Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RETRY (Resilience and Resignation among Transnational Roma and non-Roma Youths)
Período documentado: 2019-08-29 hasta 2022-08-28
In recent years, no other ethnic minority in Europe has received the same political and academic attention as the Roma. During the last decade, we have seen an escalation of public and political discourses that especially reject Roma migration, encourage expressions of Antigypsyism, and are accompanied by culturalist interpretations that spill over into policies. In this context, Romani voices have often been neglected in research and policymaking, which has contributed to their essentialisation, objectification and romanticisation.
Because the Roma are a particularly young population, this problem is closely intertwined with another broader tendency: leaving the voices, perspectives, and experiences of children and young people at the margins of migration research and policy. This is mainly due to the predominance of economic approaches to migration, which tend to construct migrants as adult workers and young migrants as future adults to integrate into the host societies.
Against this backdrop, RETRY has studied the movements into adulthood of racialised young Europeans on the move for two main reasons.
First, enquires into the youth phase are critical for understanding the impact of systemic inequalities on people’s lives. While research has shown that a young individual’s original social position strongly influences their opportunities and final destinations in adulthood, no one disputes that many young people manage to escape the forces of social reproduction by mobilising social, cultural, and economic resources. The question of how they do it is one of the leading questions of the RETRY project.
Second, children and young people can also be regarded as representing the future of their societies and therefore play essential roles in creating and maintaining national identities. The European Union itself has appealed to young people to create ‘Europe’ as a social, cultural and political entity, promoting ‘learning mobility’ schemes to foster a sense of togetherness and Europeanness. However, EU narratives and policies also trigger selectivities and invisibilities. In this respect, RETRY set the ground for a conversation around the existence of multiple regimes of youth mobility, which are placed along a continuum between two opposite, racialised, gendered and class-biased archetypes of young people on the move: the low-skilled, working-class immigrant, and the high-skilled, middle-class, white expatriate.
RETRY’s ambition has been to develop a theoretically informed, ethnographic understanding of the drivers of educational and post-educational inclusion and marginality in contemporary Europe and the role of migration within these dynamics. The project especially looked at the experiences of Roma and non-Roma to challenge the former’s representation as socially excluded and culturally separated from the majority society. In order to unveil the complex intergenerational interplay of structural constraints and individual agency, RETRY addressed three research questions:
- How are European welfare regimes navigated, and what does youth mobility reveal about their inability or unwillingness to provide social protection and social mobility?
- Which alternative strategies are implemented to cope with social insecurity in a context of mobility?
- How, and under what conditions, do underprivileged youths growing up in migrancy use their mobility capital to set in motion upward social mobility careers?
Because the Roma are a particularly young population, this problem is closely intertwined with another broader tendency: leaving the voices, perspectives, and experiences of children and young people at the margins of migration research and policy. This is mainly due to the predominance of economic approaches to migration, which tend to construct migrants as adult workers and young migrants as future adults to integrate into the host societies.
Against this backdrop, RETRY has studied the movements into adulthood of racialised young Europeans on the move for two main reasons.
First, enquires into the youth phase are critical for understanding the impact of systemic inequalities on people’s lives. While research has shown that a young individual’s original social position strongly influences their opportunities and final destinations in adulthood, no one disputes that many young people manage to escape the forces of social reproduction by mobilising social, cultural, and economic resources. The question of how they do it is one of the leading questions of the RETRY project.
Second, children and young people can also be regarded as representing the future of their societies and therefore play essential roles in creating and maintaining national identities. The European Union itself has appealed to young people to create ‘Europe’ as a social, cultural and political entity, promoting ‘learning mobility’ schemes to foster a sense of togetherness and Europeanness. However, EU narratives and policies also trigger selectivities and invisibilities. In this respect, RETRY set the ground for a conversation around the existence of multiple regimes of youth mobility, which are placed along a continuum between two opposite, racialised, gendered and class-biased archetypes of young people on the move: the low-skilled, working-class immigrant, and the high-skilled, middle-class, white expatriate.
RETRY’s ambition has been to develop a theoretically informed, ethnographic understanding of the drivers of educational and post-educational inclusion and marginality in contemporary Europe and the role of migration within these dynamics. The project especially looked at the experiences of Roma and non-Roma to challenge the former’s representation as socially excluded and culturally separated from the majority society. In order to unveil the complex intergenerational interplay of structural constraints and individual agency, RETRY addressed three research questions:
- How are European welfare regimes navigated, and what does youth mobility reveal about their inability or unwillingness to provide social protection and social mobility?
- Which alternative strategies are implemented to cope with social insecurity in a context of mobility?
- How, and under what conditions, do underprivileged youths growing up in migrancy use their mobility capital to set in motion upward social mobility careers?
RETRY successfully counterbalanced the impossibility of carrying out multi-sited ethnography in three countries during the COVID-19 pandemic with various methods and approaches, including para-ethnography, participatory methodologies, and audiovisual methods.
During the first phase (2020-2021), RETRY recruited three young Roma migrants as co-inquirers. Experimental, online collaborative approaches were tested for collecting data in times of pandemics. These activities have resulted in two book chapters that address the role of audiovisual and digital technologies in producing ethical and collaborative research; and two collaborative short movies which provide an immersive, visual account of the complex interplay of structural constraints and individual agency that shapes the movements into adulthood of disadvantaged young Roma living between Spain and Romania.
During a second phase (2021-2022), fieldwork was carried out in Birmingham with another group of racialised young Europeans on the move: 25 narrative interviews were conducted with young (20-35) Italians of migrant heritage living in the West Midlands, especially from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds. Three community researchers participated in the research by designing the fieldwork activities, conducting interviews, writing field notes, experimenting with audiovisual methodologies, and participating in communication activities. One anthology book chapter has been published, and further articles that foreground the role of racialisation, othering and exclusion in the migration decision-making processes of young Italians are in preparation.
RETRY has also delivered research on the informal strategies implemented by underprivileged Roma migrants to cope with housing insecurity and urban poverty. Two publications have emphasised the role of household strategies and grassroots political organisations in these strategies.
During the first phase (2020-2021), RETRY recruited three young Roma migrants as co-inquirers. Experimental, online collaborative approaches were tested for collecting data in times of pandemics. These activities have resulted in two book chapters that address the role of audiovisual and digital technologies in producing ethical and collaborative research; and two collaborative short movies which provide an immersive, visual account of the complex interplay of structural constraints and individual agency that shapes the movements into adulthood of disadvantaged young Roma living between Spain and Romania.
During a second phase (2021-2022), fieldwork was carried out in Birmingham with another group of racialised young Europeans on the move: 25 narrative interviews were conducted with young (20-35) Italians of migrant heritage living in the West Midlands, especially from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds. Three community researchers participated in the research by designing the fieldwork activities, conducting interviews, writing field notes, experimenting with audiovisual methodologies, and participating in communication activities. One anthology book chapter has been published, and further articles that foreground the role of racialisation, othering and exclusion in the migration decision-making processes of young Italians are in preparation.
RETRY has also delivered research on the informal strategies implemented by underprivileged Roma migrants to cope with housing insecurity and urban poverty. Two publications have emphasised the role of household strategies and grassroots political organisations in these strategies.
By adopting collaborative methodologies as a primary approach to data collection, RETRY has created safe spaces of co-creation where those subjects that rarely talk for themselves in the public sphere and are more often represented by others through colonial imaginaries have had the opportunity to produce knowledge about themselves.
RETRY has also contributed to a growing body of literature that considers children and young people as active cultural agents who contribute to creating and transforming transnational fields and connections with their own agendas and perspectives. In particular, it has highlighted the active role of children and young people in migration decision-making processes across and within generations.
The double focus on young Roma living between Spain and Romania, on the one hand, and racialised non-Roma living between the United Kingdom and Italy, on the other hand, albeit primarily determined by the pandemic, had an unexpected impact: it has allowed bringing together very heterogeneous young lives; bridging different understandings and public debates about race, citizenship and belonging across countries; and better inquiring into the nexus between (im)mobility and structural inequalities in the time of pandemic-related crises.
Against the backdrops of different youth mobility regimes, the project has identified commonalities and overlaps between strategies, constraints and social navigations of young people who are very heterogeneous in terms of class, race, ethnicity, as well as cultural, social and financial capital.
Eventually, the project contributed to the debate on how, for whom, and under what conditions mobility is an asset and suggests that the experience of geographic and social (im)mobility of children and young people is happening at the intersection of multiple registers of class that change across times and locations.
RETRY has also contributed to a growing body of literature that considers children and young people as active cultural agents who contribute to creating and transforming transnational fields and connections with their own agendas and perspectives. In particular, it has highlighted the active role of children and young people in migration decision-making processes across and within generations.
The double focus on young Roma living between Spain and Romania, on the one hand, and racialised non-Roma living between the United Kingdom and Italy, on the other hand, albeit primarily determined by the pandemic, had an unexpected impact: it has allowed bringing together very heterogeneous young lives; bridging different understandings and public debates about race, citizenship and belonging across countries; and better inquiring into the nexus between (im)mobility and structural inequalities in the time of pandemic-related crises.
Against the backdrops of different youth mobility regimes, the project has identified commonalities and overlaps between strategies, constraints and social navigations of young people who are very heterogeneous in terms of class, race, ethnicity, as well as cultural, social and financial capital.
Eventually, the project contributed to the debate on how, for whom, and under what conditions mobility is an asset and suggests that the experience of geographic and social (im)mobility of children and young people is happening at the intersection of multiple registers of class that change across times and locations.