Currently, a number of contributions in mobility studies are looking for fruitful intersections with other 'adjacent' approaches . In this spirit, our theoretical paper argues to study one particular aspect: the intersection of social protection and mobilities. Currently, the provision of social services in the 'West' is strongly entrenched within nation-state logics, which assume that clients' immobility is a precondition of service delivery and that national citizenship is the desirable conditionality of gaining social rights. To overcome such a wide-spread conflation of social security with state security, we introduce the heuristic concept 'social protection' . It allows social security to be imagined beyond a state-centric perspective and avoids the pitfalls of either a citizenship or a migration approach by taking on a mobility perspective. Thus, for scholars anchored in mobility studies we propose how to develop a social security perspective in a progressive way. For readers from other areas, e.g. citizenship, migration or social policy, we will show how a mobility perspective enriched by a No Border approach can overcome a narrow Western, statist and static perspective on social security. Our goal is to conceptually open up what we call a 'practical utopia' research agenda, one that expands our political horizons for future and present socialities.
This article looks into a community-based mentoring programme for unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs), launched in 2015 at the peak of refugee movement in Austria. Leaning on a long-term ethnographic study, it sheds light on dynamic developments in refugee support through civic solidarity. The article proposes that examining the programme from the point of view of dialectic processes of organizing provides a better standpoint for asking what was produced on the programme and what influences those outcomes have had on more contentious political dimensions. Following this, the focus is concentrated on “loose coupling” within a pilot youth mentoring scheme. This reveals how inbuilt ambiguities were given structure, how rationality and indetermination were interdependently organized and how the uncertain was ascertained through mentor training and matching. Thus, unequal but personal relationships were brought about and stabilized. The particular institutionalization of “godparenthoods for URMs” offered possible ways of integrating various elements of a support system in a way which could provide better support than other relationships amongst strangers. I argue that these specific forms of loose coupling opened up a corridor in which aspects relating to the differential inclusion of young refugees were (re-)arranged through adults volunteering, but with mixed results.
This article looks into how volunteers deal with their biographies and social embeddedness to make sense of their engagement in mentoring before they are matched. It draws on a qualitative investigation on a community-based pilot youth mentoring program for "unaccompanied refugee minors" in Austria. This article reveals how already trained, local adults actively relate to "family," "migration" and "previous activities" in their meaning-making. It shows how they negotiate their personal life and existing relationships in the process of turning into a future "godparent." The discussion of findings against the state of the art leads the way to two heuristic claims: firstly, the study provides grounded arguments for an extension of the conventional mentoring concept on the side of the mentor. Secondly, for a more relational and processual approach towards the mentors' side, both biographical and social network dimensions need to be integrated in methods and designs of youth mentoring research.
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