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What happens when roots are replaced by routes? What happens when mobility becomes one of the primary tools for finding a niche in a different land and context? In an attempt to explore these themes, this paper touches upon emergent ideas regarding mobility, and delves into the inter‐connectedness of spatial and social mobility. Mobility signifies more than ‘movement’ and can act as a catalyst for enhancing life conditions. The study examines the debate over social exclusion, freedom, ethics, sustainable mobility and capability approach in the context of non‐western immigrants in Norway, and presents arguments from a social perspective to strengthen the mobility regime of immigrants. The study concludes that mobility provides capabilities to become active participants in the social and economic morphology of a society. It further suggests that societies need to adopt the framework of capability approach while examining issues related to the integration of immigrants into the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is contested to what extent public employment services (PES) help build resilience in young unemployed people. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 19 people born in Germany and Norway between 1990 and 1995, the article examines stories about how PES, in two different activation regimes, help young people find meaningful work. The analysis and discussion are carried out within a theoretical framework that combines the capability approach with social resilience literature in a novel way. The findings show that PES are portrayed as being more present in young Germans' lives. The German informants seem to feel undue pressure from PES and they describe differences between personal aims and the "placement priority" of PES. Sanctions imposed by PES were also a much more predominant topic among the German informants. The Norwegian data were dominated by stories about young people in activation programmes who had been demotivated by being trapped in a cycle of programme participation, which did not result in employment. Across the two countries, our data suggest that PES rarely build social resilience: PES provided young people with a means to survive, but rarely helped to build their capacity to overcome their difficult situation. In line with previous research, the stories of young Germans and Norwegians also emphasise the need for a PES that provides tailor‐made services that build on young people's motivation and ambition. The article demonstrates that combining the capability approach with social resilience theory enables a dynamic perspective on the development of people's capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilizes the capabilities approach to offer a new and empirically grounded critical perspective on how cultural policy should promote citizenship to audiences. The capabilities approach posits that public policies should be designed and measured in terms of what they actually enable subjects to do or be. Focusing on the case of Norway, we operationalize the capabilities approach in two steps. First, based on survey data, we highlight systematic relationships between social background, cultural consumption, and citizenship. Based on extensive interview data, the article thereafter offers insight into how people engage with culture and whether this engagement enables them to function as citizens. In contrast to common assessments of cultural policy, we argue that the merit of this approach is that it focuses attention on how different measures actually empower different groups of citizens and fail to empower others, thus providing a basis for more effective and just policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]