Young Migrants’ Aspirations, Expectations and Perspectives of Well-Being investigated using Biographical Narratives, the Capability Approach and Intersectionality ; Young People of Ecuadorian Background’s Narratives of Educational Journeys and Career Aspirations

Balsera MR. Young Migrants’ Aspirations, Expectations and Perspectives of Well-Being investigated using Biographical Narratives, the Capability Approach and Intersectionality . Bielefeld: Bielefeld University; 2014. ; This empirical research studies the impact of the interlocking of age, ethnicity, class and gender-related factors on the educational journeys and career aspirations of 15 young boys and girls of Ecuadorian background in three different institutions: secondary schools, remedial vocational centres and juvenile detention centres in Spain; complementing these biographical narratives with expert interviews. Understanding age, ethnicity, class and gender as social construction that shape the dialectics between identity and representation, and are linked to power and oppression that produce and sustain discourses and practices of material inequalities leading to social exclusion and capability deprivation, the dissertation asks and addresses four questions: • How do some selected young people of Ecuadorian background in Spain experience age, ethnicity, class and gender in their social interactions? • What is the role of social conversion factors in enhancing the capabilities of young people of Ecuadorian background in Spain? • What mechanism do some selected young people of Ecuadorian background in Spain develop to increase their well-being? • What factors contribute to upward and downward integration of young people of Ecuadorian background in Spain? The added value of this research lies in combining the Capability Approach and the theoretical tool of intersectionality to analyse the biographical narratives of young people of migration background. By embracing the notion of capability deprivation looking at the compounded effect of age, ethnicity, class, and gender, this approach enables a broader but deeper conception of inequality and discrimination which captures the diversity between and within groups, and improves our understanding of the processes in which these differences are transformed into ...