The RYOT network has two main goals. Firstly, RYOT aims to encourage and enable collaboration between young European researchers and to strengthen their professional connections, going beyond their local and national contexts. We view this to be of particular importance in today’s academic world where the trajectories of early career researchers are characterised by continuous demands for competition as well as ever-increasing risks and uncertainties. The RYOT network facilitates discussion and the sharing of ideas, questions, and concerns among early career researchers. In this way, RYOT also builds the foundations for more formal cooperation in the future, such as joint funding applications and comparative research projects. As a collective of young European researchers from different localities, we are able to offer a fresh and diverse perspective on young people’s transitions in their particular contexts.
Secondly, RYOT aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of young Europeans’ life course opportunities and transitions, which encompasses a range of highly important social justice and equality issues. In pursuing this goal, we seek to:
- Gain a more comprehensive understanding of young Europeans’ life course and biographical transitions by including both different analytic viewpoints (according to the different stakeholders involved in shaping and influencing youth’s transitions) and levels of analysis (from macro structures to micro subjective level) in our research. This includes contextualising the examined issues in relation to broader, global phenomena of structural and cultural change.
- With regard to young people’s opportunities, explore the interrelationships between different structural features of welfare models, education systems, labour markets, transition regimes, and structures of opportunity in the varying national contexts in Europe. This includes taking into account the highly relevant local and regional levels when analysing the interactions among cultural and structural factors, subjective agency, and the formation of individual life courses and biographies.
- Critically analyse the discursive elements of transitions and opportunities in relation to their different cultural understandings, and engage in theoretical and epistemological reflections on the construction of the main concepts tackled by the Network’s research, such as ‘transitions’, ‘opportunity’, ‘agency’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘youth’, and ‘adulthood’.