Resilience and Resignation among Transnational Roma and non-Roma Youths (RETRY)

RETRY will addresses specific questions vis-à-vis the impact of welfare policies, community strategies, and personal tieson the transitions of young people striving to overcome structural inequalities and to navigate towards their desirable futures in a changing and unstable environment:

How are European welfare regimes navigated, and what does youth mobility reveal about their inability or unwillingness to provide social protection and social mobility?

Migration may represent an alternative path to achieve social mobility, but it can also be associated with impediments to access social rights. RETRY aims to understand how European welfare systems ensure social rights to their mobile citizens and under what conditions is it possible to talk about a 'spatiality of rights'. 

Which alternative strategies are implemented to cope with social insecurity in a context of mobility?

In order to negotiate the obstacles posed by insecurity, young people mobilise alternative sources of social protection. RETRY tackle the question of what kinds of transnational fields are created by individual and collective social protection arrangements, and enquires into their transformative potential.

How, and under what conditions, do underprivileged youths growing up in migrancy use their mobility capital to set in motion upward social mobility careers?

The issue of whether spatial mobility constitutes an asset or not for young people remains unexplored. RETRY addresses this gap by looking at the role of the social capital available in the transnational space in shaping and achieving upward social mobility.  

RETRY aims to combines ethnography with a variety of approaches and methods, including multi-sited methods, on-line ethnography, participatory methods and audio-visual methods.

• The adoption of a 'mobility lens' gives the opportunity to transcend methodological nationalism and embrace a transnational, actor-centred perspective. This approach blurs the distinction between urban, domestic, and international mobility, and consider movement and stasis as complementary phenomena.
• The focus on Roma youths allows for considering the impact of Romaphobia and Roma-targeted policies on youth transitions. Non-Roma peers living in the same districts and sharing similar experiences of im/mobility are also included in the research because their biographies may challenge the representation of Roma as socially excluded and culturally separated from the majority society.
• Fieldwork includes participant observation with disadvantaged Roma and non-Roma youths with different experiences of im/mobility, and is coupled with in-depth interviews with significant adults (parents, neighbours, teachers, social workers, activists).
• The employment of mobile methods allows to move beyond the experience of migrants themselves and reveal the unobserved, transformative effects of international mobility in the societies of origin, in particular among returned or non-migrant youth endowed with different experiences, memories and dreams of im/mobility.
• The use of social networks and on-line ethnography is used to observe how the emotional and cognitive gaps triggered by mobility are negotiated, and also how community networks and identities are created, preserved, and reproduced in the transnational space.
• During the RETRY project, two young participants are recruited as co-inquirers: they contribute to design fieldwork activities and to collect, analyse and disseminate research data. The adoption of participatory methods aims to establish more equal relations, adapt the research questions to their needs and interests and challenge the representation of disadvantage young people as vulnerable/threatening subjects.
• RETRY will employ audio-visual methods as a source of ethnographic data, as a means to engage the interest of the research participants, and an experimental space of co-writing.

Resilience and Resignation among Transnational Roma and non-Roma Youths (RETRY) is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement n° 846645. 

RETRY on the European Commission’s CORDIS website