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This paper explores how Australian youth climate activists experiencing ecoanxiety overcome obstacles and frustrations in their climate action initiatives by exercising meaningful political agency in the marketplace. It briefly outlines how their concerns about climate change inaction galvanised and continue to drive their engagement in climate politics, reflecting fears and anxieties about their own and the planet’s future. Despite this growing interest and engagement in climate politics, however, the efficacy of political consumerism as a strategy, particularly among young people, remains largely unexplored [Micheletti, M. 2010. Political Virtue and Shopping Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan], with limited research on their consumption habits and behaviours [Kyroglou, G., and M. Henn. 2022. “Young Political Consumers between the Individual and the Collective: Evidence from the UK and Greece.” Journal of Youth Studies 25 (6): 833–853. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.2012139]. Thus, this paper investigates how young activists in the study, despite their vulnerabilities and experiences of ecoanxiety, endeavour to address structural imbalances linked to climate change through political consumerist initiatives. Utilising in-depth interviews and a photo-elicitation exercise with ten participants aged 18–35, the 2022 Australian study examines youth activism and the interplay between political consumption, views on hope and sustainable lifestyle choices. It reveals that environmentally conscious consumption patterns such as buycotting, boycotting, engaging in discursive actions, and embracing lifestyle politics that young activists engage in serve as a source of hope for them. [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]

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 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]

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]

This study approached the issue of youths’ digital agency by analyzing the ways in which youths talk about their use of Internet technologies for recreational purposes outside of school. Using interview data from young people (n = 28) born in 2005 and 2006, this paper approaches youths’ speech as culturally embedded discourses that express their strategies for making their digital practices understandable and acceptable to adults. By doing so, the paper addresses the need for ongoing research that explores youths’ digital engagement with Internet technologies within a wider social context that positions them as ‘digital natives’. The study results were organized into 11 discourses under four themes: benefits, harms and risks, person-based networking, and Internet skills. The identified discourses reflect the ways in which young people articulate and negotiate their digital agency with social norms, assumptions and expectations of them as tech-savvy youths. By focusing on youths’ speech and discourses, this study advances current research on digital inequalities among young people. It also highlights the need for young people to be supported and empowered in developing skills that enable critical and safe engagements with Internet technologies. [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]

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]

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 focuses on the social reproductive labour of one group of young people - university students who hold hostile jobs. Engaging in paid work while studying full-time has become common for university students. Despite the desire for high-quality work-integrated learning opportunities, many working undergraduate students face precarious working conditions in service sector jobs. Full-time undergraduate students at two Canadian universities who engaged in term-time paid work participated in focus groups, life mapping, interviews, and audio diaries. The data revealed that more than half of the students experienced hostile work that is characterized by precarious conditions, intensified working pace, erratic scheduling and discrimination. We explore three kinds of social reproductive labour done by young working university students in hostile jobs – the labour of navigating their job conditions, the labour of juggling work and study, and the labour of striving for control and well-being. Our analysis suggests the need to broaden the recognition of the work of working students and to ensure better quality work for young people. Conceptually, the paper is informed by feminist political economy, particularly debates on social reproductive labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student employment is on the increase in many European countries. It takes many forms, from full-time employment to various types of flexible work, which involves short-term, non-standard and informal work. Despite its relevance and complexity, the connection between higher education and concurrent employment has been only partially explored in scholarly debate. This paper investigates the differing patterns of employment for university students, focusing on the role played by parental background, educational choices (i.e. field of study and residential status) and access to benefits. The analyses apply to the Italian higher education system and are based on data collected through a survey carried out among students enrolled at the University of Bologna, which has a highly developed student grant system and a large number of away from home students. Using multinomial logistic regression, the paper shows that students native of Bologna from lower socio-economic backgrounds and enrolled in the humanities and social sciences are more likely than their peers to be in employment. The findings on Right to Study are hence particularly important from a policy perspective, as they highlight the different roles that scholarships and tuition fee waivers play in employment choices whilst at university. [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]

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]

The paper reports on an empirical study of Chinese international students' experiences of personal safety and security at universities in a UK city. After locating these concerns in relation to current political, social and epidemiological contexts, it reviews the developments that have taken place in our understanding and theorisation of 'safety' and, in particular, 'security' of international students, noting the powerful implications of Marginson's most recent conceptualisation of the issues. The paper proposes the addition of Giddens's notion of ontological security to this developed conceptual framework. Findings from the empirical study make it clear that many students in the study remain concerned over their safety and security, and feel that their concerns are not fully appreciated by the 'authorities' to whom they might be expected to turn for support. For information and support on matters of personal safety, therefore, these Chinese students' first recourse is to compatriot fellow students, reinforcing a sense of inter-dependence based on shared subjective identities. Rather than treating this 'in-community' solidarity as potentially undermining wider cross-cultural contact and communication, this paper proposes that a strengthened sense of 'ontological security' provides a foundation for cross-cultural functioning that does not entail cultural assimilation and a 'subaltern' status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research including trans-Himalayan children and youth experiences of circular migration is often amalgamated under wider migration discourses. From 22 semi-structured interviews and three focus group sessions with 22 trans-Himalayan children/youth, this paper examines intersections of embodiment, agency, and circular migration in Nepal through what this paper frames as embodied circular migration. It then delves into this by addressing the question of how young people periodically returning for work in trans-Himalayan villages contribute towards their educational security in Kathmandu. The paper outlines how young people's agency towards choosing to engage in circular migration for work, circumvented structural challenges of not having identity documents (citizenship/birth certificates) needed to legally work or pursue higher studies in Kathmandu. Secondly, circular migration patterns that young people embodied reflected spatio-temporal aspects of migration that differed from their previous generations based on relationships to education/work, citizenship, and gender expectations. Lastly, this paper found that youth circular migration was complicated by the Maoist Insurgency, which greatly (re)structured education/work, circular migration, and family relationships in the trans-Himalayan regions. Overall, this paper connects migration and youth studies by bringing embodied lived experiences of young people from a disparate region of the world to the foreground of this ethnographic study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lays the groundwork for a research agenda on the formation of young people as workers, and therefore as subjects that are produced, valorised and devalorised within transnational movements of capital and labour. Theoretical development in the study of youth and work takes place primarily through the study of biographical movements through the labour markets of the global north. This agenda has marginalised the role that young people play in the dynamics of labour and value in changing industries, and the transformation of youth labour forces in the global South. In this context, this paper explores the valorisation and devalorisation of youth subjectivities as part of processes of labour force formation within the diverse spaces of contemporary global capitalism. The paper shows how changes in the nature of labour forces transform the nature of youth, which is characterised by new productive capacities through becoming a part of economic change. In this, the paper suggests a future agenda focused on how youth subjectivities are formed within the dynamics of labour, value and production in a global context, and therefore offers a new agenda beyond the contemporary focus on transitions in the global north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates unauthorized practices of sticker art that usually understood by scholars as political acts and yet narrated as apolitical by the sticker artists themselves. In order to analytically explore this contradiction, the article examines how and why representatives of youth culture (de)politicize their practices and present themselves as (non)political subject. The concept of (de)politicization is utilized as a tool enabling researchers to analyze what actions and intentions actors wish to present as claims for social change and what not, and the rationale for this. Using ethnographic data on the sticker artists’ community in St. Petersburg, Russia collected in 2016-2021, I scrutinized the nexus of the ethics, esthetics, and politics of youth culture in order to reveal how certain combinations of ethics and its visual manifestations are connected to the young people’s (de)politicization of practices in a given socio-political environment. Through the example of sticker artists, the paper discusses the alternative types of claims that do not follow the logic of resistance and shows young people’s complex work of politicization and depoliticization, which contributes to their liberation from subordination and provides them with an opportunity to live a meaningful life in their own manner. [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]

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]

In this paper, we begin to explore the connections between Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people’s intersecting identities and their everyday practices of constructing viable alternative lives in settler-colonial Australia. Drawing upon a series of in-depth narrative interviews and workshops with Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people that occurred across a four-year period (2019–2022), the paper discusses the core ways in which Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people are actively engaged in collective and individual processes of remaking their lifeworlds in efforts to realise viable socially inclusive and just communities of belonging and welcome. The article first briefly introduces key concepts and summarises the broader concerns of the young people involved in the research, as articulated during in-depth narrative interviews. The young people identify key areas they believe need to be seriously taken up for consideration in building alternative Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ futures. Young people collectively articulated these as enabling alternative futures of pleasure and desire, creating opportunities for gender, sex and sexuality education and, finally, collectively creating safe spaces for Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ gathering, welcoming and belonging. [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]

Young people's everyday lives are not just social and cultural environments, but also political arenas (Kallio and Häkli. 2011. 'Are there politics in childhood?' (Space & Polity 15 (1): 21–34, 2). A methodological approach is proposed that emphasizes young people's knowledge, while accepting the power and privilege of the researcher. By way of illustration, this paper demonstrates how an approach to co-creation of the method, inspired by the idea of a remix or a bricolage, can provide creative tasks as stimuli for the discussion of politics but also legitimizing mechanisms for young expertise and co-creation in the research site itself as a political arena. Specifically, this paper examines how young participants responded to a digital photography task by subverting the task itself, a process which allowed them to remix the model, making them simultaneously in control of the task and dependent upon it. This complex outcome was constructive as a way to stimulate participants as they explored their everyday lives as political arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth political disengagement continues to be a major issue facing contemporary democracies that needs to be better understood. There is an existing literature on what determines youth participation in terms of socio-demographic factors, however, scholars have not given much consideration to the macro-level determinants. In this paper, I outline an empirical analysis of what determines political participation among young people using the Eurobarometer 375 survey data from 28 European Union countries. I argue that while socio-demographic factors are crucial for youth political participation, context matters in shaping levels of political participation among young people. The results from the logistic regression analyses indicate that democratic maturity influences patterns of political participation among young people in the EU. The results show that youth engagement in different modes of political participation varies significantly across distinctive democracies, where individuals situated in established EU democracies are more likely to be politically active. The findings raise fresh concerns about existing levels of young people's engagement in politics in advanced and new democracies. This paper also contributes to the comparative research on young people's participation in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for renewed consideration of the way research subjects are selected in the study of subcultures. All too often, subcultural researchers limit themselves to the use of one or two of the orthodox sampling designs, such as 'convenience sampling' (selecting subjects who are readily available) or 'chain referral sampling' (selecting a readily available subject who refers the researcher to other subjects). While these designs certainly have their merits, especially in the early research phase of negotiating access and acceptance, they may impede insight into the diversity that exists within subcultural groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among punks and graffiti writers, this paper introduces a supplementary design, that of 'negative chain referral sampling', which consists of using group members' categorisations of subcultural anomalies as an opening to explore subcultural variation and tensions. This design is one that flips the logic of conventional chain referral sampling: if we are encouraged not to speak to certain subjects, for instance, due to their lack of authenticity or status, this forms the motivation for doing exactly that. Closer examination of subcultural anomalies may deepen our understanding of the boundary work, identity-making and social exclusion that occurs in all subcultural groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School-based mentoring (SBM) programs are seen as a way of preventing the disengagement of young people from education. However, existing research points to a complex relationship between SBM programs and improved engagement outcomes. There is therefore a need for greater understanding of the pathways through which SBM leads to outcomes for young people. This paper addresses this complexity, examining the nuanced ways in which SBM may lead to positive outcomes for young people. Drawing on the qualitative perspectives of 15 young people engaged in an Australian SBM program, the findings point to two types of pathways to outcomes. First, direct pathways go to the heart of young people's engagement, by prioritizing educational performance and achievement as the focus of the mentoring relationship. Second, holistic pathways see mentors seeking to influence young people's broader thinking about the value of education, their wellbeing and their communication skills, to in turn address issues that may otherwise present barriers to young people's engagement. The paper discusses the policy implications of the findings. It highlights the importance of acknowledging and measuring incremental steps to improved educational engagement, in a context of young people experiencing non-linear and complex pathways to engagement outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth can be described as a transitional phase for the formation of identity. As young people often hold taken-for-granted assumptions regarding their future, disability may pose a challenge for their identity development. This paper analyses the retrospectively written autobiographical narratives by three young women who became disabled during their adolescence. The structure of the narratives is approached with sociologist Arthur Frank's typology of illness narratives and identity through data-driven content analysis. This paper suggests that chaotic stories may hinder the development of identity, as the identity is described as delayed, hidden, silenced or neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen important changes in education to work transitions in the UK. For secondary and further education leavers there are extensive challenges in accessing jobs with prospects. Recently, policy makers have renewed their focus on this middle grouping who are not bound for HE or NEET. However, there is a relative paucity of research into the experiences of these young people and surprisingly little youth researcher engagement with vocational pathways and their framing in policy. The paper interrogates changing experiences and opportunity 'in the middle' and linked policy framings and interventions. Policy remains framed in individualising terms which focus on young people's capacities and positions them, and represents their interests, in very specific ways. School mediated employer engagement is an interesting exemplar here, and is contrasted with alternative interventions which seek to restructure opportunities more fundamentally. The paper argues for a new agenda for youth research which would hold a mirror to experiences in the middle, critically interrogate assumptions embedded in policy and practice and enhance understanding of differentiated pathways and prospects for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on Muslim youth is increasingly recognising the different ways they negotiate fluid, hybrid and individualised identities alongside minoritised identities that stem from a politics of mis-recognition. However, less attention has been directed towards understanding how these seemingly contradictory processes might simultaneously arise within culturally diverse societies that have defined frameworks for managing diversity. Drawing on qualitative data from a larger comparative international study on Islamic religiosity in the West, this paper suggests that for the Australian Muslim youth studied, a neo-liberal dictum of self-responsibility pervaded individualised attempts to move beyond the other-ing effects of mis-recognition. The paper argues that while these individualised responses to oppression enabled young Muslims to transcend othering discourses to an extent, they also reflect the emergence of a less visible form of surveillance in the form of self-policing. This paper explores this link by considering Ghassan Hage's concept of mis-interpellation, Ulrich Beck's writings on religious individualisation, and Lori Beaman's concept of deep equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers across an array of disciplines are focused on measuring the potential of specially designed programs – sport, movement, and/or arts-based – for supporting the recovery of youth in contexts of conflict and disaster. Yet, few such projects engage youth directly to capture their experiences of trauma and recovery, and too many continue to assume youth are 'victims' requiring 'our' (adult-designed) versions of support. This paper seeks to move scholarship, policy and practice beyond the 'deficit model' by providing space for local voices and prioritizing the creative grassroots strategies devised by youth to support their own recovery. Drawing upon three case studies and a multi-method approach (interviews with digital ethnography) it reveals the social and cultural benefits of grassroots informal sporting activities, particularly in providing youth with opportunities for valued forms of physical self-expression and escapism, social connectedness, and possibilities to redefine physical and emotional geographies. In so doing, this paper reveals informal sports as critical resources taken up by youth within situations and systems where their specific needs are too often marginalized. It also highlights the opportunities in alternative methodologies – i.e. longitudinal research, sustained digital observations – for building relationships and amplifying the voices of youth in conflict and post-disaster geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political participation of youth is growing in importance with the proliferation of youth parliaments, councils, and online campaigning. Yet, these sites are not accessible to all youth, especially those from minority, or refugee communities. Activism by these types of youth is often denounced or reduced to dehumanising narratives of their experiences. This paper aims to explore alternative spaces for and political participation of refugees through participatory art and exhibition spaces, which are critical for devising policies for pre-emptive peacebuilding and challenging potential intercommunal conflict. In this paper, we draw on a Photovoice project in Istanbul, Johannesburg and a refugee settlement in South-West Uganda (Oruchinga) that brought youth from FDPs and host communities together to reflect on their everyday experiences. All these sites are marked by increasing anti-refugee sentiments and xenophobia, where the voices of refugees are often denied and misinterpreted, making them compelling cases to elaborate on alternative participation methods and spaces for the political participation of refugees. The paper engages with the idea of epistemic (in)justice and resistance as an overarching condition to explore how the youth developed collective political voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates young people’s mobile practices of ‘making do’ as they negotiate work, study and play in the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on Singapore, and drawing on original empirical data derived from online journaling by twenty participants, the paper elaborates on their practices of ‘making do’ when working from home. Using an interdisciplinary approach spanning youth, cultural and architectural studies, the paper considers new formations and appropriations of domestic time and space. Critically situating the home as a hybrid domestic characterised by its porous public-private space and multiple-disjunctive time, ‘making do’ is evident in a range of spatial tactics: from occupying temporary mobile spaces to altering physical spaces with objects and devices, to time-sharing, to developing practices that affirm and contest ascribed social roles. Through switching objects and roles in the hybrid domestic home, our study participants not only created new mobilities within the immobile constraints of the pandemic home, they also transformed the spatial and temporal norms of study, work and play. [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]

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]

Digital sharing of sexually explicit imagery is a social and emotional phenomenon with at least three actors: A sender of an intimate image who is sexting with a consensual receiver – and a third party, who might non-consensually view the image later. In this paper, third parties are conceptualized as bystanders and it is analysed first, how non-consensual sharing makes the bystanders feel and secondly, how sexters feel about the potential bystanders. Data consists of 25 interviews with 18–25-year old Danes, who had experiences with sending, receiving and viewing intimate images digitally. Their narratives are analysed using Arlie Hochschild's sociology of emotions to understand how young adults work with changing and expressing emotions in digital intimacy. Findings suggest that bystanders experience non-consensual sharing situations as awkward, uncomfortable and ethically problematic 'oversharing'. Rather than intervening, bystanders manage their conflicting feelings by resorting to 'surface acting'. In sexting, 'deep acting' and cropping technologies are used to reduce the emotional harm of bystander viewing. The role of bystanders constitutes an important research gap in relation to the affective complexities of sexual image exchange. The paper's findings are applied in a critical discussion of campaigns advising young people to 'sext safe' and 'speak-up'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable Development Goal 8, Target 8.6, represents a direct commitment to improving the dramatic labour market situation of young people by substantially reducing the proportion of young people Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) by 2020. This deadline has now passed, and while progress has been made in most EU countries, the situation of young people categorized as NEET in Sub-Saharan Africa has worsened over the past ten years. In this paper, we review the existing literature on youth employment in Africa and analyse the reasons for stalled progress. We debunk five myths of youth unemployment and underemployment, which have hampered understanding and progress. These are that: (1) education and training systems are defective, (2) youth micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment offer a panacea, (3) the informal sector is part of the problem and not part of the solution, (4) care work equates to inactivity, and (5) the agricultural sector has little potential for job creation. We recommend more research on the supply side of the African labour markets to provide a more nuanced understanding of the structural barriers to youth market entry and call for a concerted international effort to battle the youth employment crisis through job creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decades have seen an increase in mental health problems among young people in Western countries; this has been tied to increasing educational achievement pressure and body dissatisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to explore how young people talk about reaching educational and body ideals, whether there are shared cultural imperatives underlying youths' drive to reach educational goals and body ideals, and how such imperatives relate to young people's mental health. Based on interviews with 15–18-year-old boys and girls (n=53), this paper identifies a cultural imperative permeating boys' and girls' talk about how they work towards their educational aims and their ideal body: with duty, grit and self-discipline. What also unites the fields of educational achievement and body ideals is that the qualities deemed necessary to achieve their goals in either field seem to also be potentially harmful to some young people's mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change (CC), warming at 'double the global average rate'. The southern African region is already a CC hotspot with climate variability exposing stark societal and biophysical ecosystem vulnerabilities. South African and southern African youth are beginning to claim their place at various CC negotiation tables adding to the voices of government and various civil society groups. In this paper, written by a group of youth activists, civil society organisation leaders, educators and climate scientists, we track the journey that a group of young change-makers and local government officials (in the age range 15–24) have taken in securing a seat at the policy table. The challenges, caveats and course corrections that have been taken in the Johannesburg Youth Climate Action Plan (YCAP) process and the wider country, are interrogated. This YCAP Johannesburg experiment provides a useful learning exercise for subsequent CC policy and practice engagements in the country and elsewhere. [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]

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]

This article discusses how everyday practices in a day shelter for undocumented youth interfere with binary narratives of belonging versus non-belonging. Tapping into scholarship on a home in the face of displacement and marginalization, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the so-called ‘Youth Living Room’ in Amsterdam. Caught up in migration management, the undocumented young people present here experience structural exclusion and are cut off from welfare arrangements in the Netherlands. But while their precarious situation was reinforced even further under COVID-19 measures, in the Youth Living Room, undocumented youths engaged in mundane practices that incited feelings of belonging. In the absence of a house and faced with the closure of public space, the Youth Living Room as a semi-public place accommodated ‘homemaking practices’. These homemaking practices, I argue, attest to the complexities of belonging and rather suggest alternative orderings to a dichotomized politics of belonging; this paper shows that homemaking practices in this semi-public shelter alert us to the inherent situatedness of being at home in society. Situated belonging then challenges our political imagination to ask what collective practices of homemaking we want to engage in. [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]

Against a backdrop of increasing cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female, young people have been positioned within the wider social imaginary as radical trailblazers for a new, progressive gender order. This paper provides original insights that empirically ground and interrogate such claims. Drawing on findings from focus group interviews held with 136 young people (aged 16–24) in the UK, the paper demonstrates how young people's understandings and narrations of gender diversity both support and contest linear progress narratives. We show how young people position their acceptance of gender diversity in contradistinction to older generations. However, this narrative of generational progress was undermined and complicated by tensions and ambiguities within young people's talk. Our findings suggest that, alongside being accepting of gender diversity, young people also experience confusion and misunderstanding which may mean that they are more comfortable with stable and binary forms of gender diversity. Moreover, some young people express ideological resistance to gender diversity, informed by wider debates around 'identity politics'. Overall, we stress the importance of situating young people's gender talk amidst multiple discursive constellations through which increasingly politicised struggles around the meanings of 'gender' are currently playing out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an examination of 'frexting' ('friend' + 'sexting'), which is defined as the exchange of personally-produced intimate images among friends. It draws upon accounts of frexting shared by teenage girls during a 2016 study investigating sexting conducted in Surrey, England. Frexting is theorised as a form of homosociality among girls and explores the extent to which and how it reflects, reproduces and subverts the dominant gendered social order within youth digital intimacies. The analysis suggests that while frexting involves intimate self-representation away from the male gaze, it reflects and reinforces a post-feminist cultural landscape characterised by (self-)scrutiny and regulation of girls' bodies and bodily self-representations. Frexting worked to demonstrate an authentic, relaxed, carefree and confident but, importantly, non-sexual sensibility, with implications for who and what constitutes legible participation. While subverting normative interpretations of girls' bodies as inherently, and problematically, sexual, frexting did not fundamentally trouble the post-feminist cultural landscape within which the girls were operating. The paper concludes by arguing that for frexting to become a truly emancipatory endeavour, it is necessary to dismantle the socio-cultural context that restricts and regulates girls' abilities to relate to and represent their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case management is promoted as a trademark of community service practice with young people funded by neoliberal social policy. In spite of this, case management practice and case managers have largely escaped the attention of youth scholars. In this paper, we examine the funding parameters of two youth case management services in Australia to reveal the governing effects on young people, case managers and NGOs. We develop an analytical framework that exposes the compounding effect of interacting governable spaces that facilitates a critical analysis of case management revealing the problems of governance within this seemingly generic practice method. Shifting focus from the young person as the object of governance to include the case manager and case management as separate but interacting governable spaces, provides new insights into the problematisations underpinning case management practice with young people. We argue compounding governable spaces provides insight into the infantilisation of young people that is amplified and reinforced within and between case managers, and case management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the number of children in custody declines, the complex needs of many of them have increased. A review of the youth justice system stated that education needs to be the central pillar in preventing offending. Research suggests that education fails children, by prioritising reputation and the standards agenda over providing care and education that meets individual needs (Runswick-Cole. 2011. "Time to End the Bias Towards Inclusion." British Journal of Special Education 38 (3): 11). This paper explores this failure for children prior to and in custody itself, and relates this to a theoretical model that combines children's need and self-efficacy. It suggests that until children are guaranteed an environment where their basic needs are met, there is little hope of either education or training helping them to access a life free from crime, whatever other policy changes in custody are implemented. This research shows that current provisions, for children in custody, fail to support children's needs around safety, belonging and self-esteem. Thus, it is no surprise that children in Secure Training Centres fail to self-actualise their educational abilities, as they lack the self-efficacy to successfully engage with education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a study of the life course of 40 young people (aged 18–35) in Bologna (Italy), who are active in eight different political organizations. It explores whether the political organization, given that the city's political context is the same for all participants, affects the variation of their pathways. It does so by answering the following question: which phases in the lives of young participants are interconnected with the political organizations they are engaged in? To evaluate the impact of the organizational context on young participants, we will take into consideration three dimensions: the degree of bureaucratization, forms of action, and political orientation. Situated at the intersection of youth and social movement studies, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the connections between primary and political socialization processes in shaping young participants' mobilization and sustained participation within different political organizations. Our empirical findings show that, if the degree of bureaucratization was constantly salient in the two phases, on the other hand political orientation was more salient during participants' mobilization and the forms of action during participants' sustained participation. In the conclusion, the paper critically discusses the empirical findings of our analysis of the respondents' narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]