Migrant mobility flows characterized with digital data

Monitoring migration flows is crucial to respond to humanitarian crisis and to design efficient policies. This information usually comes from surveys and border controls, but timely accessibility and methodological concerns reduce its usefulness. Here, we propose a method to detect migration flows worldwide using geolocated Twitter data. We focus on the migration crisis in Venezuela and show that the calculated flows are consistent with official statistics at country level. Our method is versatile and far-reaching, as it can be used to study different features of migration as preferred routes, settlement areas, mobility through several countries, spatial integration in cities, etc. It provides finer geographical and temporal resolutions, allowing the exploration of issues not contemplated in official records. It is our hope that these new sources of information can complement official ones, helping authorities and humanitarian organizations to better assess when and where to intervene on the ground

Spatial Transformations

This book examines a variety of subjective spatial experiences and knowledge production practices in order to shed new light on the specifics of contemporary socio-spatial change, driven as it is by inter alia, digitalization, transnationalization and migration. Considering the ways in which emerging spatial phenomena are conditioned by an increasing interconnectedness, this book asks how spaces are changing as a result of mediatization, increased mobility, globalization and social dislocation. With attention to questions surrounding the negotiation and (visual) communication of space, it explores the arrangements, spatialities and materialities that underpin the processes of spatial refiguration by which these changes come about. Bringing together the work of leading scholars from across diverse range disciplines to address questions of socio-spatial transformation, this volume will appeal to sociologists and geographers, as well as scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture

Happy 18th? Unaccompanied minors and the transition to adulthood. An Italian case study

This qualitative study considers the interaction between the Italian migration regime and young male African migrants (age 14-21) who have made the precarious, illegalised journey to Italy, where they are bureaucratically labelled as ‘unaccompanied minors’. The thesis focuses in on what happens when these children become legally adult; examining how the idealised concept of ‘childhood’ has a bordering effect, dividing between (deserving) children and (undeserving) adults. This rigid age binary is reproduced in research and policy on unaccompanied minors, reducing those over eighteen to an invisibilised category. Yet, it is at this moment that the rights they are accorded as children, including the right to stay in the host country, may be lost. This thesis focuses on this lacuna and, in doing so, reveals how these young men position themselves as ‘wrestlers’, contesting the subject position of the ‘vulnerable child’. Theorizing mobility and illegality in relation to young people through a raced lens, the thesis examines the everyday lived realities of the transition to adulthood for these young men. Adopting a multi-modal ethnographic approach, carried out over a period of eight months fieldwork in an Italian reception centre, between 2017 and 2018, data is drawn from repeat interviews, enhanced by visual methods, with twelve of the young men, plus ethnographic observations. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of hostipitality, attention is drawn to the temporalized hospitality for the child. I make the case that the specific socio-legal landscape implemented in the ‘home’ site of these young men, together with the social relations therein, allowed for a form of hospitality that could give time and exceed the threshold of childhood. The thesis deepens knowledge of youth mobility and the temporality of borders, providing important theoretical insights that can nuance understandings of the interaction between young migrants and immigration controls

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality