Youth, Urban Mobility and the Space of Possibilities


Maria Keil, University of Tuebingen

Addressing the panel’s question of how young people’s mobility, educational paths and social (in)equality are interrelated, the paper presents results from a longitudinal ethnography and interview study with adolescents from a German city. The study follows young people from different city districts throughout their transition from school into vocational training, higher education or unemployment and in different social settings, e.g. in youth clubs. The study uses a relational framework for studying social class in youth based on Bourdieu (1984, 1987) and by drawing on the concept of symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Fournier 1992; Lamont and Molnár 2002). The paper will zoom in on the aspect of mobility from different angles. Local mobility within the city and beyond will be illustrated along spatial appropriation and the interaction with institutions, such as schools, universities, youth clubs, museums, etc. Spatial appropriation is also interwoven with affective dimensions of social class intersecting with gender, ethnicity and religion. Social mobility refers to educational trajectories and vocational choices and is strongly linked to family trajectories and past mobility, e.g. migration. Contrasting two groups from my sample, a locally and community centred group of Muslim youth from the working and lower middle classes and a group of white middle-class youth with interrupted or abandoned school careers, different patterns of local and social mobility can be worked out. Whereas the former group aims at social upward mobility, but faces the risk of reproducing their social status based on their occupational choices, the second group faces a lower social status than their parents due to not following an academic path. Educational institutions such as schools, youth clubs and educational programmes play distinct roles in forming the respective pathways and local and social mobility can be ambiguously connected: Even though the upward aspirations by the Muslim youth are promoted by teachers in school as well as by social workers in the youth club, the strong local connection and in-group orientation accompanied by experiences of discrimination outside the district and anticipated social exclusion can also lead to reproducing occupational trajectories or even pursue semi-legal and criminal job careers. On the other hand, for the group of white middle-class youth a fit with the middle-class oriented school system could be expected and the reasons for the school dropout seem to be personal and mental health issues. Their appropriation of the local space in contrast allows them to find institutional settings they feel more comfortable in, such as an alternative educational programme to eventually catch up on their school exams. This relational lens on spatial mobility allows to shed light on the way the local and the social space are interrelated. It can be shown how youth mobility is distinctively shaped by families’ past social and local mobility, i.e. class and migration trajectories, but also by educational institutions. Evidently, the structuring force of the local space on the conduct of life and the space of possibilities varies among different societal groups.

This paper will be presented at the following session: