Growing up and belonging in regimes of geographical mobility. Young cosmopolitans in Berlin

ABSTRACT

The focus on geographical mobility is consolidating within youth studies. Mobility now increasingly characterises contemporary youth, and seems to play a crucial role in marking the transition to adulthood, conveying the complexity of youth cultures. Moving abroad represents an opportunity that fuels the transition to adulthood, by enabling young people to experience cultural diversity, experiment with practices of cosmopolitanism and reframe their sense of belonging in terms of places, times and relationships.

The paper draws on a qualitative study of young Italians who have recently moved to Berlin, and explores the relationships between the transition to adulthood, mobility, cosmopolitanism and sense of belonging. It highlights the deep structural and cultural roots of their mobility practices: mobility is present from an early age in their desires, regardless of their class of origin or educational qualifications. Their mobility practices also involve a daily reworking of their sense of belonging, which sees them navigating family and friendship bonds, and new relationships of intimacy that ‘make home’ and often arise in the context of a cosmopolitan generation on the move. The paper shows how these young cosmopolitans piece together this mosaic of belonging and explores its link with the coming of age process.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• transition to adulthood
• mobility
• cosmopolitanism
• belonging

Acknowledgments

This paper is the result of research conducted in Berlin when I was hosted by the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I would especially like to thank Hans-Peter Müller, Gökce Yurdakul and Anja Röcke for their interest in my research and warm welcome. My thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See in this regard the invitation by Wyn and Woodman (2006) in this journal to move beyond the transition perspective and develop a more fitting generational social theory, thus dismantling the orthodox divide between youth transition and youth cultures. This proposal prompted an interesting exchange with Roberts (2007) and has sparked lively debate among youth scholars.

2 Recent readings have critically highlighted the need to explore the multiple analytical levels that infuse this notion: social locations, identifications and emotional attachments, ethical and political values (Yuval-Davis 2006), the intimate feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness), and the politics of belonging (Antonsich 2010).

3 For the analysis with Maxqda software, we constructed a tree of codes corresponding to the topics of the interview outline. The codes used for the analysis presented here were: reasons for departure (including role and reaction of family and friends), previous experiences of mobility, belonging and transformations of belonging (in a geographical-national sense, in relation to one's generation and ‘feeling at home’), negative and positive aspects of daily life, homesickness, family ties and friendships, plans for the future.

4 On the relationship between geographical mobility, social mobility and class of origin among young Italians, see the recent works by Bonizzoni (2018), Franceschelli (2022), Marchetti et al. (2022) and Varriale (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship /Foundation number ITA1130078 HFST-P, Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.