#eMOVIX

The Youth emigration, new social movements and digital networks (#eMOVIX) project aims to study the relationship between youth migration, social movements and social media. The project is focused on the Catalan young migrant’s experiences, connected to other recent migrant experiences, especially those done by graduate people, also called ‘brain drain’. Another important part of the project is the study of the Maroon Wave, a transnational movement born next to the 15M movement, which gather Spanish young activists in different world capitals, in special in the cities of London, Berlin and Paris. The majority of these young people travelled to the European cities to study (usually with an Erasmus scholarship) and later on decided to remain in their destinations either to continue their studies or to start their professional career. Most of them took part on the 15M movement, and when politicians began to relate youth migration to a positive and necessary thing to the country, the activists started to organize themselves in different “waves” mobilizing the population on different social issues.

This study has three different goals. Firstly, to present a wide panorama of the youth migration to Europe and other parts of the world within the last five years, from the beginning of the economical crisis until now. To build this panorama we are going to use different statistical data available showing the geographical complexity and the temporality of this migration. Secondly, to analyse deeply the Catalan graduated youth migration to London from their autobiographical stories. Finally, to analyse Maroon Wave as a way to interconnect people through social media face-to-face, combining a case study in London with quantitative data from other cities around the world.

This is a transdisciplinary study that aims to integrate three different methodological approaches: ethnography from social anthropology, cartography from geography and social media analysis from informatics. We aim to create an innovative model to analyse new ways of collective mobilizations through a methodology combining the use of quantitative and qualitative data. This model is going to deal with the narrative data (ethnography), cartographic data (geography) and informatics data (data from digital communications) within the same interpretative frame.

Besides the obvious academic interest, the project has a clear motivation for transforming Spanish reality. On one hand, being aware of the fact that there is a big part of Catalan youth that thinks about migrating, we aim to provide them with information about the migration process experienced by other Catalan young people in order to allow them to make a decision on whether or not to migrate from a responsible and conscious perspective. On the other hand, we will send the final results to different Spanish parties and to members of the European Parliament. This aims to reduce the distance between the political sphere and the Spanish young people by presenting to the Spanish politicians the reality of Spanish youth and encourage them to create youth policies to promote youth return. Finally we intend to analyse the social movements abroad that are promoted by Catalan or Spanish migrants, which, like other social movements, aim to build up a democratic change in Spain.

This project intends to develop two software programs; a web page and a mobile application that give answers to youth migrant’s needs in United Kingdom and Germany (two of the European countries with more Spanish young people living in). The application will be available for free in order to encourage its use and will put in contact young people with similar needs (searching job, accommodation, health enquires, etc). The topics would be extracted from the ones discussed on the social network Twitter. Both application and web page will have a graphical appeal and users will be able to find answers to questions about new social and political movements and how young people have been migrating in order to get jobs. The applications would work as a tool to predict which European countries have the most important social movements, where such movements have been started, and the number of people engaged in the movements, etc. Additionally, it would be possible to analyse political associations related to young people and extract information youth migration.

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