Gift-for-sex (GFS) barters are a niche practice potentially representing the commodification of everyday dating practices. We inquire how GFS exchanges are practiced and understood in contemporary Russia. Second, we situate these in relation to contemporary economic culture. Our project provides answers in two steps based on online content. First, we identify GFS exchange practices within a major dating website. Next, we take the signals exchanged in those dating profiles and display their intersubjective meanings in Russia based on blogs and discussion fora. Our analysis focuses on gender roles and inter-gender conflicts, the use of economic jargon, the link between luxury consumption and sexuality, and understandings of gift-giving and generosity, in order to show how GFS barters, despite being contractual, carry emotional and romantic content. As such, love is under a constant conversion process, through the medium of the contractual gift, into the fictitious commodity form.

The geographical mobility of young Europeans takes place within institutional realms that frame young people´s educational and vocational situations. These institutional framings provide unequal preconditions for going abroad. Starting from an action-oriented theoretical approach, the aim of this work was to explore young people´s international moves within different mobility settings. Based on 52 qualitative interviews with mobile youth from three mobility fields in three countries (students from Luxembourg, employees in Norway and Luxembourg and apprentices from Germany), the dynamic concept of context-sensitive mobility-related modes of action (MRMA) was developed. The applied analytic framework reflects the fact that individual perceptions and actions relating to going abroad differ greatly according to the young people’s specific current educational/vocational situations. Moreover, the comparative approach sheds light on different dimensions of inequality caused by these framing systems.

Even though intra-European youth mobility is valued as a boost for personal and professional development, few opt for it. While obstacles preventing young people to become mobile have been discussed broadly, less attention has been paid to the obstacles for the youth who are already on the move. We offer this rare perspective in regard to intra-European mobility. We focus on youth in four types: pupil mobility, vocational (education and training) mobility, higher education student (degree and credit) mobility and employment mobility, in six countries: Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania and Spain. Our analysis, based on qualitative (140 interviews) and quantitative (N=1.682) data, reveals that the perceived obstacles vary between the mobility types, with the greatest divergence between the educational and work-related mobilities. Obstacles such as lack of financial resources and guidance, the perceived incompatibility of institutional regulations within Europe, are shared by all mobile youth.

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