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.

Based on biographical interviews from an intra-European youth mobility study in Luxembourg and Norway the article aims to contribute to the debate on how to understand and account for complexities of agency in youth intra-European employment mobility. Critically reflecting and operationalising Emirbayer and Misches’s conceptualisation of agentic orientations in the field of intra-European employment mobility of young people, we a) explore the usefulness of researching agency from a relational perspective, we b) elaborate on how young mobile reflect their manoeuvring under perceived contingent moments and we c) augment our ken of the complex interlacement of habit, imagination and judgement with (contingent) employment mobility contexts and young people’s concrete employment mobility practices. Our results emphasise the importance of considering how differently agentic orientations interlace with contingent employment mobility contexts ranging from radical self-realisation, adaptive interplay of self-realisation and situational constraints and agentic orientations strongly bounded by situational constraints. In addition, the empirical analysis shows that some of the theoretical propositions of Emirbayer and Mische’s approach have to be revisited.

Our article addresses two aspects of young migrants’ understandings of integration: their own ideas of what integration is, and their perception of the destination society’s concepts and expectations regarding their integration. We analyze qualitative interviews which were conducted in the Horizon 2020 project MIMY, in Germany, Luxembourg and Norway, using the grounded theory methodology. Our exploration shows that the young migrants’ awareness of the existing ideas of integration surrounding them creates a complex reflective interaction between their own ideas and the (perceived) expectations from society. We identified aspects of consonance, where young migrants’ ideas coincide with the expectations they perceive. More importantly, however, our research has discovered that the youth experience tensions and dissonance between their own ideas of what integration should be and the concepts and expectations regarding integration they feel confronted with by society. Our analysis revealed that while young migrants’ understandings of integration are very close to state-of-the-art scientific conceptualizations of integration, this view is not matched by the meaning of integration they perceive around them.

Against the backdrop of the continuing controversy regarding the interlinkage between social class, lifestyle and substance use of young people, the article reports the findings of an effort to assess the impact of adolescents’ cultural and economic capital and lifestyle practices on substance use. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work on class, lifestyle and practice, young people’s substance use can be seen as the product of class-specific capital endowment and related highbrow or lowbrow lifestyles. However, research seeking to explain adolescent substance use so far has eschewed a stringent empirical attempt to examine the impact of capital and lifestyle in relation to the use of different substances. Taking this desideratum as a starting point, our research indicates that although effects of cultural and economic capital are present, the type of lifestyle is more important for understanding and explaining substance use by young people.

The idea for this Special Issue emerged from the Editors’ collaboration on the framework of the European project MIMY: EMpowerment through liquid Integration of Migrant Youth in vulnerable conditions