A Biographical Perspective on Youth Exchange and Related Processes
A Biographical Perspective on Youth Exchange and Related Processes

Summary/Abstract: After focusing on the experience of a woman of French origin who “paved” her way to Germany and “Europe” in her youth and all by herself, we turn to the biographies of young people who spent a year in another European country by making use of a foreign exchange program. This involves an institutional pattern with distinct phases: applying, being selected, being prepared, being sent away, staying abroad (in a foreign family and school) and coming home. We also look for the biographical conditions which create a special receptivity for such a project of going abroad, for the significance of such experiences in the biographical phase of adolescence, and for the consequences, especially with regard to “getting involved”, committing oneself to transnational and European projects and (sometimes) developing a self-identification as European. At the end we discuss some more general (theoretical and practical) implications of this research, which is based on the analysis of narrative interviews with former foreign exchange students which were conducted within the EUROIDENTITIES project.

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