Paper short abstract:

Many young adults in Barcelona are not able to find a job (adequate to their qualifications) at “home” and are thus strongly pushed to “move”. This paper argues that the imperative for labour mobility, however, is increasingly challenge by counter-narratives of care and interdependency.

Paper long abstract:

Despite living in an international metropole, job opportunities for highly educated young people in Barcelona are very limited. While many of them were willing or even enthusiastic to move for education or work in younger years, the wish to put down roots tends to get stronger when they are around thirty years old. Consequently, they have to negotiate between professional opportunities and aspirations, and personal and emotional attachment to place.

For the highly educated young adults, geographical mobility is closely tied to biographical or existential mobility (Hage 2009) and staying put often comes together with feeling stuck professionally. Having grown up with a strong emphasis on work as a means for self-fulfilment and personal independence, not being able to comply with the socially inculcated expectations towards professional success is experienced as very challenging. Young women additionally struggle with a tradition of feminist thinking that relates women’s independence and equality to their participation in the labour market and the ability to maintain themselves. Staying put in order to live with a partner or start a family thus has a smack of backwardness and women’s subordination, and of feminist “failure”. In this paper I argue that in trying to reconcile their inculcated values regarding work and personal autonomy with a reality of lacking job opportunities and high demands toward labour flexibility, the young women I met in my research developed a counter-narrative of care and interdependency against the (neo)liberal ideology of work and individual independence.