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Access to social housing is becoming more selective with allocation criteria requiring applicants’ stronger financial capacity or, conversely, proving their state of extreme vulnerability. This seeming contradiction results from two contrasting trends in social housing governance and management: a push toward adopting quasi-market privately funded models, on the one hand, and ongoing residualization processes on the other hand. Such polarization of social housing supply increases pre-existing divisions between insiders and outsiders. Young people are increasingly seen as outsiders in housing markets, a condition that exacerbates the risk of social exclusion and undermines the transition to adulthood. However, in the wake of changing approaches to the provision and management of social and affordable housing, new tenures are being used to improve access for young people while promoting greater involvement in community-oriented actions. Such tenures rely on a specific understanding of conditionality whereby units are allocated at below-market rates to young people in return for their commitment to engage in solidarity activities and help tasks for vulnerable neighbors. This chapter discusses this idea of conditionality and its effects on young people’s relationships within local communities. It shows that such relationships are shaped by complex, dynamic, and strongly context-dependent assemblages of individual human capital (e.g., capabilities, pro-social motivations, and attitudes), available spatial resources and conditions, and the fundamental direction and discretion of housing managers and practitioners. This conceptualization of conditionality discloses aims of tenant responsibilization toward both individual dwelling and community, redefining young people’s identities as resourceful tenants.

This chapter brings together the fields of youth studies and theory of justice with the aim to open up a space within which it is possible to draw on different theoretical traditions and work from different places and cultures. It draws on political and social theory to outline the development of the relationship between social justice and youth in the last few decades. From a political theory approach, it states a critique of universal and neutral theories of social justice based on liberal democratic traditions that have tended to construct universal and impartial criteria to identify social wrongdoings and injustices, including those that directly affect the lives of young people. From a sociological perspective, it analyzes current and recent debates about social transformations and their capacities to create new vulnerabilities for young people. The chapter argues for a relational approach that renders visible the social, economic, and cultural context of young people’s lives. This approach also opens the idea of the pluralization of social justice in the field of youth studies to include claims of redistribution as well as recognition and participation and to challenge the western-centric construction of theoretical and empirical youth work. Ultimately, it is argued that a broader and more inclusive account of cultures and ideas can only benefit those interested in understanding and addressing social inequalities.

The COVID‐19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the precarious employment situation of young people, precipitating a raft of academic and public claims of an unprecedented crisis that has disrupted young lives. Our study contributes to research on youth labour and transitions with new longitudinal empirical analysis. Our analysis challenges the “newness” of the precarity highlighted by COVID‐19, focussing on employment. It draws on longitudinal mixed methods data from a research project tracking the transition to adulthood of young Australians. We make use of the concept of liminality to analyse the labour patterns for this group of young adults for the past 5 years. While we acknowledge the impact of COVID‐19 on young people's lives, our analysis reveals a precarisation of labour conditions for a significant proportion of participants that precedes the pandemic crisis. We conclude that the tendency in some youth research and in public discourse, to depict contemporary events as heralding “new” crises for young people, obscures the deeper structural arrangements that continually position the young to take the brunt of social and economic policies.

This research report examines the labour, financial and material impact of COVID-19 on members of cohort 2 (aged 33) of the Life Patterns program. It does so by drawing on data from a 2021 survey question related to the impact of COVID-19. This open-ended question asked the participants to consider the impact of COVID-19 in terms of their work, income, and ability to pay living expenses. The survey was completed by 470 participants, and 71 percent wrote a response to this question. Of the total cohort, almost a third decided not to respond to this open-ended question (29%), a third (31%) mentioned being negatively impacted by the crisis, another third (30%) stated no impact, and 10 percent commented that COVID-19 had impacted them positively (mostly through their ability to save money, although a small number also commented on the benefits of working from home, including having their partner helping in the house and with their children).

This report explores young Australians’ attitudes toward key political institutions and their civic engagement. Data was collected from the Life Patterns Cohort 2 participants who were 32 years of age in 2020. The report is framed by debates about the expectations that might be held about young people’s political engagement and participation in formal political processes, and the extent to which disengagement is simply an age-based phenomenon or a generational shift in attitudes and approaches, which is reflected in the views of young adults. The report presents a short review of literature about citizenship experiences of Australian young people, followed by a brief overview of the methods used to collect and analyse the data. The results are presented in two parts: level of political confidence (Section 4) and level of civic participation (Section 5). The report closes with a summary of the findings, and a discussion of the implications of these findings for enhancing the robustness of Australian democracy.

Roughly half of all high-risk neuroblastoma patients present with MYCN amplification. The molecular consequences of MYCN overexpression in this aggressive pediatric tumor have been studied for decades, but thus far, our understanding of the early initiating steps of MYCN-driven tumor formation is still enigmatic. We performed a detailed transcriptome landscaping during murine TH-MYCN-driven neuroblastoma tumor formation at different time points. The neuroblastoma dependency factor MEIS2, together with ASCL1, was identified as a candidate tumor-initiating factor and shown to be a novel core regulatory circuit member in adrenergic neuroblastomas. Of further interest, we found a KEOPS complex member (gm6890), implicated in homologous double-strand break repair and telomere maintenance, to be strongly upregulated during tumor formation, as well as the checkpoint adaptor Claspin (CLSPN) and three chromosome 17q loci CBX2, GJC1 and LIMD2. Finally, cross-species master regulator analysis identified FOXM1, together with additional hubs controlling transcriptome profiles of MYCN-driven neuroblastoma. In conclusion, time-resolved transcriptome analysis of early hyperplastic lesions and full-blown MYCN-driven neuroblastomas yielded novel components implicated in both tumor initiation and maintenance, providing putative novel drug targets for MYCN-driven neuroblastoma.

The new and distinctive social and economic conditions that are explored in the chapters in this book demand new ways of conceptualising the role and significance of family relationships in young people’s lives, including viewing this support as a two-way stream and beyond financial realm to include emotional sustenance. Against traditional views of families as critical actors in the process of social repro-duction of inequalities or a youth transition approach that establishes a binary independence/dependence in youth-family relationships, this chapter extends the call for a more relational analysis of youth that includes their engagement with family to more fully understand how young people make their lives. We draw on longitudinal data from participants in cohort 1, that left school in 1991, to illustrate the relevance of family support against a background of declining institutional structure, and data from cohort 2 participants who left secondary school in 2006 to place the experiences of these participants against two central contemporary issues in social life: the rise and widespread of precarious labour and the crisis of housing affordability affecting in particular young adults. Further, we provide evidence of intergenerational practices of mutuality between cohort 2 participants and their parents. Ultimately, while these youth-family relationships show the complexity of transitions in late modernity and an interdependence and mutuality, they also bring into sharp relief the resilience of old and the generation of new patterns of inequalities, dimensions that are shaping a new adulthood.

Within each report, each case study is a snapshot of an actual research project currently being conducted in the YRC. Our researchers are sharing their experiences and offering their advice for conducting social research in an increasingly complex and diverse societal environment. The practices presented in this series of research reports reflect the innovative and contemporary research methodologies and methods undertaken by YRC staff and students. Some of the methods illustrated here are traditional but employed in new ways; while other methodologies and methods depart from conventional research practices to cover more innovative practices to investigate and understand the multidimensional ways of being young in the twenty-first century.

The SAGE Handbook of Youth Work Practice showcases the value of professional work with young people as it is practiced in diverse forms in locations around the world.

This research report focuses on Life Patterns Cohort 1 participants who left secondary school in 1991 amidst deep social, labour and economic restructuring of Australian society. Amidst this backdrop, we draw on existing quantitative and qualitative data from the Life Patterns Project to examine the educational, employment and personal factors which generate the need to upskill or re-train over the life course. Our aim is to examine why some participants, despite already having a post-secondary school qualification, re-engaged in education and training and thus became lifelong learners.

This study has built up a unique picture of the reality of the lives of two generations. The Life Patterns program: - Follows two generations of Australians - one that left secondary school in 1991 (corresponding to the popular notion of ‘Gen X’) and another that left secondary school in 2006 (corresponding to the popular notion of ‘Gen Y’ or the ‘Millennials’). - Explores the pathways through different areas of life taken by Australian young people. - Provides a unique picture, very different from the stereotypes of smooth transitions from education to work, or of the narcissistic or complacent generation often described in public discourse. - Allows for insights to be drawn that feed into policy advice and also into public debate. - Was designed to follow patterns in young people’s lives over time in order to gain more than a static glimpse.

The aim of the project Stimulating Curriculum and Teaching Innovations was to build the capacity of university educators to develop policies, curriculum, and teaching and learning environments that enhance student mental wellbeing. The growing prevalence and severity of mental health difficulties across student populations in higher education is an issue of significant concern for universities. This project aimed to foster sector wide conversations, promote a whole-of-institution approach to promoting student mental wellbeing in universities and develop a suite of research-informed resources to help academic educators identify curriculum and teaching approaches that can promote and support students’ mental wellbeing.

The question ‘where and how do young people belong?’ is central to youth studies, as young people are increasingly mobile, and many are ever more marginalised from economic participation. On a global scale it is common for young people to move to metropolitan areas for education, responding to global labour markets and seeking refuge from environmental and economic degradation, and asylum from violence. This mobility inevitably raises questions about the nature and quality of young people’s connections with people and place (or ‘belonging’).

Time and space are central to youth research. Transitions research investigates the movement from one status to another and often from one place to another. Cultural youth research investigates the symbolic practices of young people, practices that necessarily unfold over time and involve engagements in place and across space. This chapter introduces the most pressing temporal-spatial questions for youth research and the work in youth studies that addresses time and space. The chapter finishes by addressing the challenges for future research in this area. Conceptualizing time and space, and in particular the relationship between the two, will be important to youth researchers’ efforts to understand the increasingly global interaction of youth cultural practices, political movements, and forms of inequality.

This article addresses the changing nature of participation for young people. Our analysis is framed by the fragmentation of traditional institutions and the increasingly unpredictable nature of life trajectories. As a result, the identification of a crisis in young people’s engagement has become a recurrent theme in the literature, alongside a burgeoning interest in new forms of (sub)cultural participatory practices. We argue that there is further complexity in the reshaping of participation in times of social change, especially for a broad ‘mainstream’ of young people who are neither deeply apathetic about politics nor unconventionally engaged. Drawing on a research project with 970 young Australians, the article suggests that many young people are disenchanted with political structures that are unresponsive to their needs and interests, but that they remain interested in social and political issues and continue to seek recognition from the political system. At the same time, their participatory practices are not oriented towards spectacular antistate activism or cultural politics but take the form of informal, individualized and everyday activities.

Despite increasing social, economic and political interest in the growing global marketplace of health and medical tourism, it remains relatively unexamined in sociological and tourism literature. In this paper, I seek to understand health and medical tourism by briefly exploring its history, varying definitions, and contemporary developments. This highlights how health and medical tourism is a subjective practice and embodied experience which, due to increasing options available to tourists, is difficult to classify. Furthermore, as health and medical tourism involves an active body that is not restricted by time and place, it challenges traditional sociological understandings of tourism, which classify tourism as a passive, escapist and leisurely activity that occurs over ‘there’ in contrast to ‘here’.

Globality generates increasingly diffuse networks of human and non-human innovators, carriers and icons of exotic, polyethnic cosmopolitan difference; and this diffusion is increasingly hard to ignore or police (Latour 1993). In fact, such global networks of material-symbolic exchange can frequently have the unintended consequence of promoting status systems and cultural relationships founded on uncosmopolitan values such as cultural appropriation and status-based social exclusion. Moreover, this materialsymbolic engagement with cosmopolitan difference could also be rather mundane, engaged in routinely without any great reflexive consciousness or capacity to destabilise current relations of cultural power, or interpreted unproblematically as just one component of a person’s social environment. Indeed, Beck’s (2006) argument is that cosmopolitanism, in an age of global risk, is being forced upon us unwillingly, so there should be no surprise if it is a bitter pill for some to swallow. Within these emergent cosmopolitan networks, which we call ‘cosmoscapes’, there is no certainty about the development of ethical or behavioural stances consistent with claims foundational to the current literature on cosmopolitanism. Reviewing historical and contemporary studies of globality and its dynamic generative capacity, this paper considers such literatures in the context of studies of cultural consumption and social status. When one positions these diverse bodies of literature against one another, it becomes clear that the possibility of widespread cosmopolitan cultural formations is largely unpromising.

This paper seeks to interrogate the Seachange phenomena by utilising cultural theoretical principles developed by Durkheim (1995[1912]) and later reconceptualised through Smith (1999). It is argued that nature plays a significant role within the Seachange discourse by being ‘sacralised’ against the ‘profane’ metropolis. By interrogating public documentation developed by local councils, it is shown that nature is constructed as ‘pristine’ and ‘untouched’. This is counter-posed against the city which is aesthetically devoid of authenticity or pleasantness. Objects of technology which signify the metropolis then are considered profane and require separation from the natural world. However, the paper shows that through policy innovation, this separation is achieved on an aesthetic, predominantly visual level rather than physically, due to the demands of these areas for services (Gurran, Squires & Blakely, 2006). This occurs through hiding the ‘profane’ objects from the spectacle of nature, or if that is not possible, by blending them aesthetically into the natural surrounds. The paper concludes by examining the manner in which past ‘mundane’ objects such as 19th century infrastructures, are symbolically transformed to represent part of the area’s ‘sacredness’. Thus, the sacred/profane distinction is not fixed and immobile, but can shift according to cultural understandings.

This paper examines the idea of social economy in an era of network governance. In particular, it focuses on recent approaches to social inclusion involving strategic partnerships that combine social and economic objectives. The paper outlines some key themes in both the social economy and network governance literatures, linking them together through the issue of cross-sector joint action. The intention is to highlight the conceptual and empirical challenges this area of research poses. In this regard, we propose some preliminary questions and tentative responses as part of a broader program of research which involves conceptualising and mapping the Australian social economy.

Tensions frequently occur when people and young people seek to make use of a multitude of public spaces (Loader 1996; Brown 1998; White 1999; valentine 2004; Whie and wyn 2008). In Australia over a number of years, various strategies have been adopted by local councils, police and other stakeholders such as business groups, to respond to such tensions. Rarely, if ever, are children and young people involved in meaningful ways in the design and control of public space that reflects their needs and aspirations (white 1999;; Freeman and riordan 2002; Freeman 2006). Deploying the prisms of urban planning and law and order to deal with perceived public space issues impacts adversely on children and young people, contributing to their partial or complete removal from public space (Harris 2006; Waiton 2001). The provisional matrix presented here draws on existing material advocating child rights, extending these rights to unclude young people, as there are few frameworks of rights that are tryly inclusive of young people (Skelton 2007).

This paper briefly summarises1 findings from a South Australian study that examined whether Judges' decisions to sentence offenders to imprisonment differed between Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders when they appeared before the court under similar circumstances. Results showed that Indigenous offenders were less likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment when appearing before the court under seemingly similar circumstances. Focal concerns (attribution) perspectives are used to explore these findings.

Place identification in urban sociology has traditionally be associated with a sense of ‘being at home’ and connected to the formation of stable and fixed identities. The rise in transnational migration and the increasing number of refugees around the world has made particular regions and communities, within many western nations, culturally diverse. This has led to a re-conceptualisation and re-examination of the relationship between place and home. In light of this new paradigm I explore the existence of multicultural places and investigate the ways, if any, we can speak of ‘being at home’ in these diverse urban places. If home has been traditionally associated with order, sameness and identity while multicultural places are conceptualised in terms of fluidity, contingency, heterogeneity and difference then there seems to be an inherent tension between these two ideas. Are the ideas of home and multiculturalism mutually exclusive? I maintain that they are dialectically interwoven, especially when we acknowledge that otherness and home should not be conceived in binary terms. In order to examine this complex relationship the paper provides a brief discussion of home within the discourses of modernity and postmodernity and then links these discourses to phenomenological and sociological approaches to home. The concluding section demonstrates how home and otherness are expressed in intercultural moments where sameness and diversity rub against each other causing occasional friction but also moments of intercultural dialogue.

Postmodern society frequently presents new technologies and ways of doing things. The definition of community has been reshaped by the impact of globalisation. Distances have been reduced by people’s ability to access various types of technology. Many nations foster Lifelong Learning because education is believed to be ‘one of the principal means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of human development’ (Delors 1996: un). Networking among communities and/or stakeholders links social and educational resources. In Victoria, initiatives such as the Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN) have resulted in networks of local stakeholders to scaffold the school to work transition. Schools, Adult Community Education (ACE) providers and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) providers have networked to provide alternative pathways to further education or work for young people in years 11 and 12. However, despite the intent of lifelong learning to overcome exclusion and increase social capital, Bauman (1998) indicates that the freedoms of postmodernity may result in feelings of powerlessness, as previously secure spaces become destabilised. This paper, drawing on the theories of Bauman, discusses some consequences that the shifting of local and global boundaries has on communities and asks if lifelong learning meets the challenges of postmodernity.

Beyond the limited efficiency and economy goals of neoliberal health policy lies the promise of genuine health services reform. In maternity care in particular, recent policy developments have sought to make the management of birth more ‘women-centred and family-friendly’. Interprofessional collaboration and greater consumer participation in policy and decision-making are key means to achieve this goal, but changing the entrenched system of medicalised birth remains difficult. Recent social contestation of maternity care has destabilised but not eradicated pervasive medical hegemony. Further reform requires analysis both of institutionalised patterns of power, and attention to the fluidity and situated knowledge shaping organisational and professional practices. Accordingly, this paper outlines a framework with which to explore the multi-layered social processes involved in implementing organisational and cultural change in maternity care. Analysis of social interventions in health systems, we suggest, can be advanced by drawing on strands from critical organization studies, complexity and critical discourse theories and social practice approaches.

Current government policy in Victoria, as elsewhere, is seeking to change the provision of maternity care from an obstetric-led system to a flatter, more collaborative system that brings midwives to the front line as primary carers, at least in the public sector. However, dominant medical discourses continue to exert a sedimentary effect on contesting claims from midwives that deny the high-risk nature of the majority of births and which valorise the competence of the female body. Although there have been modifications in maternity arrangements (and the incumbent government is currently considering more), medical discourses continue to legitimate obstetric power via legal and professional structures, fortify the obstetric ‘habitus’, infect mainstream popular consciousness and undermine autonomous midwifery practice. Drawing from research material gleaned from in-depth interviews with nine obstetricians and thirty midwives conducted in 2004 and 2005, I argue that alternative discourses may strategically undermine obstetric dominance. Specifically, reversing stereotypes; inverting the binary opposition and privileging the subordinate term (or substituting the negative for positive); and defamiliarizing what is perceived to be fixed and given, all play on the ambiguities of representation and present social activists (midwives, childbirth educators and women) with valuable opportunities to challenge fundamentalist medical orthodoxies.

The increasing use of online technologies, including ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life, provides sociology with a transformed context within which to ply creative research approaches to ongoing social issues, such as the ‘bystander effect’. While the ‘bystander effect’ was coined following a real-life incident, the concept has been researched primarily through laboratory-based experiments. The relationship between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ world environments and human behaviours are, however, unclear and warrant careful attention and research. In this paper we outline existing literature on the applicability of computer-simulated activity to real world contexts. We consider the potential of Second Life as a research environment in which ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ human responses are potentially more blurred than in real-life or a laboratory setting. We describe preliminary research in which unsolicited Second Life participants faced a situation in which they could have intervened. Our findings suggest the existence of a common perception that formal regulators were close at hand, and that this contributed to the hesitation of some people to personally intervene in the fraught situation. In addition to providing another angle on the ‘bystander effect’, this research contributes to our understanding of how new technologies might enable us to conduct social research in creative ways.

Youth and risk are artefacts of expertise, constructed at the intersection of a wide range of knowledges about Youth and so-called Youth issues: an intersection marked by institutionalised, scientific representations of education, family, the life course, risk, and so on. In this paper I suggest that the messiness of human experiences and existence requires knowledge practices in the social sciences that can rethink what counts as truth. These interests – which are grounded in the knowledge practices that frame the work being undertaken in a large scale, qualitative investigation of the cultural drivers shaping the alcohol practices of 14 to 24 year old Australian’s - will be addressed through a discussion of the ways in which Tim Winton’s (2008) new novel Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton’s key characters to seek out, sometimes stumble upon, and embrace that which promises to make their’s a life less ordinary. In these recollections risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into lifeworlds that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work.

Decline of community and atteuation of social ties in contemporary urbanism

Decline of community and atteuation of social ties in contemporary urbanism

Decline of community and atteuation of social ties in contemporary urbanism