“Our World Is Shaking Because of Corona”: Intersecting Crises and Disrupted Life Transitions among Young People in Ethiopia and Jordan Pre- and Post-COVID-19

Our article explores how intersecting crises, sociocultural norms around gender, age, household and community and broader political and economic shifts are affecting youth transitions. We draw on qualitative virtual research with 138 young people in Ethiopia and Jordan undertaken between April and August 2020. COVID-19 is exacerbating ongoing crises and gender inequalities in Ethiopia and Jordan and foreclosing opportunities for youth transitions. In Ethiopia, the pandemic has compounded the precarity of young people who have migrated from rural to urban areas, often to locations where they are socially marginalised. In Jordan, the confinement of young people affected by forced displacement to their households with extended family during pandemic-related service closures augments existing perceptions of an extended ‘waithood’—both psychosocially and economically. In both contexts, conservative gender norms further entrench the restrictions on adolescent girls’ mobility with consequences for their opportunities and wellbeing. This article makes an important contribution to the literature on gender, migrant youth and the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by showing how multiple crises have sharpened the social and political (im)mobilities that already shaped young men and women’s lives in Ethiopia and Jordan and the consequences for their trajectories to adulthood.

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE: YOUTH TRANSITIONS TO EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT: A MOBILITIES PERSPECTIVE

This special issue focuses on the geographical and spatialized mobilities related to youth transitions to post-secondary education and employment. The “mobility turn” in social sciences in the last decade recognizes that life is increasingly organized and shaped by mobilities (and immobilities) across varying spatial and temporal scales. Yet these mobilities have only recently been examined and theorized as central to understanding the complexity and diversity of young people’s experiences. The collection of articles in this special issue presents a multiplicity of young people’s relationships to mobilities, particularly as they pursue post-secondary education and employment. The papers are concerned with: (a) the motivations for and expectations of imagined mobility (the innumerable reasons why youth choose, or are compelled, to move or stay), whether focused on the outmigration or inmigration of mobile youth; (b) the lived experiences that youth have in their mobility practices (focusing on multistranded relationships between places of origin and destination, or recognizing the temporality of that mobility); and (c) the value that these youth mobility studies have for policy issues and policy recommendations. The papers in this issue are case studies concerned with youth mobility prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. They use qualitative and quantitative methods, representing inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches from anthropology, sociology, education, communication, and rural development studies. They derive from a collaboration through the On the Move Partnership, an 8-year interdisciplinary research initiative with a key focus on young people’s employment- and education-related geographical mobilities in Canada.

A New Adulthood

This chapter takes a critical lens to the field of youth transitions. The authors argue that the concept of youth as a period of transition has tended to ossify around school-to-work trajectories, obscuring the significance of other life spheres, such as leisure, friendship, and culture. Although youth transitions scholars can, and indeed are, beginning to account for a wider variety of transitions and do attempt to interrogate the impact of class, gender, and race on transition outcomes, the concept of transitions to adulthood underestimates the historically specific nature of youth, and adulthood, and is ill-suited to identifying the life course effects of youth experience. The authors draw on examples from their longitudinal research on two generations of young Australians to introduce a social generational framework that highlights the changing nature of youth and adulthood, as the stalwarts of transition patterns (education into work) are disrupted by trends toward lifelong learning and precarious work. The current generation of young Australians, like their counterparts in many other countries, have to navigate new transition regimes that involve a considerable investment of time and money in education. Yet globally competitive labor markets mean that the pay-off for education is often difficult to attain. These conditions, the authors argue, create a “new adulthood,” which is an outcome of a generational accommodation to the changing rules of the game of transition from education to work. They use this concept to move debate beyond claims that youth is simply an extended transition before adult status is reached.

Social structure and inequality

Focuses on the meaning and effects of social inequality from a structural perspective, i.e. how life chances are based on wealth and income in populations distributed demographically according to such features as education, age, ethnicity, locality and nationality. Social class based patterns and dimensions of stratification that define young people’s life chances in the US and Europe characterise neo-liberal digital societies in which inequality is rising, threatening social cohesion. The book shows how Germany and England are marked by such ‘path-dependent’ inequalities that structure privileged and precarious youth transitions. In addition, inequality is impacted by such factors as globalisation, and migration showing how national economic and social policies respond. Social mechanisms structuring unequal youth transitions are also outlined.