Publication
Being internationally mobile has become increasingly normative for the educated youth. Financial and academic resources enable young middling migrants to navigate globalised education and employment markets. However, in terms of housing, transnational hypermobility and tense housing markets constantly reassesses their position of privilege. Indeed, met with tense housing markets, their residential journeys come up as increasingly fragmented, structured by challenging access to unsecure tenancies, unconventional non-kin household compositions, and are experienced as enduring instability. By setting up a dialogue between youth and privileged migrations sociology, and a housing sociology attentive to the effect of global dynamics of neoliberalism on the domestic interiors, the present work dives into the science of the "home" and its contemporary social, temporal, spatial and material configuration. In-depth interviews with 66 young and hypermobile migrants, living in subrented, shared housing or coliving operations, provide insight on their socially situated early housing experiences. Based in either London or Geneva, the participants' trajectories, conjointly analysed in a comparative monography, shed light on the tension between these populations' resources, and their otherwise fragmented residential journeys aligned with subjective experiences of housing precarity. Their accounts are complimented by ethnographies of their homes explored through experimental drawing observation and transcription methods. Additionally, a 5-month immersive field work was conducted in a London coliving. This qualitative data provides insight on home-making practices from within the domestic interiors, and the subtle material ways to inhabit, appropriate and personalise a home when confronted with the hypermobility temporality, the presence of non-kin in the domestic sphere, and the limiting spatiality of commodified housing markets. Ultimately, this work dives into the intricacies of passing through housing, a specific and socially situated domestic experience from where to observe more broadly what global neoliberal dynamics do to the "home". Findings insist on the tension that characterises young educated migrants' housing experiences, representations and aspirations, between two contradicting normative discourses that valorise on the one hand, flexibility and transience, and on the other hand reaffirm conventional models of domesticity as pillars of both age and class appropriate accomplishment and residential satisfaction. This unsolvable contradiction translates in a lingering state of waithood, actively inhabited through transient home-making practices as the simultaneous attempt to valorised durability, fragmentation and condensation of the materiality surrounding and supporting the self, and a constant readiness to restlessness. Aspirations are reconfigured and translate the unequally distributed resources among young middling migrants that calibrate the mor