Over the past months, the GEMOTT team, led by Monika Maciejewska, has been exploring these questions as part of Y-MOVE: Youth Mobility & Views for a Sustainable, Equitable and Resilient Future.
Y-MOVE is an international research seed project involving professors, researchers and students from four universities in the ECIU network: the University of Aveiro (Portugal), Tampere University (Finland), Lodz University of Technology (Poland), and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain).
The project explores how university students experience everyday mobility, what enables or limits their movement, and aims to understand what their aspirations for future mobility are.
At UAB, one of the methods the GEMOTT team has used to study these issues is Photovoice, a participatory qualitative research method. So far, we have conducted two dedicated sessions, as well as a classroom assignment involving students from Sustainable Mobility and Land Use and Cities, Globalization and Sustainability courses (Geography Deparment).
Students were invited to take photographs representing situations encountered during their daily trips. From these images, students selected several examples and added short reflections explaining the story behind each photograph, the experience it represented, and whether the situation was recurring or exceptional.
The photographs then served as a starting point for collective discussion. The participants reflected on the barriers and facilitators shaping their mobility, the elements that make journeys comfortable or stressful, and how they would like their everyday mobility to look in the future. The discussions also opened space to consider questions of accessibility, sustainability, safety, gender and mobility justice.
By combining images, personal narratives and group discussion, Photovoice makes it possible to go beyond conventional mobility data. The method brings students’ voices and lived experiences into the research process, revealing how everyday mobility is experienced not only in practical terms, but also through perceptions, aspirations and responses to the surrounding urban and campus environment.
Further Photovoice sessions will follow during the 2026–2027 academic year. Our PhD students, Asia Latini and Sofia Alonso, are working hard to recruit participants and are gaining valuable practical experience in qualitative data collection.
