Education and educational trajectories are processes of becoming, taking place in a digitized society and culture, with increasing levels of mobility (Urry, 2000; Cresswell, 2011). To capture mobile educational phenomena we need a non-territorial confined rationality. Interconnected, multi- sited movements and mobile phenomena need to be followed (Marcus, 1995; Hine, 2007; Hannerz, 2003; Webster & Silva, 2011; Silva & Landri. 2012). Bringing to the foreground a 4-year long multi-sited study, combining online and offline ethnography, we aim to reflect on the methodological adequacy to study and understand educational itineraries co-constructed by young people from rural border regions in Portugal. The fabric of educational itineraries integrates geographic routings, non-linear movements and fluidity and digital and non-digital spaces networking. The combination of online and offline ethnography allowed navigating young people’s educational mobilities, understanding the hybridity of local and global interactions in their identities, cultures and choices. They combine, in a fluid movement, their sense of belonging to a local community and their sense of belonging to a global youth, fighting against being defined by others and hegemonic perspectives (Braidotti, 2010). The mobility is a narrative of multi-sited belongings. While they are moving they are also engaging with a local social memory, making new things, building communities across different places. While tracing multi-sited educational and social experiences through a mobile ethnography I was confronted with the fact that “leaving” their home region is not leaving home or living in a condition of displacement. Staying home includes a going back and forward movement located in an itinerary under construction. Following young people through multiple places was an experience of juxtaposition of movements, following trans-regional and simultaneous online and offline sites and routes. The paper suggests that a multi-sited approach provides encounters with a precarious ethnographic field. This process of understanding young people’s itineraries was an opportunity to develop a needed reflexion on the researcher’s cognitive transitions and motions (Urry, 2007), and on a necessary estrangement from dominant perspectives. The ethnographer’s travels are inhabited as places of epistemological and ontological change, but also of negotiating meanings. Studying these young people’s mobilities suggests the benefits of emerging epistemic disruptions and alternatives (Meneses, 2008; Santos, 2008) in order to address “constructions across spaces” (Beeman-Cadwallader, 2012: 246), through young people’s standpoints, avoiding epistemic colonisations (Meneses, 2008).

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