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?
