Living on the Brink: Enforced Liminality in the Lives of Young University-educated EU Migrants with Precarious Paths

Simola, Anna
(2019) 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association ESA “Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging — Location: University of Manchester, UK (20.August.2019)

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Over decades, the EU has encouraged young people to enhance their careers through seizing international mobility opportunities. However, the realities young EU migrants currently face in their destination countries do not necessarily come up to the expectations associated with mobility. Along with the increasing precarisation of labour, the contestation over migration has, in many EU countries, brought about policies that hinder precarious EU migrants’ access to rights associated with EU citizenship. The article draws on job-o-graphical interviews with young university educated migrants from southern and northern Europe who had moved to Brussels with hopes of advancing their careers, but subsequently experienced unemployment and worked under precarious contractual arrangements. Their migratory experiences were often about being ‘stuck’ and ‘caught’ professionally, economically, institutionally and intimately, while also forced to restless and uncertain struggles that many characterised as a ‘limbo’. The article suggests the notion of enforced liminality to understand how these experiences were shaped in the interplay between precarious employment practices and state policies – those encouraging mobility and those constraining them from striving towards their aspirations. The empirical analysis portrays three key migration narratives that illustrate how the enforced liminality often provoked a sense of living on the brink of falling, not only from the career ladder, but also through the unreliable safety nets of the welfare state, accompanied with fears of falling into exhaustion and falling back to parental home. Understanding these experiences is important, particularly because they may carry along material, professional, social, psychological and even physical scarring effects over time.
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  • University of Helsinki

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Simola, A. (2019). Living on the Brink: Enforced Liminality in the Lives of Young University-educated EU Migrants with Precarious Paths. 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association ESA “Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging, University of Manchester, UK.