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This Special Issue on Youth, Rural Places and Marginalisation, brings together nine papers from six countries – Australia, England, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – to explore young people's experiences of living in rural locations. We focused on rural youth for two main reasons: firstly, there are relatively few sociological studies of young people's experience of rural life and, secondly, academics and policymakers have tended to frame discussions about young people and rural places in negative terms. Together the papers here use a wide range of methods – quantitative and qualitative longitudinal approaches, questionnaire surveying, face-to-face and online qualitative interviews, ethnography, visual methods, 'mobile probes', 'walk-along' and 'drive-along' interviews – in order to understand young people's everyday life. We were particularly interested in the stories of young people who appeared to resist 'the mobility imperative' and chose to stay rather than leave their rural homes. Our introduction focuses on 'rethinking concepts of staying'; 'gender and the risks of staying' and 'geographies of rural opportunities'. We conclude with a call for a sociological imagination of rural youth that avoids romanticizing narratives of 'the rural idyll' or which paints rural places and populations as backward or lacking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foregrounding the voices of young women in a deprived coastal context in the UK, this paper explores the intersection of place, class, gender and marginalisation. Drawing upon participatory qualitative research, the paper focuses on the following key themes: (1) how young women navigate perceptions of 'risk' through the everyday realities of the locale, (2) experiences of sexual violence and abuse (3) and finally, how normative depictions of 'risky behaviour' correspond to the accounts of women's (sexual) agency. By rooting the analysis of place-based inequalities through a gendered lens, the findings help illuminate the complex relationship between structural context and the regulation of gender and sexuality. The paper also draws attention to the structural factors that reproduce class-based stigma for people who are deemed 'at risk' in places that are characterised as 'left behind'. In doing so, the paper provides alternative agendas for policy and practice that aim to support young women who experience place-based marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimensions of subcultural practice. In the first part of the paper, I embark on a critical reading of the traditional 'schools' of subcultural and post-subcultural theory. I seek to show that they all suffer from a blind spot in regard to collective and material embeddedness. In the second part, I analyse a number of 'thick' empirical accounts of subcultural collectivity, creativity and interchange with material and musical objects. I attempt to develop these descriptions further and seek to show how they may benefit from having more attention paid to collective and material embeddedness, as well as to the interchange between these two dimensions in subcultural practice. I hope to thus demonstrate how the embedded perspective may contribute to analyses of subcultural creativity and lived subcultural experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and policy analysis often presumes a 'mobility imperative' in respect of rural youth; to 'get on' they have to 'get out'. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and 'left behind'. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, 'Peripheral Denmark'. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions. We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of 'stuckness' (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of 'stillness' (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of 'reflexive stayers' captures these young people's lived experiences of 'stillness' and 'stuckness' and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how young refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience their new places of residence. We find inspiration in the idea of 'contradictions of space' (Kinkaid [2020]. "Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Social Space." Society and Space 38 (1): 167–186.) in exploring how young refugees navigate issues in rural life from housing, education, work and social life to their material surroundings, including the weather. Which experiences result in feelings of meaning and orientation, and which spur feelings of disorientation and contradiction? The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young refugees and local volunteers in rural Norway and Denmark. Despite several differences between rural areas in the two countries, young refugees' experiences from within show many similarities and common experiences between them. The harsh weather, empty streets, lack of familiarity with the more formal community life in rural areas, long distances from sites of education, etc. create feelings of disorientation and contradiction, while socializing with other refugees provides feelings of community and belonging. Taken together, the two aspects drive their decisions to stay in or leave the rural area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of deindustrialization, many rural areas in the Global North face challenges such as an ageing population, declining welfare systems and limited job and educational opportunities, problems that have been enhanced by decades of depopulation. Young people have left the countryside for careers in larger cities, contributing to stigmatization of those who stay in rural areas. In Sweden, however, statistics show a slow but steady trend of remigration to rural areas, which is described in municipal and state discourse as positive and necessary to 'save' the countryside. This paper examines the perspective of rural youth who feel differently about such counter-urbanization. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article shows how young men involved in Swedish greaser culture perceived the influx of urban (re)migrators as a threat to their rural lifestyle and the rural place where they wished to stay. This is interpreted as an expression of subcultural, place-based and temporal resistance towards urban and neoliberal ideals that simultaneously reinforce white, masculine values. As these young men will be part of a rural future, they must be considered in the formulation of sustainable politics for rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's digitally-mediated interactions entail negotiating co-existing risks and opportunities. This paper discusses youth perspectives on these risks and opportunities, based on data from focus groups conducted with 12–21-year-olds in England. Analysis of examples of digitally-mediated interactions shared by participants suggests that pursuing opportunities involved or created risk for oneself and/or others, while motivations to pursue opportunities were shaped by risks resulting from the actions of others. Flows of risk and opportunity were, therefore, reciprocal across a dynamic continuum of 'digital' – 'non-digital' contexts and relational both for and between young people. It is argued that a reciprocal and relational conceptualisation of 'post-digital' negotiations of risk and opportunity among youth facilitates critical engagement with their accounts of their online lives as well as identification of the interconnections between individual, interpersonal and community-ethical spheres of meaning and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shifts in young people's perspectives on and orientations towards the future. Our research comprises parallel qualitative research with young people aged 15–19 in Denmark and Australia. Drawing on a posthumanist account of the world as entanglements of multiple human and non-human agencies and inspired by Donna Haraway's admonition to stay with the trouble of the world, we discuss how species meet as the coronavirus makes kin with the young people and how the young people's perspectives on the future become with the pandemic. That is, what intimations of worldings and reworldings can be glimpsed as young people shared their changed perspectives on priorities related to the meaning of life and the sustainability of the (more-than-) human condition from the midst of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active labour market policies for young people, backed by the EU Youth Guarantee programme, led governments to trying new measures, amongst them internships for graduates of different education levels. This youth, despite being better prepared than early school leavers, still face problems during their professional insertion processes. Faulty progressions can become 'lost in transition' situations (Brinton [2010]. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). This paper analyzes the effects in terms of employment outcomes of a programme with two types of internships: in private firms and in public administration offices. A counterfactual analysis is carried out by matching intern groups of either type with a control group formed from candidates who ended up without an internship. The results from a first analysis with registered data were enhanced by implementing a second analysis based upon survey data, which permitted the inclusion of family legacy variables in a medium-term analysis. Estimated effects are positive and significant for participants in firms' internships, and negative and significant for interns who worked in public organisations. Additionally, the survey uncovers that work contracts offered by firms after the programme play a positive role. The results should be very useful for decision making in terms of active measures addressing these issues for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic and the intensified digitalization of life-worlds has especially affected younger generations, also in Austria. In this paper, we approach digital practices of 43 young adults between 16 and 18 years in a frame-analytical perspective to understand forms of politicization during the Covid-19 pandemic. We analyze memes in order to make sense of youth's life-worlds during the pandemic. The memes were created by youth as a result of a workshop series with the researchers. Our research shows that memes have provided a means for engaging and dealing digitally and emotionally with Covid-19-related problems. We show that the respective youth address educational, social and democratic issues by problematizing 'homeschooling as overburdening', a 'lack of planning' and 'social divisions'. Moreover, meme-creation offers a perspective on how youth express and create a 'sense of community' through digital practices. During the pandemic youth have increasingly come to understand and represent themselves as a group with shared experiences in digital space, going along with a positioning as 'younger generation' vis-à-vis older generations. We argue that the fact that the pandemic has affected youth heavily and the fact that they do not see their issues and needs represented by political representatives or media shows the potential and limits of digital spaces for younger generations to connect (politically). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, youth researchers have reported increased inequalities between young people, but the social processes that drive these changes are not well understood. In this paper, we draw on rich longitudinal interview data following the same participants from a year before and into the midst of national lockdown during the pandemic in Norway to explore the unfolding of classed and gendered responses that were triggered in young people across the class spectrum. We find that advantaged, ambitious youths engaged in self-resourcing practices with support from their family that could make them even better positioned after the crisis. Youths that were socially vulnerable before the pandemic dealt with the situation alone and in highly gendered ways that seemed to amplify their insecure position in the peer group and community. Thriving youths from working-class communities engaged in lockdown practices that connected them deeper to the family and resourced them for gender traditional, local lives. Illuminating how a crisis prompts practices that increased emerging differences along classed and gendered lines, the paper shows that to grasp inequalities in the making, researchers must consider the importance and changing nature of resources – including relational resources in the family – over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context for this paper is a shift in the way citizens engage in democratic processes which has received increasing attention in the literature. Building on previously conducted research, this paper contributes to the conceptualisation of citizenship activities in terms of young people below the voting age from rural communities. Based on reviewing current research, seven emerging contexts that can assist with exploring young people's citizenship activities are proposed, namely unofficial, individual, glocal, sporadic, online, issues-based, and justice-oriented. These contexts were translated into a framework which is introduced and explored in this paper. To explore this framework, focus groups (n = 26) and a qualitative questionnaire (n = 106) were conducted with young people aged 13–16 from a secondary school in Germany. The proposed framework extends previous conceptualisations of emerging citizenship contexts by looking beyond citizen types and taxonomies to explore the spaces, modes, goals, and the frequency of participants' citizenship activities. Results indicate that the proposed framework was useful in exploring multiple emerging citizenship contexts. Focus group and questionnaire participants were particularly engaged in glocal, unofficial, sporadic, and issues-based contexts and to a lower degree in individual, online, and justice-oriented contexts. A key challenge is achieving conceptual clarity around the seven contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the risks to Early School Leaving (ESL) as perceived by young people who are Early Leavers or at-risk of Early Leaving, and their educators in one region in South England. It draws on 38 interviews and focuses groups with 39 young people and 53 adults working in various roles across 11 educational settings including mainstream and specialist schooling, alternative learning provision and vocational education and training, as well as the local authority. Guided by a holistic framework to examine risks to ESL [Brown et al. (2021. "A Conceptual Framework for Researching the Risks to Early Leaving." Journal of Education and Work 24 (7–8): 723–739. )], the paper analyses findings according to five different categories of risk: personal challenges; familial circumstances; social relationships; institutional features of school/work and structural factors of policy, economic disadvantage and the educational system. The findings highlight that while educators focused upon structural factors and personal challenges, young people themselves identified social relationships and institutional features of school as the most significant influencers on ESL risk. The contribution of this paper is two-fold; firstly, in presenting a comprehensive analysis of the multiple risk factors to Early Leaving; and secondly, in reflecting on the difference in emphases between young people's perspectives of the key constituents of risk and those of the educators who support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the creative group and individual interviews with young people aged 11–18 years old in England and Wales in 2018, this paper assembles data that addresses the changing nature of intimacies in young people's digitally-networked lives. Informed by Lauren Berlant's work (2008, viii), it maps how platforms such as Instagram and YouTube circulate certain 'fantasies of the good life' that orient young people towards heteronormative future imaginaries. It argues that publicising intimate relationships on social media works to both reify and unsettle fantasies of monogamy, marriage and domesticity by highlighting their inherent precarity. It also illustrates how smart technologies such as the virtual personal assistants Alexa and Siri reconfigure the good life fantasy. Moving beyond simplistic moral panics that seek to discipline young people's digital intimacies, this paper aims to engage with the nuances of young people's digital sexual cultures. Overall, this paper argues that attending to this complexity can enable practitioners to better attune to and support young people to navigate contemporary digital relationships and sexuality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While dialogues with the youth in the EU are understood as an important mechanism for co-shaping the EU youth policies, they are constantly confronted with the problem of the non-inclusion of unorganized youth. Applying the Foucauldian analytical problematization approach, the article illuminates three historical periods that led to the formation of the contemporary problem of the non-inclusion of unorganized youth in dialogues in the EU. The first period is the 1970s when, as a response to the youth protest, the European Community organized the first dialogues. The second at the beginning of the 2000s with political struggles on how to conduct dialogues with young people in the EU. Finally, the third period relates to the processes of institutionalization of dialogues with youth after the adoption of 2001 White Paper on Youth that resulted in the adoption of the Structured Dialogue as an official mechanism for co-shaping EU youth policies. In the article, we show that the inclusion of unorganized youth is a persisting problem that always represents an unfulfilled goal. This enables unorganized youth to be formed and framed as an object to be known and a target of political interventions of the EU youth policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical youth studies understands contemporary youth transitions as an interplay between long term changes in labour markets and state approaches to welfare and the regulatory presence of societal norms about the 'right kind' of transitions and the 'right kind' of young adult citizens. This work is intersectional, with emphasis given to class, gender and race and ethnicity. However, in comparison less focus is given to disability, even though it shapes youth transition possibilities. This paper highlights the problems created by paying insufficient attention to disability, alongside making the case that there are conceptual tools useful to critical youth studies within disability studies. (1) Disability studies approaches to inequality help make the case that material inequalities are still an important factor in young people's lives. (2) A focus on disability supports arguments that as forms of state support dwindle, family is increasingly significant – and problematic – as a resource in youth transitions. (3) Critical disability studies can help explore the significance of normative embodied markers of transitions for young people making their way towards adulthood. (4) Collaboration can encourage deeper recognition of the relational quality of transitional processes and move away from a linear understanding of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young vocational graduates face many expectations related to the norms of worker-citizenship when entering the labour market. Due to contemporary uncertainties and the new realities of adulthood, meeting these expectations may not be easy. These expectations might also conflict with young adults' desires. This paper examines how vocational education graduates position themselves in the labour market and what kind of worker-citizenship they produce in their working-life stories. The study is based on 32 individual interviews with 18- to 25-year-old vocational graduates with different positions in the Finnish labour market. The findings support earlier research on the importance of assuming the position of worker-citizen for these graduates. In new adulthood, they aim but are also forced to shape their worker-citizenship when, for some, vocational qualification has not redeemed its promises. Based on empirical findings, the article argues that ideals maintained in vocational education may need to be shaped within the unpredictable realities of new adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, the Italian labour market has seen increasing unemployment, job contract instability and lower wages as a result of the global economic crisis and the policies fielded by successive governments to reduce labour market rigidities, regarded as the primary cause of high unemployment, for young people and women in particular. This paper analyses young workers' job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is relevant for workers' well-being, but it has also been shown to affect workers' productivity and hence firms' performance. We analyse overall job satisfaction and satisfaction for two job dimensions, stability and pay. We contribute to the existing literature by investigating whether job stability can compensate for a lower wage and whether the opposite is true, i.e. if a higher pay can compensate for job instability. Our findings show that overall job satisfaction is affected only by pay level. However, when we consider satisfaction with stability and pay satisfaction jointly, the type of contract seems to be more relevant than the pay in determining the probability of being either satisfied or dissatisfied with both dimensions. Therefore, if different dimensions of satisfaction are considered, both stability and pay are relevant, and there appears to be no compensating effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people form the primary target demographic of new 'buy now pay later' (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt's significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people's economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With analysis occurring during a heightened concern with the Black Lives Matter movement and knife crime in the U.K., this paper aims to delineate the characteristics of a street code, constituting a specific dominant and often hegemonic form of 'street masculinity' found on an inner-city housing estate in London called Maxwell. The fieldwork ran over nine months in 2019, involving 48 Black, Asian, and minority ethnic men aged 18–22. Using an ethnographic methodology, the principal methods of data generation were observations, interviews and informal conversations. The main theories this study draws on to understand 'street masculinity' were Connell's and Messerschmidt's dominant, hegemonic, subordinate and complicit masculinity forms. Findings centre on data from two young men who exemplify different patterns of masculinity performing the street code. Findings are presented under a series of characteristics that make up the game of the 'on-road' street masculinity and include (1) authenticity, 'swagger' and not being 'pussy'; (2) a preparedness for violence; (3) knife-carrying; (4) a presence on the digital street. Although this way of living drove a desire for respect and group status, there was also an underlying and pervasive sense of vulnerability derived from risk-taking and anticipation of danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus on geographical mobility is consolidating within youth studies. Mobility now increasingly characterises contemporary youth, and seems to play a crucial role in marking the transition to adulthood, conveying the complexity of youth cultures. Moving abroad represents an opportunity that fuels the transition to adulthood, by enabling young people to experience cultural diversity, experiment with practices of cosmopolitanism and reframe their sense of belonging in terms of places, times and relationships. The paper draws on a qualitative study of young Italians who have recently moved to Berlin, and explores the relationships between the transition to adulthood, mobility, cosmopolitanism and sense of belonging. It highlights the deep structural and cultural roots of their mobility practices: mobility is present from an early age in their desires, regardless of their class of origin or educational qualifications. Their mobility practices also involve a daily reworking of their sense of belonging, which sees them navigating family and friendship bonds, and new relationships of intimacy that 'make home' and often arise in the context of a cosmopolitan generation on the move. The paper shows how these young cosmopolitans piece together this mosaic of belonging and explores its link with the coming of age process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space and bodies have been conceptualized as products and producers of social relations. They are woven together to shape identities, belongings, and cultures. This paper links culture to the mutual construction of space and bodies to spatialize the embodied lives of rural Chinese boys. Stories from a qualitative study of two middle schools illustrate how these rural boys experience embodied exclusions during the making of a learning space. These students also redefine the dominant meaning of the school space through an embodied-discursive construction of their lives. They shift their interests away from academic learning and move to emphasize social knowledge that focuses on social relations and social abilities. However, their re-appropriation of the space is interpreted as a gendered expression of noncooperation, which leads to their further marginalization within the academic-oriented space. This analysis examines in which body and which space is the rural boys' resistance produced. Turning to spatiality and embodiment provides an alternative interpretation of the counter-school culture of rural Chinese boys, which helps us more fully recognize the need for re-placing rural bodies in the Chinese education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between young individuals that are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs) and regional resilience across the Mediterranean European Union South. It attempts a significant contribution to the literature since academic readings on youth studies have partly overlooked potential interlinkages with regional resilience, while regional studies have neglected to assess the resilience of the young cohorts of the labour force. The paper builds on a geographical political economy approach and employs a mixed-research method, calculating regional resistance and recovery indices and drawing upon informed expert interviews. It scrutinises labour market resilience in terms of youth employment and NEETs against the 2007/08 crisis and documents which regions have been (less) resistant to youth unemployment and inactivity. Thereupon, it locates four factors of low resilience in regional youth labour markets, namely structural deficiencies, path-dependence, labour market segmentation and informal practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adult care leavers who have spent time in 'out-of-home care' during childhood face many educational challenges. While some care leavers may manage to adhere to 'normal' timelines within their educational progression, others may experience delays in their educational journey or a longer-term 'resignation' from education during their care/post-care journey. In this paper, we offer a fuller understanding of what drives underachievement in this population, as well as what helps care leavers to re-engage with education. Using a case study approach, we explore the potential of the life course principle 'linked lives' for better understanding barriers to re-engagement and the processes through which key actors may promote the (re)development of learner identity, and educational re-engagement among adult care leavers, over time. We draw on analysis of data from two studies of positive educational outcomes for adult care leavers - one in education, one in the workplace. Using a linked lives lens, this theoretically-informed paper presents the concepts of support, learner identity, and educational memories as candidates for deepening our understanding of educational re-engagement of care leavers – and comparable populations facing educational challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal definitions of sexual consent emphasise 'freedom' as central to valid consent; however, power inequalities may complicate freedom. This paper discusses findings from a two-stage focus group study with young people (aged 13–23) in England exploring the implications of power inequalities for sexual consent. In Stage 1, 77 participants explored and ranked the types of power inequalities they felt were common within young people's sexual relationships, with age, gender and popularity being identified as the most common power inequalities. In Stage 2, 43 participants discussed power inequalities using scenarios based on the Stage 1 findings and considered their implications for sexual consent. Thematic analysis of the data produced two themes: powerless and powerful roles in consent communication and power inequalities implicitly constrain freedom to consent. Consent communication was constructed as a unidirectional process whereby those with more power initiate, and those with less, gatekeep. Such roles require deconstruction to position consent as mutual and actively negotiated by partners. Further, since power inequalities were seen to place implicit constraints on freedom to consent, we advocate for an explicit exploration of power and privilege within Relationships and Sex Education to equip young people to recognise, challenge and negotiate these constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent critiques of the metrocentric nature of global youth studies, this paper explores the role of place in current research on youth political action in Sweden. Drawing on Agnew's [2011. "Chapter 23: Space and Place." In Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by J. Agnew, and D. Livingstone. London: Sage] concept of place and using qualitative interpretive review as our method, we examined three sets of research publications on three different aspects of youth political action in Sweden. Our analysis found that place was addressed differently in each set of publications: youth political socialization and civic engagement were approached as placeless, street protests were examined as place assumed and urban justice movements were studied as place-based. The first two sets of publications contribute to reproducing a metrocentric understanding of youth political action, where urban areas are constructed as the key settings for political action among young people, while rural or peripheral areas are assumed to work in the same way or are depicted as non-political. By contrast, the publications on urban justice movements offered an alternative by exploring political action as place-based. The need to study the place-specific ways that young people do politics is discussed, with its potential to further the understanding of how young people do politics from where they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of a larger ethnographic study on Italian youth mobilities, this paper investigates the transitions to adulthood of young returnees who have gone back to Italy after a period of living and working in Australia. Adopting the 'mobile transitions' approach, we illustrate the ways in which mobility affects transitions to adulthood. We suggest that upon return these transitions unfold like a palimpsest, where the old texts are layered over with new ones, unsettling conventions about adult life and disrupting assumptions that return is a final stage in the transition process. New meanings around adulthood emerge in these young Italians' mobile experience that continue also after return. We explore this through their aspirations for the future and their renegotiation of family relationships. Return for these young movers means bringing home a new perception of their current and future selves and especially of their role within their family of origin and Italian social and political culture. This is significant if we consider that Italy is the 'country of the long family' (Cavalli, A. 1997. "La lunga transizione all'età adulta." In Giovani del nuovo secolo. Quinto rapporto IARD sulla condizione giovanile in Italia, edited by C. Buzzi, A. Cavalli, and A. De Lillo, 38–45. Bologna: Il Mulino), where the youth condition is characterized by a delayed acquisition of autonomy and the consequent late assumption of responsibility and adult roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines young women's experiences of early motherhood focusing on their aims and goals for the future. Young mothers face a particularly complex set of life circumstances by virtue of entering parenthood outside the normative age of motherhood and are likely to experience discrimination, stereotyping and economic disadvantage. We report data from a small-scale qualitative study designed to gather evidence about the experiences, goals and aspirations of young mothers. While the main programs supporting young mothers in Australia focus on education and employment support, we find that young mothers prioritise mothering and focus on the importance of providing full-time care to their children. We find evidence that parenthood is potentially a catalyst for transitioning to more rewarding employment, but this is a secondary goal after motherhood priorities. We also find evidence of active resistance to stereotyping and the challenges these women face as they navigate motherhood outside the standard normative age for this transition. Our findings highlight the need for longitudinal work that can provide evidence of journeys through motherhood, heterogeneity in outcomes, support programs that cater for changing needs and greater recognition of the value of unpaid mothering and care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates to what extent the likelihood of young people being long-term NEET can be explained by low literacy skills, how this varies across advanced countries, and how this cross-national variation can be explained by education and social policies. We use PIAAC data and include macro-level indicators on education and social policies. We analyze the likelihood of being long-term NEET versus being in employment or in education/training among some 34,000 young people aged 20–30 from 25 countries. We find that low-literate young people are more likely to be long-term NEET. While NEET risks are associated with countries' institutional characteristics, this does not mean that these characteristics and policies always work in favour of low-literate young people. Although high levels of (enabling) ALMP generally reduce the risk of being NEET, they do so less for low-literate young people. Additionally, young people living in social-democratic welfare states are less likely to be NEET, but low-literate young people seem to profit less from this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hip Hop has been shown to influence the identities of Black youth (Love. 2012. Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Peter Lang). However, for Black girls, Hip Hop has a complicated relationship as some representations of Black girls and women are objectified and hypersexualized while others reflect strength and empowerment (Richardson, 2016). The present study examines Hip Hop, Black girlhood, and identity by exploring how Hip Hop influences the gendered racial identity developmental processes of Black early adolescent girls. Further, this study explores how Black girls navigate environmental stressors such as racism, sexism, bullying, and stressful home environments using Hip Hop. Using a Black and Hip Hop feminist lens, this paper utilizes two semi-structured interviews from 6, twelve year old Black girls from the southern region of the United States and participants in a Hip Hop based after school program. Utilizing thematic analysis, the following themes were found: (1) acknowledging identities of strength, independence, and resilience in Hip Hop helps create meaning for gendered racial identities and (2) Hip Hop as a mechanism for healing and therapy against social and environmental stressors. This work follows notable Hip Hop feminist theories and praxis and provides an alternative framework for exploring intersectional identity development for Black adolescent girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people arriving alone in the UK due to forced migration face significant hardships including, but not limited to, their history of experiences, current and future uncertainties, and cultural differences. This paper took a critical perspective of current dominant theories of refugee youth through in-depth exploration of lived experiences of coping. Following the authors' involvement in a community youth project and consultation, five young people took part in individual interviews. The participants were living in semi-independent accommodation in or near London, and were all male, while four identified as Muslim and one as Christian. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a culturally relative understanding of coping was developed. These young people were found to be taking active roles in managing their lives in the context of extensive loss, and gaining independence through connection to others. Religious practices were important, with young people making sense of their experiences through worldviews shaped by religious beliefs. While religion was described predominantly in a positive and beneficial light, an area for further investigation is the experience of religious struggle, and how this may impact experiences and coping. Implications for support for young people both from services and in communities are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical relationship between youth subcultures and mainstream media has long been the subject of debate. Some researchers have proposed that, after mixed panic and hype, the media quickly coopts and commodifies subcultural threats. Conversely, others have argued that negative media coverage keeps subcultures coherent and thriving, while positive coverage is the 'kiss of death'. Despite its continued importance, few studies have closely examined this topic and none has quantitatively examined changes in subcultural media representation over time using archival data. This paper addresses this gap though a computer-assisted content analysis of 735 newspaper articles about punk subculture spanning three decades of publication. The results provide mixed support for both theoretical predictions, but fit neither perfectly. Overall coverage is ambivalent in tone, but becomes more positive and less radical over time. Punk takes far longer to commodify than cooptation perspectives predict. It survives positive coverage, but becomes increasingly coherent. The results call into question previous claims about media representation, highlight the need for more synthetic theories of the media's relationship to subcultures, and illustrate the utility of text-mining methods for historical youth studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automating workplaces that results in a loss of jobs has become a topic of public debate and study but has paid little attention to differential impacts on age groups. This paper applies OECD data on the risk of jobs being automated to Australian longitudinal survey data following 15 years old students over a ten-year period as they enter the job market. Whilst in the early stages of their working lives, these young Australians often worked in jobs projected to be at high risk of automation, they gradually moved into jobs and occupations projected to be less exposed to automation. Young Australians were also less likely to work in jobs at risk of automation than the average Australian. Besides socio-demographic factors, including educational attainment but also domestic wealth, the incidence and kind of computer use at home were associated with working in jobs at a higher or lower risk of automation, as were young workers' type of employment contract and whether young employees changed employers. Whilst suggestions of large-scale job losses owing to automation may be exaggerated, the socio-economic divide that extends to exposure to at risk occupations ought to be a matter of policy concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on the outcomes of a place-based scenario planning project in Melbourne's (AUSTRALIA) inner northern suburbs that was titled COVID-19 Recovery Scenarios for Young People in Melbourne's Inner North. As part of that project, we conducted video interviews with 53 young people during what became an extended second lockdown period in Melbourne as the city dealt with a resurgence in COVID infections. In this paper, we present the stories of three young people – Rosie, Ash and Astrid – that are illustrative and inclusive of the uncertainties and hopes that young people in Melbourne's inner north gave voice to. We situate these young people's stories in what Rosi Braidotti (2019) has identified as the convergence of the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth mass extinction. Our aim is to situate the pandemic, the social, cultural, economic and political responses to the pandemic, and the challenges and opportunities that this public health crisis produces for young people's health and well-being, their education, training and employment pathways, and their sense of belonging, connectedness, even community, in the broader, unfolding crises of global capitalism, of earth systems, and of biodiversity that is heralded by the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the concepts of cultural narrative to examine career choice among post-Soviet Russian teenagers going into higher education. Drawing on insights from cultural sociology more broadly and the cultural autonomy thesis more specifically, we demonstrate how the cultural narrative of a university degree as a 'must-have at all costs' subjugates various career decision-making logics identified, while downplaying individual agency and reflexivity. We argue that, by misdirecting career choice from opportunities to constraints, the dominant narrative serves to limit, rather than diversify, young people's career choice and social mobility potential. We go on to theorise the interplay between culture and social institutions. Drawing on the cultural interpretation of Unified State Exam – a neoliberal educational governance tool – we show how cultural narrative hijacks institutional interpretations and usages, re-grounding neoliberal sensibilities in Soviet-era ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant debates and digital upskilling strategies in Scotland have been long underpinned by the notion that engagement with technologies can transform young people's lives. This paper offers a critique of such dominant understandings and contributes to the scarce research on the impact of technologies on disadvantaged young people's life chances. It reports on qualitative fieldwork exploring everyday lives, transitions and technology use amongst 22 NEET-identified Scottish young people aged 16–24, drawing on thinking tools from Bourdieu. Findings show that participants followed 'accelerated' transitions towards vocational pathways, whilst technologies played a liminal role in making occupational choices. Furthermore, processes underpinning the post-16 transitions policy field were found to strongly shape the young people's trajectories, directing them towards the least valuable options in terms of work and training. Concurrently, uncertainties about how to navigate the realm of work and perform the self in relation to the labour force constituted a common feature of participants labouring subjectivities and these were reflected in the ways they used technologies while looking for opportunities. However, even when the young people acquired digital employability skills, these had little impact on their transitions as the old social divisions were a much stronger influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediate living arrangements, like shared flats, collective accommodation or double residence, have become increasingly common due to the individualization of life scripts, and because of economic and cultural shifts in western societies. However, they have been assumed to be negligible in Mediterranean Europe, where housing transitions are 'late but simple'. This paper challenges this assumption, using Catalonia (Spain) as a case study. Data coming from the 2017 Catalan Youth Survey offer some clear-cut results. First, shared flats and double residence are not uncommon among Catalans: respectively 15.7% and 8.1% of youngsters experience them sometime during their twenties. Second, multinomial regression models show that double residence implies economic reliance on parents, it is most common among university students, especially those with well-off parents, and among young people coming from rural areas. Conversely, shared flats appear to be linked to precarious economic situations, and they are common among young immigrants, and those living in the city of Barcelona. Both arrangements are transitory, being less frequent among older people. Some expected predictors of intermediate living turned out to predict double residence instead, so this semi-dependent practice could be the equivalent of 'living away from home' for youngsters in 'familistic' territories as Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the call for more research on the 'missing middle' by reporting the findings of a small-scale qualitative longitudinal study in the North of England exploring the labour market transitions of young people completing compulsory schooling with mid-level qualifications and seeking employment. It found that participants desired training which aligned with their skills, interests and future work intentions. Participants were drawn to seek apprenticeships because they offered 'earning and learning' in a real-life work environment. However, for the vast majority, apprenticeships were not available, so they turned to college to articulate their choices and gain work-related training. Qualifications were gained in order to gain leverage in the job market and help them achieve 'getting on' work. However, often a period of 'pinballing' between their ambitions and the reality of the labour market ensued due to the lack of desirable quality work available. The majority of participants were still resisting 'going nowhere' work and making efforts to achieve 'getting on' work when interviewed, however, some had stopped making the effort and resigned themselves to on-going poor quality work. The process of biographicity was, for them, a reconciliation with on-going low-quality work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article distances itself from the scholarship's tendency to describe youth leadership through the prism of the adult world. Leaning on ethnographic data, I explain how adolescent leadership is an outgrowth of social relations and cultural symbols that are perpetually negotiating the status quo. As part of an extensive study on female youth leaders, the paper focuses on the rich array of insignia that are made, worn, and exchanged by my research subjects: teenage female members of the Israeli Scouts (a co-ed Jewish youth movement). More specifically, I examine how the creation and display of material symbols on clothing mirror the leadership identity of Girl Scouts. In contrast to their uniforms and rank, which conform to restrictions and a formal hierarchy, the subjects engender a dynamic, non-formal, and open-ended set of symbols that visually represent power and status within their social group. Among the principal contributions of this study are insights on the nature of adolescent leadership and how it is wrought, maintained, and renewed within social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we draw on the findings on teens' transmedia practices from the research project Transmedia Literacy carried out in eight countries from Europe, Latin America and Australia between 2015 and 2018. An ethnographic approach that combined different research methods, including questionnaires, participatory-creative workshops, interviews, media diaries and online community observation, was used to explore what teens are doing with media. In this article we focus on how teens perform their digital identity on Instagram. This social network is notably popular among young people, and the practice of taking, editing, selecting, hiding and sharing photos and videos through it is part of teenagers' everyday lives and online interactions. We argue that this curating process encompasses several aspects that are central to teenagers creating a digital persona on Instagram, including content creation, validation through 'likes' and 'followers' and socio-technical automation. This curation can lead in certain profiles to a professionalized use of the platform, so that the self becomes an object of marketing and promotion for career and business purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding what youth aspire is widely considered to be a critical step towards recognizing further changes in societies. This article explores young people's aspirations, including personal and collective desires, in a less-studied social setting, Yazd in Iran. This paper also examines the differentiating roles of gender and family income for the importance and chance of accomplishment attached to these ambitions. The data for this study comes from an initial explanatory phase followed by a survey comprising 2700 youth in Yazd. Our findings suggest that marriage-based and political aspirations are the most and least important dimensions, respectively. We also found that the importance given to aspirations and chance of their realization are generally, but not consistently, different in terms of gender and family income. Accordingly, young women, compared to young men, commonly attended more to their ambitions but perceived them as less reachable. In most cases, youth from low-income families considered their desires less accessible than others. Drawing an importance-expectation matrix for each gender group, 'having a healthy body and soul in aging' was introduced as a critical aspiration with the widest gap. We discuss the results and implications vis-à-vis contextual and structural conditions in which the youth are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a gap in the literature on youth justice in England and Wales by examining disaggregated patterns of juvenile court processing (i.e. proven offences) and custody. It provides new evidence to show that gendered effects are best observed over time. Looking at juvenile justice data over time allows us to see the effects of policy that are obscured in the short-term. This is especially important when considering small and specific populations, such as girls. It is often assumed that policy impacts smaller groups in the justice system (in this case, girls) in the same way as the larger group (in this case, boys), with boys' experiences representing the norm. In this paper, we call into question that assumption by considering female and male proven offences and juvenile custody over time in England and Wales and show why gendered impacts should be given proper consideration. We also examine changes in the gender gap in proven offences and juvenile custody over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinmen, located in Taiwan's remote border area, has become increasingly embedded in the global economy by opening its border for trade and tourism with China. Previous rural youth studies mainly focus on decisions and experiences of migration while neglecting the experiences of those who stay in their hometown. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the experiences and subjectivities of young people who stay in the periphery for adulthood transitions. Based on our ethnographic data gathered in Kinmen, it shows how the enlarged employment with the new markets supported by Chinese tourists bring hope for the youth. At the same time, our findings explore how the highly dependent tourism economy and the overdependence on a single source of tourists bring them worry and uncertainty. Analyses of the paper highlight spatial elements in the economic, cultural and political processes of structuring young people's lives and subjectivities under globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, the physical design of a setting ostensibly seems routine and neutral. However, it tends to powerfully govern who goes where and who can access certain places. Much of the literature on exclusion within education settings often overlook this significance. This paper therefore seeks to rectify this by examining exclusion by design and allocation of physical space at The Site, a fictional name used for the large general further education (FE) college in England's East Region. Adopting a case study approach over two academic years (2013–2015), qualitative research was undertaken with seven tutors and twenty-six so-called NEET and disengaged youth. Drawing on Wacquant's theoretical concept of the ghetto, my key findings demonstrated territorial exclusion by design: this employability course was delivered in Q-Block, a temporary prefabricated building positioned out of sight and primarily used to deliver programmes for disabled, mature and disengaged youth on the fringes of education. This article concludes that, whilst existing research on policy and outcomes is useful in understanding the negative educational outcomes of stigmatised youth, a sharper focus is needed on wider social processes and exclusionary continuities in seeking to elucidate how governance processes contribute to their social and spatial marginalisation in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an exploration of how race shapes the migration trajectories and labour market experiences of Black African youth who migrated to deindustrialising Newcastle, a traditionally White working-class city. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered from interviews with 20 Black African youth (10 males and 10 females) residing in the city in 2018. Their ages ranged between 18 and 30 years and they migrated to Australia under different circumstances as students or dependents of their carers who travelled to Australia as skilled migrants or as refugees. These young people migrated to Australia from different African countries including: The Republic of Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria, Liberia, Uganda and Ghana. Theorising their experiences through decolonial theory and Critical Race Theory, this paper explores how these young migrants imagined Australia pre-migration in contrast with how they experienced Australia post-migration. With this, the paper forwards the argument that pre-migration Black African youth draw on modernist notions of development associated with Whiteness to position Australia as a developed place, and they have the expectation that once in Australia these experiences of development would be available to them. Post-migration, these young people negotiate being racialised on the labour market while looking for work and working, meaning that these experiences of 'development' are not available to them. The paper concludes by reflecting on the importance of accounting for how other processes like racialisation impact on young people's experiences of migration and labour market engagement in deindustrialising localities like Newcastle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how collective capabilities at a neighbourhood level can support youth voice and empowerment. By applying Ibrahim's 3C collective capabilities model in a new context with young people, we propose that it offers a useful framework to demonstrate the existing value and extend the social justice potential of youth work practice. Our findings aim to address the concern that youth work in Scotland supports individual but not collective transformation. They offer a framework to analyse the development of collective youth capabilities, with the potential to hold policy makers to account for commitments to youth decision-making such as The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill. The 3C model conceptualises three key processes in the development of collective agency as conscientisation, conciliation and collaboration. The model recognises the personal and group processes of engagement that lead to grassroots action, but also prompts analysis of power relations between grassroots actors and the institutions that govern public decision-making. Drawing on a case-study example, we highlight the ways in which youth work practice might extend its social justice potential, highlighting the need for collaboration and power sharing with policy institutions in order to support meaningful youth empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores young women's expectations on future work-family reconciliation in Finland, a Nordic country well-known for the promotion of gender equality. Utilising Sen's capabilities approach, we content-analysed thirty individual interviews to identify differences in women's expectations and their perceived capabilities in future work and care. The results showed that irrespective of their labour market status and educational attainment, the women's expectations were contradictory, reflecting a current Finnish gender culture that embraces both the ideal of shared parenthood and the primacy of maternal care. Between-group differences were also found. The employed women perceived themselves as having the capability to balance work, family and, personal time in the future. The women who were studying and had higher education- and career-related expectations perceived themselves as capable of combating gender inequality in their future working lives. In contrast, the unemployed women perceived their capabilities in both their future work and care as limited, thereby constraining their agency to realise their choices in work-family reconciliation and family decision-making. These findings indicate that Finnish women's expectations on future work-family reconciliation are shaped by institutional, societal and individual socioeconomic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the NEET category. We argue that it is both too focused on individual responsibility and too homogenizing to enable the development of public policies and measures capable of responding to the needs of the most excluded youth. We respond to these needs using a qualitative approach that has allowed us to account for the diversity of young people, especially the most marginalized, living in lower-class neighborhoods of the Brussels region. Our approach generates a NEET/non-NEET typology that helps deconstruct NEET as a statistical category by identifying social situations that are both diverse and temporary. This typology challenges the tendency to reify young people and to hold them responsible for their own circumstances. Furthermore, our typology shows how NEET situations result from trajectories shaped by structural dynamics as well as relations and processes of inequality. These may stem from social class, experiences of migration, or the intersection of the two, and inevitably exercise an effect on both school and job market environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility is high on the agenda in both policy and research and being mobile is a positive descriptor, not least for young people. The downside of the focus and value placed on mobility as the path to success is that 'immobility' has clear, negative associations: being immobile equals being 'stuck', a 'failure' and not being aspirational. In this paper I seek to problematise dominant representations of decisions to stay in regional and rural locations as 'immobility' that indicates a lack of aspiration or agency. More specifically, by exploring how the participants in this study negotiate belonging and aspiration in ways that are both classed and gendered, the paper contributes to more nuanced representations of the lives of young people living outside of urban spaces. The paper is based on a qualitative study of the everyday lives and imagined futures of young women with interrupted formal education, focusing on a disadvantaged location in regional Victoria, Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]