Search

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]

Research shows that young people's online practices have become a continuous, seamless and routine part of their physical and social worlds. Studies report contradictory findings on whether social media promotes intoxication-driven drinking cultures among young people or diminishes their alcohol consumption. By applying actor-network theory, our starting point is that the effects of social media depend on what kinds of concerns mediate its use. Social media alone cannot make young people drink more or less but influences their drinking in relation to specific attachments that we call here 'assemblages'. The data consist of individual interviews among girls (n = 32) and boys (n = 24) between 15 and 19 years old from Sweden, covering topics such as alcohol use, social media habits and leisure time activities. The paper maps the variety of assemblages that mediate young people's online practices and analyzes how young people's drinking-related social media assemblages increase, decrease or exclude their alcohol consumption. The analysis shows that social media-related attachments seem to reduce our interviewees' use of alcohol by providing competing activities, by transforming their drinking under the public eye, by reorganizing their party rituals to be less oriented towards drinking and by facilitating parents' monitoring of their drinking situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data drawn from the European Union Labour Force Survey 2000 Ad Hoc Module on School to Work Transitions to explore the influence of gender and social background (measured in terms of parental education) on young people's educational and early labour market outcomes across 12 European countries. Our results show that social background is strongly related to the level of education achieved while gender is found to have a stronger effect on the field of study selected. Countries vary in the extent to which gender and social background affect young people's outcomes. Gender differentiation in labour market outcomes reflects the nature of the welfare regime, being more pronounced in familial and conservative systems. Social inequality in educational attainment and early labour market outcomes are less marked in Finland and Sweden, reflecting the combination of less differentiated educational systems, mass higher education and social-democratic welfare regimes. In contrast, social inequality is more marked in the Eastern European countries, due partly to their highly differentiated educational systems but more notably to rapid changes taking place in post-communist systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. This paper offers an alternative drawn from a study that sought to empirically explore, and build theory upon, how teenagers construct their political action. Our qualitative study among 10 activists aged between 17 and 19 in a medium-size city in Northern Sweden found that youth constructed their political action as four different processes:moving from consciousness to action,moving from personal experience to shared goals,moving from social activities to political activities, andmoving from single to multiple arenas. We integrated these processes in the conceptYouth Politics as Multiple Processes. Youth efforts to bring about these processes were not always fruitful because, as their political action gained complexity, youth faced greater constraints for recognizing, addressing and challenging power from age-based exclusion, state-centered definitions of politics, and adult disinterest in youth demands. According to our findings, youth constructed political action based in an approach to power that was not state-centered. We linked our findings to youth politics research and social movement theory that similarly proposed alternative approaches to power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Swedish tweens (10–14 years old) understand and experience the writing of their online identities? How are such intertwined identity markers as gender and age expressed and negotiated? To find some answers to these questions, participants in this study were asked to write a story about the use of online web communities on pre-prepared paper roundels with buzzwords in the margins to inspire them. Content analysis of these texts using the constant comparative method showed that the main factors determining how online communities are understood and used are the cultural age and gender of the user. Both girls and boys chat online, but girls more often create blogs while boys more often play games. Gender was increasingly emphasised with age; but whereas boys aged 14 described themselves as sexually active and even users of pornography, girls of the same age described themselves as shocked and repelled by pornography and fearful of sexual threats. In this investigation an intersectionalist frame of reference is used to elucidate the intertwined power differentials and identity markers of the users' peer group situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "The Corrosion of Character" Richard Sennett contends that the storied nature of human experience is stunted by "conditions of the new economy". He argues that individuals are unable to develop "coherent life narratives" in the absence of job security. Thus, continuous employment somehow provides coherence: at least, enduring relationships with a single employer--which were possible under the auspices of organised capitalism--facilitate continuity in adult life more broadly. This paper draws on Linde's typology of "coherence strategies" and in-depth interviews with young adult workers to demonstrate that young Europeans construct coherence by piecing together episodes of employment, unemployment and education in their biographies. Thus, the unfolding of the narrative is perhaps less likely to be enhanced by a sustained relationship with a single employer than discontinuous episodes of employment as part of the reflexive "project of the self". Nonetheless, the degree to which young adults reflexively engage in life as a project is structured by their position within social hierarchies. This paper puts forward contrasting reflexive strategies, which are discursively appropriated by young adults depending--in part--on their labour market experience, in order to construct coherence. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)

The relationship with place has been recognized as a significant dimension of rural youth leisure, both through the discursive constructions of place, but also as affective and embodied dimensions. This study captures these processes by applying the concept of place-making as a set of recurrent discursive processes, analyzing how girls in Northern Sweden engage in place-making alongside, beyond, and in contrast to dominant discourses on leisure, rurality and wellbeing. The study draws on data from photo-elicited focus groups with girls from two sports organizations. The discursive psychology analysis resulted in three interpretative repertoires. The first repertoire describes the sharp contrast between discourses of the 'rural dull' and how stressful the participants constructed their own places of leisure. The second illustrates the gendered discourses around what is considered to be productive and respectable leisure. The third shows how the participants are made responsible for the survival of their leisure. Through place-making, the participants shape places of leisure, affecting both themselves and their rural community. They engage in, conform to, and challenge place-making within discourses of responsibility and precariousness, creating space for their own initiatives, which are simultaneously shaped by the material conditions under which these practices take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressions of hostility in immigrants' surrounding environment have been shown to negatively influence their relation to the political society. The impact of such contextual hostility on immigrant youths and political community support however remains unexplored. Filling these gaps, I test the hypothesis that contextual hostility decreases immigrant youths' political community support, captured with a sense of national pride. In addition, I test two rivalling hypotheses regarding the influence of contextual hostility on the so-called second generation of immigrants, expecting the impact to be either weaker or stronger among the second generation of immigrants in comparison to the first generation. Analysing survey data on the political beliefs of youths in secondary school classes in Sweden, my main finding is that immigrant youths in school classes with high levels of anti-immigrant attitudes are less supportive of the political community, entailing a potential legitimacy problem for the democratic system. The impact of anti-immigrant attitudes among the second generation of immigrants is in turn weak or non-existing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the political interest of young adults who over two years moved in or out of a romantic relationship or had a romantic partner at both ages. The sample comprised young adults in Sweden (n = 1335; Mage = 22.75, SD = 3.01). Among those who entered a romantic relationship, the partners seemed to adjust to each other's political interest, but when separations occurred, the influence of the former partner vanished. Attending to similarities and dissimilarities in both partners' levels of political interest, we hypothesized that in relations where both partners had high political interest, their political discussions would occur frequently, and they were likely to reinforce each other's search for information about society more than in other romantic relationships. This hypothesis was confirmed. We also examined if partners with different political interest had lower partner commitments and later become singles more often than couples with similar political interests. We found few differences. Overall, both variable- and person-oriented analyses showed that romantic partners can both thwart and increase the political interest of young adults. Apparently, young adults' romantic partners play a significant role for their political interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its starting point in a mixed methods study on Dating Violence/Youth Intimate Partner Violence (youth IPV), this article emphasizes the social sphere of youth IPV and contributes to a focus shift from consequences and risks to responses, resilience, and resistance. It asks how IPV-exposed youth describe their responses and those of their social networks to violence, and how these responses might be interconnected with resilience. By exploring the concepts of 'resistance' and 'paradoxical resilience', youth responses in the context of an abusive relationship are highlighted. The empirical data comes from 18 in-depth, 'teller focused' interviews with victimized youth (aged 17–23) in Sweden. A theoretical thematic analysis of the interviews surfaced responses from three different types of actors, all described from the youth perspective. Responses are discussed from the point of view that they can promote resilience, but also enable abuse to continue. Overall, the data show youth-specific factors that have meaningful bearing on responses as well as resilience. The article also proposes that responses should be an omnipresent concern for practitioners working with these young people and for the adults involved in their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the crime victim movement and discourse on victimization, a novel victim category has been introduced: the young crime victim. This article analyses the professional discourse formed around the new notion, focusing on the needs of the young crime victim along with the practices, tools, and techniques used to deal with resistance at a support centre for young crime victims in Sweden. The institutional or professional discourse, which functions as an environment for the youths' stories about crime and victim support, affirms some stories and marginalizes others. It is reproduced through two overarching formula narratives helping to organize and lend legitimacy to the support work: one constructed around the 'bad' or resistant victim and the other around the 'good' or compliant victim. The young crime victims interviewed for this study generally reproduced the narrative on the 'good' victim in reporting on their experience. Although other findings indicate that there is possible room for an alternative approach to help-seeking clients, a third narrative emphasizes the uniqueness of the client's needs and personal competences. This narrative nonetheless remains but a subordinate one, evidently not part of the dominant professional discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines young people's discussions about alcohol in an Internet chat room. I study how alcohol is meaningful to the young people through specifically focusing their understandings of the concepts control/loss of control, conscientiousness and maturity. I also study what relations of power are constructed among them. The results point to four different lines of reasoning about alcohol: the "teetotaller argument", the "age-distinction argument", the "moderate drinking argument" and the "getting drunk argument". From each of these lines of reasoning to the next, there is a shift in the definition of "the Others"--of those who are said to be immature. In three of the lines of reasoning--the teetotaller argument, the moderate drinking argument and the getting drunk argument--the young people describe the characteristics of what for them appears as an ideal person with ideal views on alcohol consumption and intoxication: the strong person, the competent drinker and the authentic person. In the concluding section of the paper, I discuss and compare these different lines of reasoning with each other and with previous research on young people and drinking. (Contains 1 table and 16 notes.)