Establishing state of the art knowledge of the topic is a natural initial program of any research project. The resulting book will, in addition to its presentation of seven unique contexts in the realm of migration, outline the research project’s background and theoretical grounding, as well as discuss challenges of comparison. Finally, a concluding transnational analysis will focus on public discourse and the legal, political and economic situation of young adult immigrants.
One task of ours is to integrate former contributions into a cohesive perspective on the dynamics of each national setting as social context. This enables us to seek out well-known mechanisms and patterns of inclusion/exclusion, as well as identifying issues that researchers have not yet cast light upon. In addition, we will explore what we currently know about the social factors contributing to the exclusion and inclusion of young adult immigrants – while aiming to combine this with more “emic” insight into the latter group’s relevant experiences and perspectives. Through the country-specific investigation of how juridical, political, economic and cultural patterns are framing processes of inclusion and exclusion, we seek to understand to what degree these factors are local – and to what extent similar mechanisms operate in several national contexts.
This phase of “Mapping the Contexts” will work as background material for the fieldwork. The latter, making out the key research effort of the project, is inspired by methodological perspectives attempting to bridge the gap between data collected through in-depth interviews and participant observation, and data reflecting macro sociological phenomena (often statistics). Thus, the extension of the local (Burawoy ) – collected principally through life-story interviews – is meant to be facilitated by the secondary analysis of both national and transnational circumstances.