affluent backgrounds pursuing English-medium medical degrees (MBBS) at a provincial university in China. After initially struggling to offer “rationalistic” explanations of the Indian students’ educational mobility endeavour, I turn to the notions of compromise and complicity to articulate the sociocultural logics characterizing various stakeholders’ behaviour and interactions in this case. In doing so, I make an attempt to take ISM analysis beyond “rationalistic” theorizations such as those inherent in the Bourdieusian perspective and the “push-pull” framework.

This talk will be largely based on the speaker’s publication:  Yang, P. (2018). Compromise and complicity in international student mobility: the ethnographic case of Indian medical students at a Chinese university. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 39(5), 694-708. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1435600

About the author:

Peidong Yang is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A sociologist of education, Peidong’s main research interest is the intersection between education and migration/mobility. He has worked on a number projects, including Chinese student mobility to Singapore, Indian medical students in China, and immigrant teachers in Singapore. He is the author of International Mobility and Educational Desire: Chinese Foreign Talent Students in Singapore (Palgrave, 2016) and numerous journal articles. www.peidongyang.com

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

Youth mobility: comparing internal and international mobility experiences around the world

Geographical mobility is closely linked to youth, as young people are most likely to become mobile, whether it is driven by necessity (e.g. to access education or employment), a lifestyle or individual choice (e.g. for personal development), or a combination of these reasons. While young people have always been mobile, in the contemporary context, mobility has often become integral to the process of becoming an adult.

Given its importance for young lives, the UCL CGY is hosting a series of 5 webinars to explore youth mobility practices in different parts of the world. What are the drivers and motivations for mobility in different countries and social groups? Which social groups get to be mobile and what does this mean for those who are “left behind”? What impact does mobility have on youth transitions and youth identities? And what impact, if any, has the COVID-19 pandemic had on youth aspirations for and experiences of mobility?

These are some of the key questions that will be explored in these 5 webinars, drawing on the experiences of young people in 4 different countries: India, Australia, China and the UK. The fifth and final seminar will focus on the experiences of young people seeking asylum in the UK.

Each Tuesday from 4 May to 1 June 2021, we invite two researchers to present some of their latest research and ask a discussant to place the research in context.

Our confirmed speakers include:

• Johanna Waters (UCL Geography) UK
• Carol Upadhya and Supriya RoyChowdhury (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore) India
• Peidong Yang (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University) Singapore
• Shanthi Robertson (Western Sydney University) Australia
• Michael Donnelly (University of Bath) and Sol Gamsu (University of Durham) UK
• Elaine Chase (UCL)
• Jiexiu Chen (UCL)

More details about the seminars, speakers and registration will be available in mid-April. The webinars will also be recorded and subsequently made available for free via our Youtube Channel.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr. Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.

COVID-19 has disrupted our usual research dissemination methods, and it has not been possible to host our usual seminars and workshops this year. But we didn’t want to miss out on hearing about all the amazing research that is taking place right now, and so we started a new initiative called “CGY Conversations with…”

As the name suggests, the “CGY Conversations with…” series involve us having conversations with youth researchers about their current research and their future research plans. The hope is that this format will be more informal than a research presentation webinar, but still informative. The interviews take place on Zoom and the recordings are posted on our Youtube channel.

Some recent highlights include:

• Dr Sarah Pickard (Sciences Po) talking about youth environmental activism.
• Professor Judith Bessant (RMIT) introducing her new book, Making-Up People: Youth, Truth & Politics
• Dr Brett Lashua (IOE) talking about music, place, race and innovative research methodologies.
• Dr Kieran Mitton (KCL) discussing youth gangs in Sierra Leone, Cape Town, Rio and London
• Dr. Crystal Abidin (Curtain University) on the emergence of internet cultures and influencers
• Dr. Sazana Jayadeva (Cambridge University) on the impact of COVID-19 on student migration aspirations.

To find out more, check out our Youtube channel.

Last updated: 19/04/2021

This project is funded by UCL Grand Challenges’ GCCU strand, and led by Avril Keating (CGY), Johanna Waters (Geography) and Claire Cameron and Abigail Knight (TCRU).

The aim of this project is to identify research methods and cross-disciplinary intersections that will give us greater insight into how the dynamics of globalisation are shaping youth aspirations and attitudes in coastal communities in England. Coastal towns are of particular interest because the dynamics of globalisation mean they are experiencing greater inward flows (tourists, ex-Londoners seeking cheaper housing, EU migrants) and outward flows (young people leaving to access further study/ work). At the same time, many of these towns are struggling to attract the kind of resources (e.g. good teachers, new jobs, transport investment etc.) that enable young people and coastal communities to flourish.

We will focus in particular on the impact of these dynamics on young people’s attitudes towards, and aspirations for, mobility and migration. It is often assumed that young people are highly mobile. This is a life stage in which young people become more independent and, it is assumed, start to explore new aspects of their communities and countries without assistance from adults. However, contemporary youth are doing this at a time when their communities are changing rapidly, through a combination of: cuts to youth services and transport links; inward migration of immigrants; and the closure of high street shops (which removes both job and leisure opportunities and spaces for young people).

Through our previous research, we believe that there are many unexplored tensions, contradictions, and inequalities in young people’s access to, and attitudes towards, mobility and migration. In this project, therefore, we will examine how new cross-disciplinary connections and new research methods might shed more light on these tensions.

Project Objectives

Our goals are to:
1. Bring together researchers from across UCL to exchange knowledge about the different definitions and theories of belonging, community, mobility, and migration that are being used in different disciplines (sociology, politics, psychology, geography and the Built environment);
2. Explore the relative merits of different data collection methods for tapping into youth experiences of and attitudes towards belonging, community, mobility and migration (e.g. walking interviews; local community ethnographies; arts and visual-based interventions; Big data and social media data);
3. Develop research instruments that enable us to test out how some of the suggested research methods could be used to address our research problem.
4. Consider the ethics of these different methods, particularly given the strictures of the new GDPR regulations; and
5. Lay the foundations for an interdisciplinary and mixed-method funding bid that allows us to extend this work and our understanding of young lives in coastal communities.

Action Plan and Timetable
To achieve these goals, we plan to:
1. February 2019: Conduct a preliminary literature review to identify the range of recent research on the impact of globalisation on coastal communities and key gaps in the field.
2. March 2019: Organise an inter-disciplinary Knowledge Exchange Workshop that brings together researchers from across UCL to share theories, methods, and research design ideas.
3. May 2019: Pilot 3 different methods of data collection in one coastal town, with young people aged 16-18.
4. June 2019: Organise an inter-disciplinary Dissemination and Reflection Workshop to report the results of the pilot and refine our methods.
5. July 2019: Produce a short project report and blog posts