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Paper short abstract

This paper explores migration, aspirations, and kin relations via Greek ethnography and bridges refugee immobility studies with Athens school ethnography.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines entanglements of migration, educational aspirations, and reciprocal kin relations via comparative ethnography in Greek educational settings, centering youth perspectives. It dialogues earlier research on refugee youth facing involuntary immobility in transit and informal spaces with recent classroom ethnography in middle-class Athens public schools attended by migrant and refugee children.

Youth aspirations emerge as relational, negotiated through school interactions, informal learning, family strategies, and moral economies of care, obligation, and reciprocity. Rather than linear or individualized, they unfold within families, across generations, amid uneven resources and polarized discourses on migration, belonging, and inclusion—shaped by neoliberal meritocracy, integration ideals, and exclusionary regimes.

Using aspiration, hope, and relatedness as an analytic triad, the paper analyzes educational projects as accomplished, unfolding, hindered, interrupted, deferred, reoriented, or cancelled. From a youth view, these are family projects influenced by legal shifts, economics, institutions, racism, opportunities, recognition, and stability. Successful trajectories—like school transitions, credentials, or language gains—are relational feats tied to collective investments. Disruptions prompt reassessments of education's present and future value.

Aspirations recalibrate via reciprocal obligations, intergenerational plans, and imagined futures. Education may defer for siblings, redirect to skills, suspend for migration or legalization, or consolidate amid flux. These uneven paths reflect family priorities, constraints, and opportunities within polarizing regimes that entrench inequalities by legal status, class, race, and migration history.