Youth Mobilities, Aspirations and Pathways
Conferences & Speaking Events
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‘Mobile Transitions’: A Symposium on Global Youth, Transnational Mobilities and Transitions to Adulthood
The YMAP Project hosted a one-day symposium on Friday 23rd June 2023. The event was a pre-conference event aligned to the XX ISA World Congress of Sociology, which was held in Melbourne in 2023.
Young people aged 18-30 represent the most mobile cohort across the globe. Much of this mobility is encouraged and facilitated by current migration, education and social policy, reflecting the widely accepted view that transnational mobility will provide youth with enhanced life chances and competitive job skills as they transition to adulthood, as well as benefit the community more broadly through an increasingly cosmopolitan and agile workforce. Yet these assumptions have been largely untested, and research and policy have remained narrowly national in focus. This symposium brought together leading and emerging scholars who are researching transnational youth mobility to explore the impacts of mobility, immobilities and temporalities on young people’s transitions to adulthood. It featured a keynote session with Associate Professor Valentina Cuzzocrea, two themed sessions including a special session on the Youth Mobilities, Aspirations & Pathways Project, and a panel on careers outside of academia with recent migration studies PhDs.
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About this Event
We were delighted to host our Conceptualising Youth Mobilities amidst Social Challenges Workshop on the 28th November 2022 at Deakin University and online. The workshop brought together over ten presenters in and outside Australia, including our two Keynote Speakers, Associate Professor Valentina Cuzzocrea (Università degli studi di Cagliari) and Associate Professor Catherine Gomes (RMIT). The workshop provided speakers and audiences with dedicated networking time and connections with like-minded researchers at all stages of their careers, including early career and postgraduate.
In this one-day workshop, we examined transnational youth mobilities amidst the social challenges of our contemporary world. How do young people construct belonging and place in a mobile world? What is the role of mobility in young people’s negotiation of social challenges? How might emerging forms of mobility (re)shape perceptions of adulthood and aspirations for youth transitions?
The theme of Social Challenges is particularly timely considering the growing knowledge of the challenges that young people face as society emerges from COVID-19 associated lockdowns; grappling with, in many cases, pre-existing issues including mental health, employment, racism and inequality, among others.