Conference Agenda

Young people’s educational and work-related transitions unfold within social and economic structures operating at local, regional, national, and global scales. These structures are shaped by uneven power geometries that influence access to resources and opportunities. In addition to navigating structural constraints, young people must also relate to normative expectations and value regimes formed within families, communities, and public discourses, such as ideals of career-making as self-actualisation and expectations that individuals should adapt, reskill, and revise their plans over time. They negotiate and respond to these intersecting constraints and expectations in diverse ways across time and context, reflecting both their limited power and their capacity for strategic action.

Youth in Transitions examines how young people navigate pathways into adulthood in northern Sweden, a regional context marked by rapid labour market transformation. Historically shaped by depopulation and deindustrialisation, the region is now experiencing rapid, though uneven, large-scale ‘green’ industrial investment (Eriksson & Tollefsen 2018), which has created demand for new labour (Forsberg 2025). However, these investments have moved through several phases over a short period, from substantial expansion in the mid-2010s to a more restrained phase marked by retrenchment and bankruptcies in the early to mid-2020s (Adjei et al. 2024), and remain unevenly distributed across the region.

This paper synthesises key findings from the qualitative longitudinal Youth in Transitions project, some of which have been reported in earlier publications (e.g. Rönnlund and Tollefsen 2023a,b; Rönnlund et al. 2025). It examines how young people navigate their futures in relation to their structural positioning and the specific conditions of their home region, a European peripheral region undergoing far-reaching reindustrialisation. The 45 participants were 15 years old at the time of the first interviews and in their mid-twenties during the most recent round of data collection in 2025. The guiding research question is: What structural constraints did these young people face when navigating their educational and work-related transitions, and how did they engage with them? The paper contributes to broader debates on young people’s educational and work-related transitions and, more specifically, to scholarship on transitions in regions experiencing uneven reindustrialisation.

The analysis draws on a conceptual framework from human geography. We interpret the findings through the lenses of ‘power geometries’ (Massey 2005, 2024) and ‘constrained youth agency’, a concept adapted from ‘constrained labour agency’ (Coe & Jordhus-Lier 2023). To analyse how young people engage with structural constraints, we also draw on ‘disaggregated agency’ (Katz 2004), which distinguishes between three forms of social response to injustice and unequal power relations: resilience, reworking, and resistance. While labour geographers have used Katz’s R-concepts to describe strategies among employees and trade union members, this triad has also been applied in youth research to categorise the coping strategies young people use as they navigate transitions into adulthood.

In this conference presentation, I will share the main findings and conclusions of my doctoral thesis examining how Finnish schools respond to increasing linguistic and cultural diversity. The study focuses on two lower secondary schools in culturally and linguistically diverse urban settings and on ninth-grade students making their post-comprehensive educational choices, as well as on the adults teaching and guiding them. The linguistic landscape of these schools, and of Finnish society as a whole, is becoming more diverse. This diversity affects the everyday language policies, practices, and pedagogy of these schools in many ways. This research aims to understand how social justice in education can be strengthened in a changing social context.

From an equity perspective, fostering inclusion among marginalized students is central to education. In Finland, as in many other European countries, migration over the past few decades has made schools more diverse. Nevertheless, ethnic educational inequalities remain significant, and students from non-Finnish backgrounds often report a weaker sense of belonging at school.

This research lies at the intersection of the sociology of education, language education, and youth studies. It utilizes Pierre Bourdieu's class theory concepts to analyze educational inequality. Symbolic violence, one of Bourdieu's concepts, is a particularly important tool in this study and is used to understand normative whiteness in schools. Examining school culture from the perspective of linguistic responsiveness was guided by Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, specifically the concepts of linguistically responsive pedagogy (Lucas & Villegas, 2011) and, more specifically, culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016). This study illuminates its subject from three angles: the operating culture and leadership of the school, the educational choices of the students, and the multilingual tutors who act as brokers between families and the school.

The study's results have been reported in three research articles.

Over the past decade, the arrival and protection of unaccompanied minors have become central concerns within European migration and asylum policies. In 2024, 235000 first-time asylum applicants in the European Union were under 18 (26% of the total), including approximately 35000 unaccompanied minors seeking international protection (Eurostat, 2026). These flows are driven by persistent geopolitical instability, economic inequalities, and environmental crises, which disproportionately affect children and adolescents and expose unaccompanied minors to increased risks of marginalisation, exploitation, and rights violations. Italy plays a key role in European child migration dynamics as one of the major countries of arrival and reception. As of mid-2025, more than 16000 unaccompanied foreign minors were registered, predominantly male and aged 16–17, with Egypt, Ukraine, Gambia, Tunisia, and Guinea among the main countries of origin (Ministero del Lavoro, 2026).
These trends highlight ongoing pressures on reception systems and long-term integration pathways. In Italy, unaccompanied minors are supported through a dedicated child-protection framework established by Law 47/2017, which reaffirms the principle of the best interests of the child, prohibits pushbacks at the border, and promotes family foster care as a preferred solution alongside community-based reception, while ensuring access to accommodation, education, healthcare, legal guardianship, and socio-educational services. While this reception system is relatively well consolidated, its practical implementation remains fragmented, as a wide range of public and private actors operate at the local level using heterogeneous and often poorly coordinated intervention models, including therapeutic/clinical approaches and community-based, relational practices (Alpini et al., 2025). Such fragmentation risks weakening the continuity of educational and protection pathways, particularly beyond the initial phases of reception.
Specifically, significant challenges persist in supporting young people during the transition to legal adulthood, especially with regard to social integration and the development of autonomy. This transition is marked by a sudden loss of protection measures and rights at the age of 18, making access to stable legal status, employment, housing, and social support especially precarious. Existing research largely focus on minors’ conditions at the time of placement within reception systems, while the post-reception phase remains largely unexplored, despite being equally crucial for assessing the effectiveness of existing measures (Agostinetto et al., 2025). Indeed, a recent systematic scoping review conducted at the European level identified a limited number of empirical studies addressing this phase, showing a significant lack of longitudinal and qualitative research and an almost complete absence of young people’s own voices.
From a pedagogical and intercultural perspective, this gap calls for a critical engagement with the normative and institutional frameworks shaping reception and educational practices. The literature highlights several recurring dimensions that are central to the transition to adulthood of unaccompanied minors, including access to the labour market, legal status regularisation, participation in educational and vocational pathways, as well as formal and informal social support networks. However, studies warn against overly functionalist and employment-centred approaches that risk narrowing young people’s life projects and reproducing forms of social and occupational segregation. Instead, an intercultural pedagogical approach emphasises the need to recognise unaccompanied minors primarily as adolescents, whose developmental, emotional, and relational needs must be addressed alongside demands for autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Addressing this theoretical and empirical gap, the project presented in this abstract adopts a longitudinal qualitative research design to explore in depth the lived experiences, life paths, and meaning-making processes of young people navigating the post-reception phase after unaccompanied migration. By focusing on the “after” of the reception system, the study aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of this particularly delicate stage of integration and to inform pedagogically grounded and more coherent support practices for the transition to adulthood.