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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]

Middle-class young adults in the United States increasingly face insecurity around social class. This situation is especially fraught for women, whose economic and social gains are still not equal to men's. Using interviews with 20 heterosexual- and LGBTQ-identified women from middle-class backgrounds, this paper investigates the gendered and classed messages in women's communications with friends and family regarding romantic intimacy choices. Women's accounts suggest that family and friends monitor their choices in the interest of protecting class privilege. However, classed messages sometimes conflict with gendered expectations, creating ambiguity for women. Women's accounts also illustrate the importance of heteronormativity to the classed project of adult womanhood, posing a dilemma for LGBTQ women in particular. Despite increased individualization in Western society, women's accounts suggest continued influence from friends and family in the interest of upholding class and heteronormative gender privilege among middle-class women. However, this classed project ultimately comes at the expense of limiting women's intimacy options and maintaining class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]