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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.

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.

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.

The conventional view since the early 2000s has been that participation in higher education (HE) is a risky pathway for disadvantaged young people in England; the social risk of entering an alien environment combines with the financial risk of rising costs and questionable long-term returns. This riskiness has been constructed as a major barrier to participation. However, national administrative data cast doubt on whether this analysis still holds true. Despite significant rises in tuition fees, the proportion of disadvantaged young people entering HE has continued to rise, with advantaged groups seemingly being more price-sensitive. Data from recent qualitative studies has also suggested that young people are now less attuned to risks. This paper considers whether circumstances in wider society have shifted perceptions of risk. The volatility resulting from the global financial crisis appears to have repositioned HE as a less risky option than early entry to the labour market, especially with more jobs becoming ‘graduate’, while the social risk has declined as HE has diversified. The paper draws on theoretical perspectives from Beck, Boudon, Simon and Kahneman to argue that many disadvantaged young people now view HE as a form of ‘insurance’ against an uncertain future.

In countries worldwide, Outdoor Education (OE) offers rich possibilities for learning. OE has been researched for many decades; however the field lacks an integrating framework for its different historical, geographical and disciplinary conceptualisations. The outcomes of OE programmes are well documented and appear diverse, yet also have common attributes suggesting there is scope for unifying approaches. Although substantive barriers to the conduct of OE programmes have been identified, these have seldom been synthesised. This paper offers a narrative review of the literature addressing three key questions designed to look rearward at where OE has come from: (i) how is OE conceptualised, and what theoretical models have been used in OE? (ii) what evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of OE programmes? (iii) what are the barriers to conducting OE programmes? The paper then advances onward with an integrated framework for reconceptualising OE and providing insights into how the field may be strengthened and augmented.20124

The paper seeks to makes a contribution to a recent debate in the Journal about what a political economy of youth might look like. The paper will take up aspects of Sukarieh and Tannock’s [2016. ‘On the political economy of youth: a comment.’ Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289] response to the initial contributions by Cote [2014. ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.’ Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543, 2016. ‘A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.’ Journal of Youth Studies.] And France and Threadgold [2015. ‘Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.’ Journal of Youth Studies], and will take the form of three ‘notes’: Capitalism: From the first industrial revolution to the third industrial revolution; Youth as an artefact of governmentalised expertise; The agency/structure problem in youth studies: Foucault’s dispositif and post-human exceptionalism.These notes will suggest that twenty-first century capitalism is global...

Young people are increasingly called upon to invest in educational qualifications, experience opportunities and other character forming activities in order to stand out from the crowd. This fetishizing of generic distinctiveness is promoted throughout education in England, and particularly Higher Education. This paper considers the policy and theoretical implications of the quest to enfranchise distinctiveness in English HE. From a policy perspective the universal promotion of distinction reflects how recent neoliberal reforms in HE have been moderated by a commitment to a liberal ethos of equality of opportunity. Theoretically the mantra of standing out from the crowd is emblematic of the entrepreneurial self as a tool of governmentality. The expectation of compulsory distinction encapsulates the duality of individualisation and regulation that is central to the project of governmentality. This duality is also implicit in the activity of enterprise and how it is calibrated by competition. Being entrepreneurial stimulates innovation but the uncertainty of competition may simultaneously stimulate isomorphic behaviours. The paper concludes by reviewing what the promotion of generic distinctiveness infers for young people and how the promotion of distinction is also bound up with the mantra of confidence.

In recent years a plethora of arts-based projects and interventions targeting marginalised children and young people have emerged a number of which have focused specifically on music-making. Resulting research has often highlighted the social, psychological and emotional benefits involved (see, for example, De Viggiani et al, 2013) although few studies have explored the connections between music-making and mentoring with young people in educational contexts. This paper comprises a small-scale, qualitative study of one such intervention in a secondary school in the South of England. Analysis of transcripts from one-to-one interviews with participants (pupils) aged 11–17 years reveals various ways in which music-making facilitated positive change such as increased confidence, improved attitudes towards teachers and peers, feelings of calm, and better communication skills. The paper concludes by suggesting that music-making activity may confer significant psycho-social benefits for young people, particularly when combined with mentoring support.

Recent work on youth participation has mobilised a ‘DIY’ or ‘individualised’ framework to explain the nature of contemporary participation, particularly amongst minoritised religious youth. This paper examines this conceptual framework in light of concurrent claims that contemporary participation can be better conceptualised using a ‘doing it with others’ (DIWO) approach, which emphasises the collaborative nature of participation. In light of these claims, I analyse the participation experiences of 22 young adult Buddhist practitioners who are located within a neo-liberal Australian context, yet simultaneously have access to religious teachings and practices which challenge distinct notions of selfhood. This paper shows that both ‘DIY’ and ‘DIWO’ conceptions of participation find expression in the participation experiences of participants from the study, and that both DIY and DIWO approaches can additionally be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than distinctly contrasting. I propose a new concep...

Online social interaction has become integral to contemporary social life, adding new dimensions to how young people learn, interact, and perceive themselves and one another. This paper presents theoretical insights from a year-long ethnographic study within a Scottish secondary school, where participant observation and qualitative interviews were used to explain pupils’ informal social relationships. Here, pupils aged 11-18 constructed and negotiated a hyper-surveillanced social space within which many became (or strived to become) visible and ‘known’ amongst others and where online presentations of self were highly important. This facilitated a celebrity-esque culture amongst the pupil population whereby pupils learnt from and emulated macro celebrity culture and often framed social interactions as entertainment. Central to these practices, was a continual desire to “make gains in distinction” by demonstrating high social status amongst peers. The paper explores the resulting implications for teaching, learning and pupil wellbeing within contemporary educational environments.

Young people’s transition from education into the labour market are diverse: sometimes direct from school to work or inactivity, sometimes characterised by stop-starts and combinations of different activities. This paper explores the association between transition pathways of Australian youth and their outcomes, in terms of earnings, perceptions of employment opportunities and debt. It builds on analysis by Fry and Boulton [2013. Prevalence of Transition Pathways in Australia. Canberra: Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper] who identified five pathways most typically taken by 15–24 year old Australians over a 10 year period, including quasi linear transitions from education to work with and without study, combinations of work and study, multiple churning between labour market statuses, and transitions into prolonged periods of inactivity. The present study adds four more years of panel data that have since become available, and compares the labour market outcomes of the different pathways a...

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of bo...

Persistent simplistic binary discourses of young people’s citizenship portray them either as civically deficit and disengaged citizens or the creators of new democratic modes and approaches. This paper draws on field research with two groups of young people in Australia to better recognise the nuance of young people’s experiences of citizenship, power and influence. The study investigated the extent to which different groups of young people believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the current barriers to their influence; and what would enable them to have greater influence. Our analysis in this paper draws on Lukes’ concepts of power [2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and Arvanitakis’ framework of citizenship engagement and empowerment [in Arvanitakis, J., and E. Sidoti. 2011. “The Politics of Change: Where to for Young People and Politics.” In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?, edited by L. ...

In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how - within consensual sexual activities - young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.

The effects of neoliberalism on young people and youth workers through outsourcing government services has attracted critique from multiple sources. Post-structural analysis interrogates subjectification effects of these policies on youth. However, this kind of analysis of the governmental formation of youth ought to consider the interaction between the knowledge of youth underpinning neoliberal social policy, and those employed by non-government agencies implementing them. The interaction between these two shape the reciprocal governing activity within the young person and youth worker power–knowledge relationship that, this paper will argue, is an important factor in the critique of neoliberal social policy. Young people are governed by a diverse array of knowledges developed by government, youth studies, NGOs and young people themselves. These knowledges interact, reinforce and contradict discourses of youth work. This paper focuses on a neoliberal social policy (FLO) which constructs youth as ...

Prior research has found that persistently delinquent youth or more violent youth were less popular than their less delinquent peers (Young, 2013). However, recent research has also found that weapon carrying is associated with being more popular in adolescence (Dijkstra et al., 2010). The present paper examines the perceived popularity of adolescents who carry weapons in comparison to those who both carry and use weapons in acts of violence or threatened violence. Data consist of two waves from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Analyses use OLS regression with lagged predictors. This paper found no differences in number of friends between weapon carriers and weapon users. However, among both male and female gang members, those who did not use or carry weapons (abstainers) named significantly fewer friends than weapon users. Among females, weapon abstainers both named and were named by significantly more people than weapon users. These differences were not observed for males. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.

In recent years sport-based interventions have been implemented as a mechanism via which to target marginalised youth in relation to the development of social inclusion. Much of the political rhetoric surrounding social inclusion programmes highlights engagement with education, employment, or training, as key metrics. This has led some scholars to observe that conceptualising social inclusion in this way can act to further marginalise young people who fail to engage with these metrics. In contrast, this paper seeks to employ an alternative understanding of social inclusion, which uses the concepts of recognition and acceptance, to infer how participation in sports-based programmes may enable marginalised youth to meet mainstream societal expectations and aid with social assimilation. Drawing upon findings from two small-scale studies of sport-based interventions located in three UK cities, this paper places participant accounts at the centre of the analysis to explore broader notions of pro-social development in relation to recognition and interpersonal acceptance. The paper concludes by suggesting that within contexts in which young people are able to generate strong interpersonal relationships with key personnel (such as coaches), and which are built upon trust, recognition and developing self-worth, there is clear potential for sport-based programmes to incubate social assimilation.

This paper focuses on the everyday lives of young people with a severe mental illness living temporarily at a social psychiatric housing facility in Denmark. In the paper we take a temporal approach to the analysis of this and we draw on Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm analysis to investigate the differences between the rhythms of everyday life within the institution and the rhythms of what is perceived as the everyday life of ‘ordinary’ youth. We also show how digital technologies play a central part in these institutionalised everyday lives by creating connections as well as disruptions between different time-spaces. Centrally, we point to the positive and negative consequences this has for the young peoples’ sense of self. Empirically, the paper is based on a four-month ethnographic fieldwork at the housing facility in 2014.

This paper reports findings from research conducted in six Romanian residential care homes. The aim of the paper is to examine the views held by young people, currently living in residential care, about the importance of their biological families and the option and challenge of reintegration. The data reflect the ideas and perspectives of 44 young people captured through a narrative interview approach using social mapping activities. The results indicate that most children and young people know at least one birth parent and maintain contact on their own initiative; most do not place a high level of importance on such relationships which are generally characterised by lack of confidence, low security and a presumed limited capacity on the part of the biological family to meet their needs. Family reintegration is considered to be a viable option for a small number of young people; others do not see it as realistic because of the impact of long-term separation and the likelihood of experiencing poore...

Policy and research portray sport volunteering as a means by which young people can develop skills and perform active citizenship. This paper draws on qualitative research with participants in a UK sport volunteering programme to critically examine young people’s volunteering journeys and how these are shaped by their formation and mobilisation of capital. The results show how programme structures and practices, such as selection criteria, privilege young people with higher levels of cultural and physical capital, and afford these youth additional opportunities to accumulate and mobilise cultural and social capital. The paper argues for a more critical understanding of youth sport volunteering; one that recognises that sport volunteering can reserve the practice of active citizenship for privileged youth.

Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real noneth...

This paper will detail youth political engagement in one of the most important activist organisations that the Mexican city of Puebla (the fourth largest in the country) has known in its recent history. In particular, the paper will focus on the leadership of two of the leaders of this organisation, who were also lovers. As we will see, the relationship between these two activists proved to be very important for this organisation, so much so that when the couple broke up, the entire collective collapsed. In this sense, the theoretical challenge I am interested in is the one of inserting the study of the affective dimension of youth political practices in the social and political contexts in which these practices make sense. It is hoped that by studying this case in a rather explorative way, we will gain a better understanding of how youth politics and engagement interact with interpersonal affect.

Events related to bullying are so complex that they require a much broader examination than is usually available from a single disciplinary point of view. The purpose of the present paper is to offer new ways of examining this complex phenomenon. We will argue that transdisciplinarity (henceforth TD) could bring a more comprehensive analysis and a deeper understanding to the current state of bullying research. As a way of emphasizing the benefits of a more pluralistic and integrative approach, we will use TD based examples to describe the general context and process we used to develop a new definition of bullying, one that provides a sharper distinction between bullying and general aggression, thus offering the possibility of more targeted intervention strategies. The present paper is divided into three sections, namely, a selected review of the TD literature, an application of TD inspired ideas and tools that examine bullying from a number of interrelated perspectives, and an outline of a concept...

This paper considers how ‘participation’ features as a key concept in contemporary approaches to research, policy and interventions to promote young people's experiences of safety and well-being in digital society. In particular, it examines the potential of participatory design (PD) methodology as a way of expressing, surfacing and supporting engagement with youth perspectives in research and design projects. In doing so, we explore how the language, materials and processes of a PD approach can help reconfigure the aims of research beyond the production of ‘products’ towards fostering ‘youth-inclusive publics’. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastucturing’ and ‘attachments’ [Le Dantec, C. A., and C. DiSalvo. 2013. “Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design.” Social Studies of Science 43 (2): 241–264. doi:10.1177/0306312712471581], the paper reflects on an Australian research project to develop online campaigns to promote youth safety and well-being in digital society. Fr...

Mobilities of money, symbols and young people themselves are central to the formation of the contemporary youth period. While rural young people remain marginal to theoretical development in youth studies, this paper shows that mobilities are especially significant for rural youth, who experience a kind of mobility imperative created by the accelerating concentration of economic and cultural capital in cities. Drawing on theory and evidence from contexts including Europe, Australia, Africa and South America, this paper explores the mobility imperative for rural youth and offers a new theoretical framework for understanding rural youth mobilities. The framework understands mobilities across three dimensions: the structural, the symbolic and the non-representational. These dimensions refer to material inequalities between rural and urban places in a global context; symbolic hierarchies that concentrate the resources for ‘youthfulness’ in cities and the affective entanglements between embodied subjec...

This paper draws upon international research evidence that suggests a relationship between protest masculinity and the manifestation of violent crime among young males, and that criminal desistance may be linked to (inter-) subjective processes such as the reconstruction of masculine identity. The paper considers the potential that pugilism (the art and practice of boxing) may have on enabling young, disadvantaged minority male gang members to find avenues for alternative identity construction and to gain transitional experiences which trigger self-confessed desistance actions. Drawing upon an ethnographic study conducted in a boxing rehabilitation centre on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark, the paper reports on data gleaned from participant observation and qualitative interviews with 22 ethnic minority young men. Findings suggest that the masculine context within the rehabilitation programme provided the young men with a safe space to perform broader versions of locally dominated views on masculinity and to reflect on their current situations and dilemmas. The young men were clearly in transition and their desistance journeys were characterized by hope and ambition but also disappointment and despair. In some cases it appeared that the young men's dogged attempts to desist from crime became a new way for them to ‘do masculinity’. The authors draw upon the findings to make recommendations for policy, practice and research.

This paper interrogates how three key concepts in youth studies – ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’ – have historically centred the experiences of white/Anglo young people in ...

Using longitudinal data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this paper employed a set of techniques to investigate the mechanism through which participation in structured extracurricular ...

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 sh...

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.

Drawing on empirical data from two individual research projects, this paper extends the literature on child and youth incarceration and offers a previously unexplored analysis of experiences and tr...

In the UK, transition to university has become regarded as the ‘normative’ next step for young people following completion of their post-16 education. This paper examines the views of 23 young peop...

Little attention has been given to young workers’ uses of private employment agencies as part of their job search and this paper seeks to rectify this omission. It does so by presenting a critique ...

This paper examines interview data from 20 young Muslim environmentalists in Indonesia. The data comes from a much broader research project on how people in Indonesia become environmentalists. The ...

This paper features stories about disharmony and social cohesion collected via interviews and focus groups conducted with teachers, school leaders, students, parents and the principal in a multicul...

This paper demonstrates how young people make sense of religion through local places in the urban context while moving from youth to young adulthood. We draw on in-depth interviews–including a mental map-making exercise–with twenty-four young Muslims (18–30) from a wide range of cultural backgrounds living in Metro Vancouver (Canada). Their narratives reveal young people ‘live’ religion in various local places and how spatialities of lived religion change over time. We highlight how making sense of religion is reflected in the changing meaning of the mosque and relates to the increased salience of places shared with young Muslims in which our participants negotiate religion in the context of their everyday lives in the city. While many studies on Muslim identities have established the complexities and dynamics of negotiating religion at specific local places, we argue for a focus on relations between lived religion at various local places over time. These spatiotemporal complexities are able to capture how making sense of religion is spatially and fluidly manifested in the urban context of Metro Vancouver.

This article studies the extent to which ethnic minority and ethnic majority students in highly diverse urban schools identify with Flemish and European identity. In doing so this paper aims to discuss to what extent these sub-national and supranational identities can function as shared identities within the multiple identity belongings of teenagers and what the impact is of teacher support and perceived discrimination in schools on these phenomena. The analysis is based upon a survey among Belgian native and Moroccan origin students in the 5th and 6th year of secondary education in Antwerp, one of Europe's most diverse cities. The results show that Moroccan students identify more strongly with a European identity than with a Flemish identity, while Flemish native students identify more strongly with Flemish than with European identity. This results in a large 'identity gap' with respect to Flemish identity but a much smaller gap with respect to European identity. In addition, our results show a positive effect of teacher support on Flemish and European identity for Belgian students, while it only has a positive effect on European identity for Moroccan students. The broader implications of the findings are discussed.

Street involved youth experience both increased rates of mortality and the all too frequent deaths of people they know, rely on, and care about. In this paper, we explore how street-involved youth ...

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 movemen...

This paper interrogates claims that millennial youth are being jilted by gilded baby boomers. The interrogation is by comparing the education and early experiences in labour and housing markets, th...

This paper argues for the need to better understand intercultural relationships among rural youth. Altered relations of labour, finance and power have seen the growth of international migrant labou...

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper (1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-...

Gang members and membership are oft displayed as fixed and stable entities that are only understood in the context of the gang. This paper purports that membership is a role learned through the pro...

Previous literature has paid attention to housing pathways and cohort features of young people, but studies connecting the two themes are lacking. This paper offers a perspective on the cohort anal...

This paper seeks to explore how indebtedness increases the economic instability of Chilean young adults working as professionals who are unable to address their financial commitments. This is takin...

Young women tell different stories about teenage pregnancies. Their stories are embedded in the storyscape of their environment, which offers a limited set of narratives. Normative discourses influence the stories young women tell about their pregnancies. Social norms and stigma play an important role in the construction of the meaning of teenage pregnancies. However, the embodiment of being pregnant constitutes meaning as well. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative study conducted in 2015 among 46 young Dutch women who got pregnant before their 20th birthday. Our study explores how young women navigate the moral arena when they are confronted with a teenage pregnancy and which role the embodiment of pregnancy plays in the construction of social meanings. The concept of storyscapes visualises how young women are constrained by their embeddedness in multiple storyscapes, defined by different and often contrasting audiences. Nevertheless, our study indicates that the momentum of pregnancy can offer agentic possibilities to take up another position towards their social environment and develop narrative agency.

The amount of public interest in and media panic over youth, sexuality, and social media has grown in recent years. In this paper, we explore the discursive practices that are disciplining the digi...

Extensive research has shown that working-class young people often struggle in school. There has been a lack of research that explores young people’s institutional experiences of education and support outside of the school context, however. This paper presents some of the findings from a qualitative study with 10 young people in Scotland, which addresses this gap by exploring young people’s experiences of support and education beyond the school gates. It found that the participants had troublingly negative and strikingly unproductive school careers, and instead accessed support and education in one or two settings: through youth work and/or college-based further education. The more individually tailored and informal nature of these institutions, combined with what was widely felt to be a more relaxed and personal relationship dynamic between staff and young people, were highly valued by the participants, all of whom began to make concrete progress towards forming or achieving their aspirations in these settings, often for the first time.

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and ...

The paper reports on a mixed methods study that sought to analyse determinants of youth labour market and educational disengagement in Peru. It begins by questioning the widespread focus on NEET – ...