Youth activism in the city: Part 1- 3rd November

By UCL Global Youth, on 12 October 2021

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

The third webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 3rd November from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the theme of youth activism and will feature research from Nigeria and Glasgow at the start of the UNCCC COP26 negotiation 2021.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Presentation 1: Understanding youth restiveness in contemporary Nigeria – Street Protests and Dissent as forms of claim-making.

Dr. Joseph Egwurube, University of La Rochelle

The Nigerian youth, people aged between 15 and 35 according to the Nigerian National Youth Policy of 2009 revised in 2019, have been struggling to be seen and heard by successive Nigerian governments. Though the Youth Policy declares the intention of governments at all levels to accelerate youth empowerment and cater for the welfare of those in this age bracket, to be young in Nigeria remains very challenging today. With a median age of 18, the country is relatively young demographically. However, while the youth wield demographic muscle, they continue to suffer from neglect and economic, social, and political marginalization and deprivation. I will explore how in the absence of political, economic, and social capital by the young on the one hand, and the high level of citizen distrust of governmental institutions coupled with State intolerance to freedom of expressing dissent on the other hand, young Nigerians have taken to street protests, among other avenues, as a vehicle to articulate their interests and make claims on public policy makers.  I will examine what these interests are, and how street protests designed to advance them nation-wide in major cities have been organized, drawing from the experience of some protests from the 1989 riots against the IMF imposed Structural Adjustment Programme to the End SARS movement in 2020 which began as a fight by the youth against police brutality before it evolved into a demand for good governance and accountability. I will explore what generated the youth street protest movements chosen, how support was mobilized and by who, what actions were taken by young protesters, how governments reacted and if the desired outcomes by the young were attained or not. I will draw attention to how the digital tool provided a very potent mobilizational and federating trans-regional, trans-ethnic, and trans-religious tool for the youth during the 2020 End SARS street protests before assessing the relative capacity of the Nigerian youth to use ‘parliament on the streets in cities’ as an avenue to initiate social and political change.

Author Biography: Joseph Egwurube holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Bordeaux in France. He was a Senior Lecturer for several years at Ahmadu Bello University in the city of Zaria in Nigeria before he moved in 1990 to France for family reasons. At present, he teaches Business and Legal English to post-graduate students at the University of La Rochelle in France and is an Associate Researcher with the CRHIA, the Centre for Research on International and Atlantic History. His research focus is on inter-group relations in Nigeria. He is interested, among others, on women empowerment and student activism.  His first novel, which deals with the resilience of women, has been accepted for publication by a British publisher. He is also interested in exploring adjustment problems faced by Nigerian and other sub-Saharan African immigrants in the USA and has written a few published articles on this theme.

Presentation 2: Contestation in the city and COP26: the voices of young environmental activists taking to the streets

Dr Sarah Pickard, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris and Dena Arya, Nottingham Trent University

Sit-downs, die-ins and lock-ons are just some of the ways that young people are increasingly engaging in peaceful protests through non-violent direct action (NVDA). Young people are drawing on and expanding the repertoire of contention, including civil disobedience. By disruptively occupying public (and sometimes private) spaces in the city, these young protesters are using their agency to draw attention to situated injustices and specific issues, with the aim of putting pressure on powerholders to bring about change. The collective performance of protest also brings feelings of solidarity, joy and hope to those participating in often aesthetic acts of contestation. Thus, young people are taking part in Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics; they feel the need to do something together because they feel frustrated and angry with politicians not doing enough. The collective act of doing something with like-minded youth in public arenas provides an existential outlet for their anxiety, fear and rage.

This seminar builds on interviews carried out with young environmental activists in FFF and XR in late 2019. It will be given from Glasgow at the start of the UNCCC COP26 negotiations. With a focus on ‘youth and the city,’ it will address, why young people have been taking to the streets, where they have come from to participate, how they are using public spaces to protest, and what reactions their disruptive actions solicit from the public and the police. It will include insights from observations and interviews with young environmental protesters at COP26, as well as thoughts on carrying out research with young people in situ during protest actions.

Author Biographies:  Dr Sarah Pickard is a Senior lecturer in British Politics and Society at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and her research examines different dimensions of young people’s political participation. In addition to publishing a monograph on Politics, Protest and Young People in 2019. Sarah has also co-edited several edited collections on youth political participation. Most recently, she co-edited (along with Judith Bessant and Analicia Mejia Mesina) a three volume edicted collection on When Students Protest.

Dena Arya is a doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University and her research focuses on the role that economic inequality plays in how young people participate in environmental politics in the UK. To find out a little more about her research you can check out her NTU profile page, Twitter page (@dnaarya) or her Instagram (@dena.arya). You can also have a look at some of her recent published work on ethnography with young environmental activists during the COVID-19 pandemic here.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

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Youth voice in the city: involving young people in research and planning and decisionmaking – 17th November.

By UCL Global Youth, on 8 October 2021

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

The fourth webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 17th November from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the theme of youth voice, and will feature research from London and Athens.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

The practical ethics of doing urban planning research with young people

Hannah Sender, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL

In this presentation, we’ll talk about what makes co-producing research with young people possible, and a positive experience. We’ll touch on different matters to do with practical ethics, including project management and design, mental health support, and payment. Whilst we’ll draw on our own experiences of working with/as young researchers in London, we aim to tease out some lessons we’ve learned which can be relevant for others working in different contexts.

Author Biography: Hannah Sender is a PhD student and Research Fellow at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. She is interested in how changes in urban areas affect adolescents’ everyday lives, subjectivities and futures. Hannah works with young people of different genders, nationalities, ethnicities and with different abilities, in Lebanon and the UK. She develops creative and collaborative methodologies which support young people to be researchers of their own lives and neighbourhoods.

Youth voice in the city – involving young people in research and planning and decision-making

Dr. Tom Western, UCL Department of Geography

This talk details a set of collaborative methods for creative activism. It centres on Athens, and the ways that people build autonomous spaces of research, knowledge, and cultural production – both as techniques of voice and mobilisation, and as means of remapping and remaking the city. I will narrate these methods through a project called the Active Citizens Sound Archive, which I run with my colleagues in the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF). The archive is a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, and community mobilising. It sings relational and collective geographies. It foregrounds imagination as a tool of social and political transformation, required to think things otherwise: to unmake borders, to form counterpublics, to assert presence and belonging, to open the city. The talk aims to share these methods of collaboration, relation, and imagination – detailing how academic and activist knowledges combine, and how vocal politics carry into research, planning, and decision-making.

Author Biography: Tom Western is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL. His teaching and research centre on movements and migrations, cities and citizenships, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms. Tom works primarily in Athens, Greece, where he studies and contributes to migratory activisms and creative citizenship movements. Based on this work, Tom is currently writing a book titled Circular Movements: Migratory Citizenships in Athens. The book hears how people in Athens creatively contest the logics of borders and citizenship regimes, reimagining questions of being and belonging in the city, and remaking citizenships against citizenship.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

Webinar on Precarity, youth and the city – 20th October 2021

By UCL Global Youth, on 8 October 2021

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

The first webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 20th October from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the theme of precarity, and will feature research from London and Nairobi.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Presentation 1: ‘Press-ganged’ Generation Rent: Youth homelessness, precarity and poverty in East London

Paul Watt, Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London.

This paper examines youth homelessness, precarity and poverty via a critical account of ‘Generation Rent’ – that young people are living in the private rental sector (PRS) in perpetuity having been locked out of both homeownership and social renting. The post-2008 crash period has witnessed a profound transformation in young people’s tenure expectations and experiences such that homeownership has become an impossible dream for most, while social renting has also become increasingly out-of-reach for working-class youth due to four decades of neoliberalisation and the last decade of austerity welfare cutbacks. Rather than being a transitional tenure for young people embarking on their housing careers, the PRS has become their de facto tenure of destination, hence giving rise to the influential notion of ‘Generation Rent’. This paper examines precarity and the notion of Generation Rent by focussing on employment (non-standard contracts) and housing (insecurity and evictions) with reference to in-depth interviews undertaken with 55 young people aged 18-30. This multi-ethnic group of low-income, working-class youth were living in temporary accommodation either in East London or in South East England having been displaced there from London. The paper illustrates the interlinkages between employment and housing precarity. However, despite the young people’s well-founded antipathy towards the PRS, they were being steered towards this tenure by housing officials – not renting from the PRS was no longer an option. Therefore, if the PRS is becoming a ‘tenure of destination’ for young people, this represents a case of coerced, ‘press-ganged’ Generation Rent for Black, Asian and white working-class youth.

Author Biography: Paul Watt is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published widely on social housing, urban regeneration, homelessness, gentrification, suburbanisation, and the 2012 Olympic Games. His most recent book is Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2021):

Presentation 2: Hustling recentred – thinking with Nairobi to understand young working lives in the post-wage economy.

Dr Tatiana Thieme, UCL Geography

This presentation draws on ethnographic research in one of Nairobi’s oldest and largest informal settlements, Mathare, where young people mobilise the notion of ‘hustle’ to express narratives of struggle, day to day income opportunities, and solidarities in under-served neighbourhoods. In this context, everyday young lives navigate constant economic, social and political insecurity, caught in a state of suspension (or ‘waithood’) while shaping local practices of provisioning in the absence of formal structures of support. The presentation will reflect on the temporalities and terrains of the hustle economy in Mathare, which include the emerging tensions and solidarities between different generations of youth, and between youth who stay and those who leave ‘the hood’. Finally, the presentation will pan out to reflect on how ‘hustling’ is situated within wider debates around the future of work for youth. Here I reflect on hustling as an increasingly globalised vernacular, that simultaneously presents an affirmative narrative of work outside normative conventions of the wage, while also echoing on-going expressions of racial capitalism and marginalisation.

Author Biography: Dr Tatiana Thieme is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at UCL Geography. Her research interests engage with different aspects of entrepreneurial and makeshift urbanism, and recent research has focused on alternative cultural and economic geographies related to the politics of urban poverty, informal work, and everyday coping strategies in contexts of precarious urban environments. The three sub-themes of her research are: Urban political ecology of sanitation and waste; Youth geographies and “hustle” economies; social enterprise and development.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

New webinar series for Autumn 2021: Youth and the City

By UCL Global Youth, on 10 September 2021

The Centre for Global Youth (CGY) is hosting a series of webinars to explore questions of youth and cities. Over 5 weeks during October to November 2021, these 1-hour seminars will bring together a range of guest speakers to share new research and engage in dialogue about how young people use, relate to, challenge and remake urban spaces. Spanning research in cities from the Global North and South, session topics will include precarity, race, social class, activism, music, and youth voice. Contributors will draw on theories from sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and beyond. Overall, the aim of the program is to overcome silos of urban sociology, youth studies and allied fields, and encourage further conversations at critical intersections of youth and cities.

When? The webinars will take place on Wednesday from 12-1 on the following dates:

• Week 1: Precarity, youth and the city – 20^th October
• Week 2: Race, class, youth and the city – 27^th October
• Week 3: Youth activism in the city  – 3^rd November
• Week 4: Youth voice in the city – involving young people in research and planning and decision-making – 17^th November.
• Week 5: Youth and music in the city – 24th November

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr Tatiana Thieme, UCL Department of Geography
• Professor Paul Watt, Birkbeck University
• Professor Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University
• Dr Tyler Denmead, University of Cambridge
• Dr Sarah Pickard, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
• Dena Arya, Nottingham Trent University
• Dr. Joseph Egwurube, University of La Rochelle
• Hannah Sender, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL
• Tom Western, UCL Department of Geography
• Dr Gabriel Dattatreyan, Goldsmiths

The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on our YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Organisational details: The series is co-ordinated by Avril Keating, Caroline Oliver, and Brett Lashua. To book your ticket and receive a link for the webinar, please visit our Eventbrite page.

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

Growing up in coastal towns: exploring the impact of place on young people’s life chances

By UCL Global Youth, on 21 June 2021

Coastal towns have come to the fore in recent UK policy debates, as some of the most deprived neighbourhoods are now in coastal areas. These debates often raise concerns about the future of young people in these towns, largely because of the limited educational and employment opportunities in these communities. Despite this, there is almost no research on the impact of growing up in coastal communities on young people and their future prospects. The core aim of this project, therefore, is to consider: in what ways does growing up in a coastal town impact on young people’s experiences, aspirations, and life chances?

The project is particularly interested in the impact of place-based inequalities as coastal towns tend to have distinct characteristics because of:

• Location and infrastructure (e.g. geographical isolation and poor transport links)
• Local labour market (e.g. limited opportunities for stable, year-round employment).
• Educational opportunities: (e.g. few post-16 institutions and difficulties recruiting teachers)
• Demography: (e.g. high levels of youth out-migration and residents on low incomes)
• Public and health services: (g. difficulties recruiting GPs; cuts to youth services)
• Environment: (e.g. less polluted, but environmental degradation because of funding cuts and concentration of deprivation).

Our first task is to examine whether these characteristics create place-based inequalities that mean coastal towns are distinct from other deprived communities in the UK. If so, do these inequalities have a unique impact on the life chances of young people who grow up in coastal towns?

The second aim is to ask young people about their experiences of growing up in coastal communities and asking them if these experiences have shaped their aspirations for the future. At the same time, we will also ask them: what are the solutions they would propose to improve their coastal communities? What do they feel these communities need in order to provide a environment for young people where they can flourish?

This will be a mixed-method project that will combine secondary data analysis with more exploratory qualitative data collection activities that combine arts-based methods with co-production and collaborative activities with young people living in coastal towns. The project builds on previous work undertaken in Margate.

For further information, contact: Avril Keating.

Project team:

• Avril Keating, Director of the Centre for Global Youth
• Prof Claire Cameron, Professor of Social Pedagogy, Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), and UCL-Institute of Education
• Dr Michela Franceshelli, Associate Professor of Sociology, TCRU and UCL-Institute of Education
• Dr Emily Murray, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
• Dr Stephen Jivraj, Associate Professor in Quantitative Social Science based in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
• Rachel Benchekroun (Research Assistant)
• Francesca McCarthy (Research Assistant)

Start date: 1 June 2021

End date: 28^th Feb 2022

Youth mobility webinar series week 5: Young Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers in the UK

By UCL Global Youth, on 21 April 2021

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.

Youth mobility webinar series week 4: UK

By UCL Global Youth, on 19 April 2021

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.

Youth mobility webinar series week 3: Australia

By UCL Global Youth, on 12 April 2021

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.

Youth mobility webinar series week 2: China

By UCL Global Youth, on 12 April 2021

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.

Youth mobility webinar series week 1: India

By UCL Global Youth, on 9 April 2021

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.