These days, geographic mobility has become a normal standard and taken on a truly mandatory character. In our multipolar and far-reaching world, moving elsewhere is no longer a right: it has often become a real obligation. Where young people are concerned, mobility is presented as an asset that allows one to open up to the world, to enrich one’s life thanks to new experiences, to face up to and deal with otherness and, finally, to build up one’s own individual characteristics. Effectively, migratory practices amongst young people are statistically significant and have tended to grow over these past decades. In such a context, the family plays an important role and is a major factor as concerns youthful migration. An important role because it is through the resources it may provide (economic, material, emotional) that it supports the young on their pathway. And a major factor too since juvenile mobility leads to the separation of the generations. This also requires readjustment of intergenerational relationships and a review, by the young people, of the meaning of their family ties and of their affiliations.

Keywords: migration, intergenerational relationship, youth, family ties, mobility

The objective of this article is to better understand the linkage between the residential anchorage of adolescents living in segregated neighbourhoods and their urban mobility practices. The subjects we have chosen for this are working-class and middle-class adolescents living in Sensitive Urban Areas (SUA) of Greater Paris. The use of statistical and ethnographical materials and of semi-structured interviews allows us to demonstrate that SUA adolescents have a lesser mobility potential than do other adolescents, but that the fact of living in a segregated neighbourhood does not necessarily mean that they avoid exploring the rest of the city.

Keywords: daily mobility, residential anchorage, segregation, teenager, sensitive urban area

This article contributes to the analysis of the processes of student training mobility and anchorage in Brittany’s university cities. Using a quantitative methodology, we have re-examined, on the one hand, the hypothesis that students have become more and more mobile, and we have also looked at their anchorage in the university city (both their residential and urban practices per se). Our reference population is that of IUT (technological university institute) students, at bachelor degree level (I^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd year) and Breton university MA students (1^st and 2^nd year)

Mots-clés: student, mobility, spatial practice, living apart, higher education

Within contemporary society ‘mobility’ has been upgraded to the point where it is a cardinal quality, while ‘anchorage’ simply refers to the negative concept of a lack of dynamism. However, the pathways taken by the young working-class people we have interviewed, make it quite clear that such mobility does not constitute a more positive individual and social stance than that of anchorage. Unlike ‘anchored’ young people, those who are ‘mobile’ are more likely to have broken up with their families and, due to the fact that they have no close support to rely on, their mobile practices result more from constraints than from structured, prepared choices. At the other extreme, young people from the working classes who extend their stay at home with their parents, are able to take advantage of family solidarity, which allows them, rather than achieving economic and residential independence through entry into some stable professional activity, to wait out their time, while enjoying material and emotional stability. This article also stresses the ambivalent nature both of mobility practices and of territorial anchorage.

Mots-clés: mobility, residential anchorage, youth, working class, living together, living apart, family

In a context of increasing migration of French nationals to London, this article is focussed on understanding the motives of young French adults of North African origin who adopt this mobility in order to enhance their professional employability. Some of these young people benefit in France from an international mobility support mechanism, set up by a local mission that accompanies these young people throughout their mobility activities. Once in London, they are welcomed by a French structure that puts forward job and housing proposals. Starting from this data base, the first part of the article deals with the characteristics of these young people, depending on whether they had set off within the framework of a mobility support mechanism or not. The first group find themselves in a much more precarious work situation than the second. Additionally, they are not in the same life cycle stage. The results as a whole are strengthened and further developed through the analysis of biographical discussions with the young people who had left for some months in London. The second part of the article includes three sections in which we deal with the reasons they left for London, how this experience allowed them to discover their Frenchness, and their new lifestyle. Obtaining new referential material is something that impacts their entire introduction to adult life, but nevertheless, this mobility is most usually explored with the idea of promoting their professional integration in France. Far from engaging in a mobility that will distance them, what they are doing illustrates their desire to leave « in order to come back better » to their original region.

Mots-clés: professional integration, mobility support mechanism, introduction to adult life, mobility

This text concerns Quebec Cégep students who migrate for study purposes. Its aim is to determine the role played by the migrant’s family and original environment throughout this migration process, involving as it does a fourfold adaptation to a new educational system, life away from the family home, city life, and a constantly changing social network. For these young people, who face new adaptive challenges, underlined by an obvious desire for independence, their family and original environment continue to be indisputably important anchorage points. To fully understand this phenomenon, one needs to determine the migratory path trodden by these young people, paying particular attention to the transformation of their social network and to the structuring of the relationship between their original environment and their host territory. One then realizes that mobility is an integral element in the lifestyle of these young student migrants. They see such mobility as part of a socialization process, as a rite of passage to adulthood, initiated when they move into higher education. The loss of spatial cohesion with their family and their original environment, confronts them with the concerns and responsibilities of adult life, and thus of autonomous development. One has no choice then but to realize that their identification and attachment to their host territories, even though they will permanently affect their lives, are not absolute and, therefore, these student migrants will develop a range of socio-affective, temporary and labile anchorages.

Mots-clés: migration, special education, college program, youth, studies

Identity building is a complex process located at the crossover between the synchronic dimension of the subject, focussed on the present time (affiliation) and the diachronic dimension, that places the subject in a historical context (filiation). Over and beyond the vertical relationship to parents and to grandparents, one’s identity is also built up via horizontal relationships. Brothers and sisters have joint, shared relationships while, at the same time, each sibling tends to differentiate him or herself from the others. Now, the migratory movement often means that the subject concerned will be liable to a foundering in the transmission process and a reshuffling of identification characteristics. This leads us to ask the following questions: how does the migratory process lead to changes in family relationships and, more especially, those amongst siblings? Can sibling relationships serve as supports for identity negotiation and integration of the migrant? If so, in what ways? This research, therefore, is focussed on the building up of the identity of young adult immigrants to Quebec. More specifically, we examine interests us are the issues and processes that go into identity building, linked with sibling relationships on the one hand, and with the migration process on the other. We have made use of a qualitative research process that has allowed us to interview seven adults (three interviews with each one) so as to explore with them the development of their family and sibling relationships along with their intercultural experience. The first stage in the analysis of the results is now complete and indicates that brothers and sisters may, at one and the same time, represent an emblem of continuity that can coexist with the uprooting effect of immigration; contribute to the building up of new affiliate links within the host society, and participate in the subject’s renegotiation of his or her identity.

Mots-clés: identity building, sibling relationships, immigration, family, qualitative research

The connection with adolescent space and, more specifically, its mobility, is often comprehended through the framework of the family and of a single residential location. However, some individuals experience adolescence via multiresidential situations, more especially related to a taking into care linked to a geographical shift. An analysis of the residential situations of foster children brings out a range of patterns, involving parents but also extended families and those in their immediate environment. Adolescent territorial appropriation thus takes over numerous spaces: third-party spaces that appear between the family home and the residential location, demonstrating the existence of an emotional relationship with the territory.

Mots-clés: placement, teenager, spatial representation, multiresidentiality, territorial appropriation

In this article, we analyze to what extent young people mention less their parents as important discussion partners when they live away from them. Using a representative sample of young people aged 18-34 living in Switzerland, we show that, overall, young people living away from their parents are not less likely to confide in them. However, parent-child relationships vary strongly with distance in the case of young mothers. For a young woman, having a child increases the likelihood of citing her mother or father as a confidant if parents live close by, and decreases this likelihood if parents live away. Moreover, young mothers geographically distanced from their parents do not find elsewhere the emotional support that they usually receive when they live in close proximity to their parents. Associated with specific family events, geographic distance therefore contributes to reconfiguring relational dynamics and worsening gender inequalities within families. This study points out that spatial mobility and geographic distance should receive more attention in research on families and intergenerational relations.

Mots-clés: distance, family ties, youth, living apart, support

This article aims at studying the development of relationships in families of Sub-Saharan origin now living in France, and is based on interviews with two generations of adults (parents and young adult children). The duality of references to the home countries as regards practices, values, standards or educational principles is constant. Children and parents provide a dual focus on the journey, the background and the destiny of each person. The building up of individual identities, impacted by a wide range of references, varies according to the generation to which the individual belongs. Migrant parents remain attached to their African identities (ethnic, national, pan African, even transnational), whilst acknowledging that their identity has acquired a French « segment. » The young people, on the other hand, declare that they feel themselves to be French citizens and would like to be recognized as such. Both generations affirm that they are comfortable in France. Where children express an interest for Africa, proof of their attachment to their countries of origin, this does not mean they are therefore tempted to live in them. As for the parents, they hesitate when it comes to determining their « final resting place, » between deciding whether to be laid to rest in their ancestral mainland, or to be buried in France and thus remain close to those of their immediate lineage. The above considerations are drawn from some sixty interviews carried out amongst immigrant parents (whose social upbringing took place in Africa) and the children (born in France or brought there at an early age).

Mots-clés: sociology, anthropology, intergenerational relationship, identity building, qualitative approach

The massive development of the Brazilian public health system over the past two decades has given rise to new practices and new forms of participation amongst working-class women. As a consequence, maternal care in North-East Brazil is being developed more and more through public health programs. Women are being called upon to act as agents for change and to play a health management role as concerns their children. Under the terms of these health programs, the bodies of poor women are targeted by regulations that seek positive health results. This widening of the public health compass has led not only to new physical constraints, and new forms of legitimization of medical intervention, it has also created room for the development of new areas of maternal subjectivity.

Keywords: maternity, regulations, health program, Brazil, subjectification