Mobile transitions - mobile lifestyles? Career choice and way of living at the transition to transnational scientific careers in the European Union

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Karin Schittenhelm
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281509238

The study is on the transition to early transnational scientific careers in the European Union. By help of qualitative methods, humanities graduates are interviewed who, after having completed their studies at German universities, are active as scientists in selected countries of the European Union (The Netherlands and France). In how far do issues connected to their professions but also to their private ways of living play a role for their transition to scientific work in other EU-member states and for their way of dealing with thus-connected demands? The study is meant to gain an extended view of transitions in educational and professional biographies, apart from professional orientation in each case also considering the practiced lifestyles or the ways of living anticipated for the future (including partnership, family or alternative ways of living). In order of covering biographically acquired knowledge as well as negotiations and social inclusion already during the period of transition, the study combines individual interviews and couple interviews. Based on narrative interviews with mobile university graduates having graduated up to three years ago, the study asks about biographically acquired orientations, periods of application as well as mobility decisions. The interest of this step of the inquiry is in their coping with the transition biography as well as in their practiced and anticipated ways of living. From the sample of those having already been individually interviewed a selection for the second step, the couple interviews, will be made. These will be conducted with mobile university graduates and their respective partners. On the one hand these interviews will serve for investigating their negotiation processes and their potentially divergent views on professional mobility and the thus-connected ways of living as couples. On the other hand, the interest focuses on how ways of working transnationally and the practiced lifestyle are based on sharing common stocks of knowledge. For data evaluation, the documentary method will be applied. The epistemic interest is in which kinds of knowledge prove to be relevant in the analysis of transitions in professional biographies from a point of view which is extended by the private way of living. On the one hand, the question is how women and men, in relation to their respective ways of living, cope with the demands of mobile transitions. On the other hand, it is worth asking in how far the Europeanisation of scientific careers creates ways of transnational living in the private life domain.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants