Abstract
This book is a topical and interesting read. It draws on empirical material from Portugal, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to question a number of common assumptions within the fields of both migration studies and youth studies, and explores the extent to which austerity has impacted on the decisions of young people about whether to seek employment or education abroad.
The book is relatively short and structured into five chapters of varying length. The first chapter, the Introduction, discusses the policy context relating to youth mobility, and also introduces the reader to relevant theoretical frameworks. A strength of the book is its interdisciplinary orientation, engaging with debates within human geography, youth studies and the sociology of education, and these are signalled well in the first chapter. A key argument of these chapter is that for many young people, the decisions they make about mobility can have a significant impact on their transitions into adulthood – into the labour market, but more broadly as well. The second chapter, ‘Mobile Being’, is organised in two parts: the first explores in more depth some of the theoretical debates set up in the previous chapter, while the second part comprises four case studies of individual young people, used to introduce some of the themes derived from Cairns’ empirical material. In this chapter, a useful distinction is made between diploma and post-diploma mobility, and a convincing argument is advanced for more research on the latter – that is, mobility undertaken after the completion of a first degree. This chapter also underlines the importance of focussing on Europe’s ‘peripheral’ regions rather than only on countries that are more geographically and politically central. Here, Cairns contends that in such peripheral regions, assumptions about mobility are often different from those in other nations – indeed, being mobile is often a normative expectation among young people in the ‘periphery’.
The third chapter, ‘Becoming Mobile’, focuses primarily on data from the empirical studies carried out by Cairns in Portugal, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Although the research in these three areas was not conducted as part of a single, comparative study, similar research methods were used in all three places, and thus meaningful comparisons can be drawn. Data were collected by both survey and in-depth individual interviews, from young people engaged in undergraduate study. Cairns argues that it is particularly useful to explore mobility decisions by students in these three geographical spaces as they are faced with a limited range of options for investing their educational capital when they graduate (because of the nature of local labour markets). Although interesting differences between the young people in the three sites are discussed, Cairns places most emphasis on points of similarity. A key argument he develops here is that, contrary to the assumptions often made within migration theory, those with the bleakest outlooks about their future economic prospects are those who, on the basis of the evidence collected, seem least likely to move abroad – largely because of strong bonds they feel to their local communities. Thus, social relationships appear to be of greater significance than economic imperatives.
‘The Mobility Promise’, Chapter 4, shifts the focus of the book to the wider policy context and, in particular, the European Commission’s Erasmus scheme for promoting mobility. As Cairns himself points out, the link between this chapter and the previous one is rather weak, as none of the young people involved in his empirical studies had participated in the Erasmus scheme. Moreover, much of the discussion about European mobility policy has been covered by other texts, and thus is not as original as the other material in the book. It does, however, provide a useful overview for those who need an introduction to European policy in this area. The concluding part of this chapter offers a rather different perspective on mobility – introducing some more abstract concepts to help us understand the role of geographical mobility in young people’s lives. (These are discussed further below.) Chapter 5, ‘A Mobile Future?’, concludes the book by summarising some of the key findings from the empirical material, and exploring their implications for theorising about youth mobility within geography, youth studies and the sociology of education. One of the main arguments made here is that many young people have the desire to be mobile, but do not realise this. Cairns suggests that the ‘mobility impulse’ tends to be related to family dispositions rather than purely economic calculations – and argues that parents play an important role in the inculcation of a ‘mobility-favouring habitus’. He also argues that while there is little evidence that austerity policies in the three countries and/or poor labour market conditions related to the recession have had much of an impact on decisions about whether or not to move abroad, they are likely to have affected young people’s ability to be mobile – through the squeeze on the income of their parents, for example. The final part of the book is devoted to an exploration of the ways in which mobility can be better facilitated, making links to the wider policy context discussed in Chapter 4.
Overall, this book makes a useful contribution to the literature on young people’s mobility – particularly because of its focus on more ‘peripheral’ geographical regions, and its investigation of the impact of recession. It would, however, have benefited from a stronger theoretical focus. In several places, interesting concepts were introduced but then not developed sufficiently. For example, longer could have been spent discussing the concept of ‘spatial reflexivity’ and what, exactly, it means to ‘think spatially’. At times, the latter seemed to be used to mean ‘a desire to be geographically mobile’, but this was not stated explicitly. Entangled in such discussions are questions about the kind of mobility we are talking about – the book often assumes that mobility is primarily associated with the crossing of national borders, but a wider definition could also include mobility within the nation-state, which opens up a rather different set of questions.
In addition, I would have liked to see a more rounded discussion of mobility. Throughout the book, it is presented both explicitly and implicitly as a positive resource. For example, the final chapter discusses a range of possible policy changes to facilitate more mobility, and in Chapter 4 Cairns argues for the ‘idea of mobility as a lifelong state of being’ (p. 105). Alternative perspectives are provided by work across human geography, youth studies and the sociology of education that suggest that immobility can, for some young people, also be a useful resource – for example, for those who choose to study at a local university, to mitigate some of the ‘identity risks’ often experienced by students from less advantaged backgrounds (Patinoitis and Holdsworth, 2005). Similarly, my own research has demonstrated that the value of overseas qualifications often differs across national borders: in our study of mobile students, many of those with degrees from outside the United Kingdom reported difficulty in securing their first job because of employers’ lack of knowledge about their qualification (Brooks et al., 2012).
Nonetheless, while the theoretical contribution of the book could be stronger, it raises many important questions about the experiences of young people in relation to geographical mobility, and articulates very well the need for further research on ‘post-diploma’ mobility across Europe and beyond.