ON ‘AN INTROSPECTIVE JOURNEY’: Identities and travel in young people's lives

To what extent can the experience of travel become also a journey of self-discovery leading to a reconstruction of identities? Taking ‘a year out’, inter-railing, going abroad on a language study or an au pair stay: these are some of the most common forms of youth travel in contemporary Europe. As almost ritual ways of moving, they may be likened to initiation journeys. This article explores the significance of travel in young people's lives, and in the process of identity construction. These issues are explored in the travel narratives of a group of young people who took part in an autobiographical and mixed method project on identities which was conducted in England and Italy. The meaning of travel in these young people's lives is appreciated through their own words and written diaries. Young people's agency and role in constructing their travel experiences is analysed, as well as the extent to which fate, in the shape of societal expectations and norms, as well as parental intervention, may actually predefine some forms of travel as ‘institutional’ rites of passage. Travels may offer a scenario for an individualised construction of self, which may also involve the co-participation of significant others. The experiences of young women backpackers in this study point out how travelling can still be a way of defining alternative gender identities.

With the reduction of geographical distances brought about by globalisation, the experience of travelling has become part of daily life for most people, and the wish to travel is a highly desired consumer option. It is often the case that people set off to travel in coincidence with ‘fateful moments’ (Giddens 1991) in their lives, when identities are put to question and reflexivity is particularly heightened. Travelling may help turn a moment of anxiety into a moment of opportunity; it is a way of becoming someone (McDowell 1999), an experience which helps to construct new identities (Desforges 2000). From ancient myth and literature, the dimension of the journey has long been associated with a process of inner search, self-discovery, and renewal. The experience of travelling at life transitions may indeed be linked to the ‘initiation rites’ of traditional societies, which would often include a process of separation from the previous environment (Van Gennep 1960).

This article looks at the meaning of travelling in young people's lives. It explores some of the most common forms of youth travel in contemporary Europe, and investigates the relationship between travel and identities, looking at the extent to which physical travel may correspond to a psychological process of self-reconstruction, and at the modalities with which identities may be changed through the experience of travel. It further investigates what kind of roles young people have in constructing their travels, and the extent to which a decision to travel may effectively be a choice within a young person's life, highlighting an individualised pattern of self-definition, or rather the product of societal expectations and norms, which may be uncritically and fatalistically assumed.

My study has adopted what I have called a ‘self + other’ model of identity, which I have more extensively described elsewhere (Bagnoli 2007). Dialogical and relational, this model is based on dynamic theories of the self, Hermans and Kempen's (1993) ‘dialogical self’, and Markus and Nurius's (1986) ‘possible selves’. In this perspective, the dialectics between self and other is central to the process of identity construction. Self and other are here conceived as two poles in a dialogue which is ongoing and through which different discourses and self-representations, even contradictory ones, contribute to shaping identities as ever changing narrative constructions. Identities thus emerge as the product of a multiplicity of voices, arising from both within and without the subject. Thanks to its dynamic characterisation, this model can investigate the impact of different narratives on people's self-constructions, and the power dynamics between individual and societal discourses, looking at how people position themselves and negotiate between context provided identities and individual narratives of resistance (Smith 1993).

The data presented here are drawn from the research project on young people and identities that I carried out for my PhD programme at the Centre for Family Research of the University of Cambridge¹ (Bagnoli 2001). This was an autobiographical project which investigated identities in relation to a case study of migration and which was framed on my own experience of moving from Italy to England as a young woman (Bagnoli 2007). The migration case that I considered was that of young people, first generation, moving between Italy and England, who had been staying in their country of destination for at least six months. A total of 41 young people took part in the research, which was conducted in Cambridgeshire in England and in the Provincia di Firenze in Italy. They were aged 16 to 26, equally divided between migrants and locals, as well as by sex and nationality, and came from different socio-economic backgrounds. A variety of access routes were followed at recruitment and attention was paid in each country to draw samples of young people who would have similar backgrounds and comparable experiences.

This was a mixed-method qualitative longitudinal project, which was designed in order to encourage the active participation of young people as well as their reflexivity. It made use of diaries and visual methods, including self-portraits and photographs, which were applied in the context of two interviews, a first open ended one, introducing the study and diary writing, followed by a second interview, guided by the diary and the other documents collected (Bagnoli 2004). The resulting multi-media data were analysed contextually with narrative analysis procedures (Lieblich et al. 1998), and with the aid of the Atlas.ti computer software.

Many young people across the samples of locals and migrants mentioned travelling as one identity-defining experience: travelling appears to be a common aspiration for young people in Europe. From their travel stories four main modes of travelling emerged: taking a year out, backpacking and inter-railing, spending a period abroad on a language course, either as a student or as a teacher, and au pairing. There is considerable overlap between these modes, but here they have been kept distinct for analytical purposes. The popularity of, as well as the reasons behind choosing these forms of travel varied in the two cultures. The following sections will analyse each of these modalities of youth travel, with attention to their relevance to identities, and to the role played by young people in defining these journeys as trajectories for their individual self-construction.

Taking a year out, usually after secondary school and before going to university, is a common practice amongst young people in Britain. Thirteen out of the 21 English young people in this sample, corresponding to about two-thirds, had had or were considering taking a year out at the time of research. An insight into their plans and expectations as well as their recollections and evaluations of this experience may be gathered from the narratives in this section.

Abigail² and Hesther, 18 and 16 years old, respectively, were two A-level students following the same sociology course. Both of them were thinking of having a break after their A-levels:

Travelling to holiday resorts, working for charity projects or for kids’ camps in America: these are some of the options frequently being considered by English young people at the end of secondary school, often relying on the help of specialised agencies. Offering full immersion in different realities, these experiences may provide an escape from one's usual routine as well as a break away from education. However, there are also other reasons why a year out may be appealing, as pointed out by Hesther and by Nick, a 19-year-old BTech student:The introduction of tuition fees by the Labour government at the end of the 1990s, at the time when this research was being carried out, may have increased the popularity of the year out, which can appear as an opportunity for gaining some work experience and earning some money one can rely on later when at university.

This break away from one's daily routine and career path often has faraway and exotic scenarios as its preferred destinations. As Richard, a 26-year-old vet, recollects:

Despite the narratives of freedom with which it is associated, such as travelling to the other side of the world and collecting exotic and adventurous experiences, the year out is actually in itself a highly ‘structured’ phenomenon. Evidence from this research suggests a clear difference between the student experiences in Italy and in England. Whereas a general uncertainty and irregularity of routes seem to characterise the student lives of Italians, not one of the English students in the sample had had a false start at university, and those who had changed career had done so without dropping out, but after completing their course first. Uncertainty about what routes to take once school is over may be common amongst young people. However, the two cultural contexts seem to suggest rather different ways to cope with this uncertainty. In the Italian narratives, career choice is often a family task, heavily piloted by parental views. As a result, the high incidence of false starts and drop outs seems associated also to the high level of parental involvement. By contrast, with only a few exceptions, there is no indication of an analogous direct involvement of English families in their children's choices. Decisions over young people's future are constructed in terms of individual task and responsibility, rather than as a family enterprise. In the generally more structured English context, the year out appears, as the very term suggests, an institutionally granted ‘moratorium’ phase (Erikson 1980), which is defined as a stage within a more or less clearly marked path. Young people are allowed a time of flexibility, when their responsibilities may be put into brackets and they can experiment with a variety of possible selves, before making any long-term commitments. This time is ‘out’ and free, yet it is also pre-set as having the duration of a year and canonised as an almost ritual experience of growing up. The absence of a translation or an equivalent in the Italian language of a ‘year out’ further indicates this as a phenomenon which is specific to the Anglo-American culture.

The structural character of the year out is confirmed in the narrative by Richard, when he tells how his decision to take a year out was taken:

Richard's Cambridge college seemed to be following an admissions policy which encouraged taking a year out as a good preparatory experience before embarking in what is a very competitive course of study. Even employers may similarly suggest taking some time out, as it appears from the experience of Mark, a 23-year-old Englishman studying for a PhD in Italy:In Mark's ironic account, the year out is an ‘excuse for a long holiday’ which relies on some fashionable cultural discourse about ‘finding yourself’. The endpoint of this trip of self-discovery, however, will eventually be working ‘like a dog in a city firm’, fully re-entering the institutional structures and the work ethic ethos once the holiday is over. Indeed, although rooted in the hippie counterculture, backpacking is not experienced as a permanent lifestyle by most of today's travellers, who once back home will easily reintegrate in the society they are from (Welk 2004). Mark also links the year out to the English aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour:Actually dating back to the seventeenth century onwards (Towner 1985), the tradition of the Grand Tour seems to be a significant cultural reference for contemporary English travellers (Bagnoli 2007). The year out can indeed be seen, as Mark suggests, as an evolution of the Grand Tour: originally a marker of distinction for the young of the aristocracy, this ‘educational trip’ has nowadays become a middle class youth ritual. Travelling facilitates the accumulation of cultural capital in the form of cosmopolitan knowledge of the world which is viewed as necessary to the construction of a youthful middle class identity (Desforges 1998). Travelling on a budget to exotic destinations can add quite significantly to one's cultural capital class distinction, although, as Mark points out, the year out can turn out to be a rather different experience depending on the economic resources one can draw from:Backpacking is a quintessentially ‘young’ form of travel and one of the most popular experiences young people undertake during a year out. The next section will analyse backpacking in terms of identity construction, and in relation to the structural component of gender.

Backpacking has been seen as a form of oppositional postmodern travel, a practice through which the new middle classes construct themselves as ‘alternative’ and define their class distinction (Munt 1994). Backpackers construct themselves as travellers, forging for themselves an identity which distances them from the more superficial and ‘en masse’ tourists. My focus here is on exploring the sort of experiences young people make whilst backpacking, and looking at their relevance for identity construction.

According to Richard, his year out backpacking made him a ‘more mature person’ for the following reasons:

Travelling on one's own, having to scrap a living from day to day, going hostelling, and meeting many people: these experiences have led to increased learning and independence. Ethnographic research (Binder 2004) has shown that ‘meeting people’, that is to say the community of other backpackers, is one of the key traits of this form of travel, as it indeed also emerges from the backpacking tales collected in a recent Lonely Planet publication (Johnson 2003).

Backpacking as a form of ‘alternative’ travel offers a cultural script for the definition of youth identities, and a script which may be valid regardless of the actual timescale of the trip, be it one year or a few weeks in the summer, for the ‘short term backpackers’ (Sørensen 2003). Inter rail is one common form of travel for backpackers. In this section I am looking in detail at the narratives by two Italian young women, Asia, a 17-year-old high school student, and Gianna, a 20-year-old anthropology student, who at the time of research were planning an inter rail trip together to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco for that summer. Asia and Gianna had already travelled in the past, both together and on their own. Gianna describes her first trip on her own to England and Scotland as the most important experience in her life:

Like Richard, Gianna thinks travelling on her own boosted her self-confidence. This journey stands out in her life-story because associated to the construction of her own identity as an independent and assertive woman. Her quote reveals how such an identity had been contested before. On the basis of her successful travel narrative, Gianna can oppose that context-imposed ‘little girl’ identity with her own construction as a self-confident and free woman. For a young woman, travelling can thus be a way to define alternative gender identities opposing the social expectations which spatially confine women within the restricted spaces of the home (McDowell 1999).

Backpackers mention self-discovery as one of the crucial experiences which define this way of travelling (Binder 2004), and that includes both the dimension of discovering oneself, which was the target of Mark's irony earlier, as well as the dimension of discovering others, and the relationship one has to them. If travelling alone can foster a construction of identities in terms of discourses of freedom and independence, travelling together with friends is also important, since it allows sharing this passion with similarly minded people. Travelling starts from home: planning the trip together is part of the whole adventure, and the diaries Asia and Gianna wrote for this research bear witness to the amount of time they spent evaluating expenses, possible risks, and joint resources in anticipation of their trip. I learned from Asia's diary that she was at the time looking for a job that could help finance her inter rail ticket, and that she had just received a birthday present from Gianna, a game called ‘El Diablo’, which was going to become useful during the trip:

Learning some new entertaining skills could potentially become a resource in the future, allowing them to raise money as street performers while travelling. In their extensive planning the two friends were building themselves as a team in imaginative and resourceful ways. Another note in Asia's diary that caught my attention was the reference to a ‘survival list’ they had drawn together:I later enquired what the ‘survival’ list was:The process of identity construction made through travel is not limited to the actual journey experience, but extends to the anticipation of travel which precedes setting off as well as to the narrative reconstructions of travel made after the homecoming (Desforges 2000). Imagining possible scenarios for their joint trip, Asia and Gianna also engage in constructing their identities according to their wished-for selves (Markus and Nurius 1986). Planning what will be useful once away from home is an activity through which they can define their commonly shared resources and test their friendship in the anticipation of this ‘institutionalised risk environment’ (Giddens 1991) which is the inter rail trip. Thinking of imaginative ways to get by financially, keeping their belongings to a minimum, and drawing a survival list are also actions which respond to an anti-materialistic logic that is common amongst backpackers (Binder 2004) and that has its roots in the drifters’ culture which was first analysed by Cohen (2003).

In addition to its practicality, sharing clothes is a way for the two friends to collaborate in constructing their own femininities on a very intimate level. Travelling will allow experimenting with and sharing alternative constructions of female identities which transgress stereotypical gender boundaries because mobile and independent, as well as resourceful and cooperative. Backpacking may be ‘an arena of makeability’ for women travellers, allowing them to shape things according to their plans, and away from traditions (Elsrud 2001, 2005). Travelling thus becomes a way to re-appropriate one's own gender identity and define what it is to be a woman through a close and supportive friendship.

Relationships, however, may be seriously put to test by travelling. Asia and Gianna's plans include two travel partners, one young man and one young woman. They however have serious doubts about this third woman, whom they see as lacking ‘a spirit of adventure’. This is a crucial quality in the traveller's identity, and someone lacking it may end up being a drawback to the whole team. Adventure and femininity form an ‘uneasy relationship’ according to Elsrud, with adventurous women usually being considered as ‘oddities’, and women travellers negotiating their narratives between an individualised discourse of makeability according to which anyone can reconstruct their lives as they please, and a dominant discourse which still sees adventure as a masculine prerogative (Elsrud 2005). By distancing themselves from the less seasoned traveller already before the trip, Asia and Gianna are also detaching themselves from traditional gender identities that would need the protection and comforts of the routine environment of the home. In the anticipated knowledge that the group may not be able to stick together, they are however relying on their own proven adventurousness and tested friendship, whatever the circumstances might be during the trip.

Going to England on an English language course was the most popular reason given by the Italians in the sample for first leaving home for a prolonged period of time. When asked about their decision to embark on a language course, young Italians mention the high employability of English as the standard motivation for their departure. Daniele, a 22-year-old au pair in Cambridge, is one such case:

One dominant and ‘institutional’ narrative presents learning English as necessary for the labour market: the risk of unemployment surfaces as a key factor behind young people's life decisions. However, running in parallel is another narrative that constructs the move abroad as a ‘change of air’ after dropping out from some course of studies. These two narratives can also be found combined in the plot of Bianca's story:The paths taken by these Italian young people appear to be the result of a concerted effort with their parents. Bianca, 20 and another au pair in Cambridge, explains her move with her mother's intervention. Bianca's parents were going through a divorce, and the mother encouraged her to leave at this difficult time. The mother's own travel stories about England, which Bianca has been hearing all her life, seem to have had a crucial role in originating this move:Bianca's move has a narrative background: growing out of her mother's own stories, it is legitimised as a family theme and ‘legacy’. Bianca speaks of her move in fatalistic terms: the agency behind it is entirely attributed to the mother. Elsewhere I have defined this pattern of moving, in the footsteps of one's own parents and role-models, as a ‘psychological chain’ migration (Bagnoli 2007). Through this sort of move young people make the experiences of parents and significant others their own, and in this case reproduce family patterns in the definition of their identities.

In these two stories an experience of loss in the young people's lives is behind the decision to move (Bagnoli 2007). Daniele and Bianca are drop outs in the Italian university system. The academic institution proved not to be a viable scenario for the construction of their identities, and they have therefore lost the structural parameters that had regulated their life up to that point. In addition, Bianca's family is going through a period of change with her parents’ divorce, and she is losing the security of the family as it had always been. By travelling, these young people are trying to recover some individual control over their lives, at a time when other institutions seem to be losing their hold, and not to be making sense as usual.

If for Italians studying English is desirable because it can increase cultural capital and employability, for the English their native language can be an important resource for travelling to other countries. Training to become a teacher of English as a foreign language is therefore a good way to step into a job which can allow living and working abroad. Another experience of loss, a traumatic break up with a long time girlfriend was a fateful event in Johnny's life. Realising he was not ready to start a family, he substantially changed his life, taking the decision to move to Italy. Now 26 and teaching English in Florence, Johnny recollects choosing this career because it was the easiest way he could make this move:

Travelling to Italy and then moving there more permanently as a teacher allowed Johnny to give a dramatic turn to events and reconstruct his life. Johnny and other teachers in the sample describe teacher training as a tough experience, yet this seems to be a useful investment for exploring other countries and cultures, since it allows them to make good use of their cultural capital. Italians, on the other hand, cannot rely on their language to travel, and often choose to move as au pairs.

The au pairs in the sample are either language students amongst Italians or year outs amongst the English. Their stories are however worth looking at in some detail because of the common traits in their plots. From my contacts with au pair agencies, it appeared that Italians enjoy a good reputation amongst English families, and are therefore sought after: the Italian culture is known for being child-centred, and English families appreciate the caring qualities that Italians seem able to provide. It was therefore rather easy to find Italian young people working as au pairs in England. On the other hand, I was unable to find any English au pairs in Italy: usually, the English rely on their native language, a crucial resource on the labour market, as we have seen, through which they can find jobs that allow more freedom than living as an au pair with a family.

The au pair stay is usually chosen because of the opportunity it offers to live with a native family, experiencing the different culture as well as the language. It also allows some money to be earned, thus giving the possibility to extend one's stay for longer. But the expectations of young people and host families often turn out to be different. As Bianca defines it, the au pair experience is a ‘blind date’:

For Bianca, organising her stay as an au pair meant taking risks and emerging as a ‘pioneer’ amongst her group of friends back home, who had chosen to travel on safer and well tested paths instead:Despite its appeal, living as an au pair does have its disadvantages, which perhaps young people do not fully take into account when making their decision. A common theme of disappointment does emerge in all the au pair narratives. Daniele talks about his experience with his host family in positive terms, yet he still is adamant he would not do it again:Being an au pair often means spending quite a lot of time on one's own, at home, doing domestic chores. For Daniele this was a challenge since he had never done anything like that before but also because it meant encountering different cultural expectations about home and how home should be like:If Daniele could successfully manage, other au pairs had a more difficult job in meeting the expectations and different cultures of their host families. In the first family she went to live with, Bianca could not have a room of her own but had to share in turn with some of the seven children. In addition, she had to fight her landlady's disapproval when wearing skirts and going to the disco:Despite the initial difficulties, Bianca was able to integrate well with the different culture of her landlady and eventually developed a good relationship with her, in her own words an ‘eternal love’. They were indeed still keeping in touch even after Bianca had moved in with another family.

Halfway through being a family member and an employee, the au pair role is ambiguous and full of contradictions. This ambiguity leads to problems in the relationship dynamics between au pairs and receiving families (Mellini et al. 2007). The different expectations with which families and au pairs typically get into this experience mean that both parties have great difficulty in establishing a relationship in which they can be sympathetic to the other's needs. Their different agendas often make the experience end in discontent. Beatrice is a 26-year-old Italian student at an English university. She originally moved to England to study the language, and spent some of that time as an au pair. She however decided to leave the family earlier than planned:

Different expectations about how to raise children can make understanding each other complicated, therefore compromising everyday life in the same home. Conflict over best approaches to care as well as negotiating over boundaries have been documented as problematic areas in the relationship between au pairs and host families (Mellini et al. 2007). If Beatrice found it hard to adapt to the lifestyle of a family in which the children would hardly see their parents at all, Patricia, an English 21-year-old student at Cambridge, thought the child she had to look after when she au paired in France was too spoilt:When leaving home for an au pair stay young people may not take into account that integrating into the everyday life of a new family could turn out to be rather more problematic than first anticipated. Evidence from this research indicates that most of the au pair stories, and even those stories which speak of a successful relationship with the host family, narrate of disappointment. The au pair job is often rather monotonous as well, as Bianca points out, echoing Daniele's words above:Having all this time to fill in, however, may push young people to reflect about their lives more generally. After moving to England Bianca has made many experiences that have changed her so much she now feels distant from her old self and from her old friends in Italy, whom she perceives as ‘stuck’. Her view of life has acquired a new flexibility which makes her feel able to actively self-reconstruct her life. At present, going to live with her new boyfriend may be a more important experience than studying, and Bianca is thinking about this possibility. As she writes in her diary:This is a fateful decision, and Bianca realises that she needs to reflect and to go on ‘an introspective journey’ in order to clarify what she wants to do. Disengaged from her old certainties, Bianca also feels more fully responsible for whatever choice she is going to make about her future. She is now constructing a ‘biography of choice’ (Beck 1992). Travelling as an au pair, even with all its associated problems, has allowed her a time and space to understand herself more fully, and start reconstructing her identities accordingly. It has therefore started her on a voyage of self-discovery.

This research identified four main modes of youth travel: taking a year out, backpacking, studying a foreign language abroad, and au pairing. The analysis of the travel stories associated with them showed that in practice they do overlap, since a year out may encompass any of the other three modes, and au pairs are usually language students, yet some peculiarities were distinguished for each. My aims here were identifying the characteristics of different forms of youth travel, the ways in which these might be related to or encourage a process of identity construction, and the extent to which a journey might be interpreted in terms of individual agency, as the subject's reflexive definition of a choice biography (Beck 1992), or in structural terms as responding to societal expectations at the institutional, family, and peer levels.

Although travel is nowadays unexceptional, and a routine form of escape from everyday life, a decision to travel may also correspond with periods of transition, when people are going through some change in their lives. Several of the young people in this study identified travel experiences as significant turning points in their lives, fateful moments (Giddens 1991) that had had a major impact on their biographies and identities. Some narrated their decision to travel in coincidence with an experience of loss. Relationship break ups, parental divorce, and dropping out of some course of studies were experiences in which the parameters that had regulated people's lives up to that point suddenly stopped making sense, and previous certainties were lost. Travelling at these moments would emphasise the dimension of loss one was already living and could be a way to try and recover some control over events, engaging with a process of self-reconstruction in a changed scenario.

Historical studies have shown travel to be related to the dimensions of loss and separation, and to the experience of a degree of solitude, which would then culminate in learning something about the communality of human experience (Leed 1991). When moving from a familiar context to an unfamiliar one, people are confronted with the other. This other could be the local cultures they are visiting, or indeed the other within the self, learning to see oneself though different eyes. These identity processes may be encouraged by the voluntary experience of separation and solitude that is travel, and differently so by the different travel modes highlighted in this article.

Some forms of travelling at times of transition such as finishing high school, and moving to university or into a job, can be regarded as institutional ways of moving. The year out is one such example in the British context. The contemporary version of the aristocratic Grand Tour, the year out is a structural form of travel and a ‘finishing trip’ which completes the education of the young person with cosmopolitan knowledge of the world, a route of non-formal education which increases cultural capital for the definition of today's young middle class identities (Desforges 2000). A British institution, the year out has no direct equivalent in the Italian context. A trip abroad studying English is however a similar finishing trip and institutional mode of travel for young middle class Italians. The high relevance of English to the labour market works two ways: it makes travelling to the UK an appealing destination for Italians, since knowledge of English is thought to give higher employability back home. On the other hand, it allows the English to use their language as a resource when travelling abroad.

Through backpacking travel young people actively seek ‘institutionalised risk environments’ (Giddens 1991) in order to test their own resourcefulness either singularly or together with significant others. A spirit of adventure is the fundamental prerequisite young people associate to this mode of travelling, which, planned and defined largely by travellers themselves, may be seen as opening a variety of scenarios for their self-reconstruction. This study showed that for women backpacking can be a way to define identities of resistance, away from stereotypes that would still confine them to the home or to ‘safer’ and less adventurous ways of travelling. This study also indicated how sharing the trip with fellow travellers plays an important role in the construction of identities, which may be collaboratively experienced and redefined. Backpackers have been found to form many associations with other travellers like themselves, but not to interact much with the local cultures they visit (Cohen 2003).

Interacting with the other culture is instead fundamental for language students and au pairs. But whilst language students may often end up meeting people from their own country, failing to establish significant relationships or interactions with the locals, au pairs must be able to define working relationships with their host family from the start. This is not a smooth process, and the stories collected in this research show a common theme of disappointment, due to the different expectations young people and host families typically have. Au pairs often seem unprepared to deal with the amount of time they will have to spend at home on their own. Yet this study showed how this could also become a time for reflection, leading to a reconstruction of identities.

A decision to travel in young people's lives may be taken against a context of well established patterns of moving, and with the active encouragement of employers and educational institutions. It may arise out of parental involvement and end up reproducing family patterns of negotiating entry into adulthood. It may otherwise just respond to fashion and simply be the latest experience to be consumed. Even when young people's agency in defining their travels is reduced, travelling may still be conducive to identity change and reconstruction (Westerhausen 2002; Noy 2004). Whether they are already living a period of enhanced reflexivity or not when setting off, the experience of travelling can make people look at their everyday life with new eyes. What was once fate may appear very different when looked at from a distance. Fate may thus become choice, and changing everyday realities and identities a possibility.

Dr Anna Bagnoli is Research Associate in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies (PPSIS) at the University of Cambridge. She is currently working on the PRAGES (Practising Gender Equality in Science) project, a European coordination action which aims to identify and evaluate the initiatives that have been implemented in both EU and non-EU countries in order to promote women in science and in decision making positions in research. Her research interests include gender and scientific careers, identities, young people's lives and transitions, autobiographical and life story research. She uses qualitative methods, mixed method approaches and visual methods. She has published in the areas of identities, youth research, and qualitative methods in the Journal of Youth Studies, Sociological Research Online, Qualitative Research and European Societies.