Paper short abstract:

My proposal is to explain the introducing of the issue of intergenerational relationships into my ongoing PhD research. I aim to understand the different impacts of EFA certification on Lusophone immigrants and their descendants, treating the generational differences as a crucial point of analysis.

Paper long abstract:

This is part of my on ongoing PhD research entitled "Lives recounted - the impact of the EFA experience on the life trajectories of Lusophone labour migrants and their descendants".

My proposal is to explain the path that led me to introduce the issue of intergenerational relationships into my PhD research. Initially, the goal was to understand the impact of EFA certification on Lusophone immigrants' lives. In the official statistics these immigrants and their descendants appear in the category 'foreigners' i.e. they appear interchangeably in a single category. Despite being born in Portugal, a significant number of the descendants of immigrants have never been able to acquire Portuguese nationality, which affects various dimensions of their lives, including access to and continuation in the educational system and labour market.

The situation found in the fieldwork led to the resizing of the sample, which now considers not only Lusophone immigrants but also their descendants as a key object of analysis. I aim to understand the different impacts of EFA certification, treating the generational differences as a crucial point of analysis. Despite these two generations sharing the certification processes, I consider that the discourses on the impact of the EFA experience in their lives can be differentiated.

On the basis of interviews conducted, I argue that being a Lusophone immigrants and the descendants of Lusophone immigrants form two distinct categories - for we are referring here to different generations that, despite the firmly established relationships between them, ultimately (self)evaluate the EFA experience differently.