Search

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the main dynamics behind the patterns of friendship between Muslim youth and the Anglo-Australian majority in Australia, from the perspectives of young Muslim Australians. In particular, we focus on the extent to which race and religiosity play a role in shaping these friendship patterns. We use qualitative data obtained from 64 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with young Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24. Building upon the existing notions of religious homophily, we show that our respondents separate public acquaintances from close friendships and confine their acquaintances with the Anglo-Australians to the public sphere. Young Muslim Australians perceive the drinking culture of Anglo-Australians as a major barrier to socialisation in private spaces. [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]

This paper uses empirical evidence to explore the nature of employment transitions for a cohort of marginalised young people in England. The findings presented reveal the importance of past experiences, largely determined by prevailing opportunity structures, in shaping the present and reiterate the need to see transition as a historical process. Longitudinal data collected as part of an evaluation of a youth employment programme called Talent Match provides the evidence for the paper. The routes participants took in terms of securing and sustaining employment are examined. The paper develops a typology of different transitional groups to explore these routes based on the movement (or lack of) into and out of employment. The relative importance of different factors in explaining the groupings are assessed, with results underlining how the ongoing change participants were encountering in the present was inextricably linked to their past. In response, this paper suggests a reemphasis on understanding youth as both a stage of 'being' and 'becoming', seeing youth as both a condition in its own right but also part of the life course process, and calls for a more dynamic understanding of youth transitions among policymakers and those designing youth employment programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people and their housing conditions are closely linked, since housing determines whether an individual can lead a smooth transition from dependence to independence. Nevertheless, young people across many societies face growing problems in achieving this transition, which can be attributed to rising house prices and the lack of affordable alternatives to homeownership. Moreover, young people are likely to have vastly divergent experiences and outcomes depending on their tenure. This paper explores these issues in relation to young people in Beijing. The paper argues that the housing issues in Beijing have distinct local characteristics. Drawing on a unique dataset of 83 housing stories, this paper explores housing differentiation and experiences amongst young, promising middle-class people in Beijing. This paper attempts to answer the following research questions: What factors contribute to young people's access to homeownership in light of the rising house prices in Beijing? How is homeownership differentiated by different classifications? The answers to the research questions are the key to understanding the differentiation of homeownership amongst young, promising middle-class people in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 labour across rural spaces of the Global North from the Global South, notably nations of the Pacific, Asia and Africa (Argent, N. 2011. "What's New about Rural Governance? Australian Perspectives and Introduction to the Special Issue." Australian Geographer 42 (2): 95–103). This paper focuses on Australia, where labour relations, humanitarian programs, visa categories and mobility desires have led to new rural futures (Hugo, G. 2014. "Immigrant Settlement in Regional Australia: Patterns and Processes." In Rural Change in Australia: Population, Economy, Environment, edited by R. Dufty-Jones and J. Connell, 52–82. Farnham: Ashgate). Young people are at the forefront of these changes, with youth forging pathways and relationships for themselves and their families. However, within the burgeoning literature of rural intercultural relations we know little about young people's social relationships within these transforming places. This paper outlines a framework to progress such an agenda and focuses on conditions, capacities and identity resources within rural trajectories. It argues that empirical scholarship on these intersecting concepts may generate insights into young people's relationships within today's transforming rural multicultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 economic crisis has had particularly negative effects on the youth labour market outcomes in Southern Europe. Thus, it is hardly surprising that many Southern European youngsters see migration as the only way to escape from under-employment and precariousness. In this context, the article studies the reasons for emigration to Mexico of a group of young graduates from Italy and Spain. The paper is based on 42 in-depth semi-structured interviews with young graduates, aged 29 years old or less on their arrival in Mexico. The article first explores the relevance of the economic crisis as the main reason behind the migration of this group. It is revealed that the interviewed graduates had a precarious labour incorporation back in their countries of origin, and migration appeared as a means to further their careers. Second, the paper analyses the interviewees' labour incorporation in Mexico; in many cases this coincides with an extended university-work transition, since many of them had not secured full-time permanent jobs before their arrival in Mexico. Finally, the paper explores the interviewees' future plans. These depend not only on their work experiences in Mexico but also on their degree of social and cultural integration in the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth studies has called for new ways of thinking about transitions for young people. This paper argues for new ways of understanding times during transition, particularly for young people with complex support needs. Young people (16–26 years) with complex support needs are those who experience multiple forms of social disadvantage, and who depend on siloed services to support them. Complex support needs are created by the intersection between a person and a complex system of services including education, health, disability, health, mental health, homelessness, youth justice and child protection. In this context, transition has been understood as a physical movement between and within separate services. Using the arts based method of body mapping with 31 young people with complex support needs from three Eastern states of Australia, this paper reports on how young people themselves experience transition. Young people identified three distinct times during transition that resonated with existing literature on critical moments, liminal periods and meaning making times. However, these times were not sequential or singular, nor were they a reflection of service transitions. Instead, this paper contends that times during transition were not as much about moving forward, as about simultaneously living with complex and chaotic pasts and presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 39 in-depth interviews with young people experiencing homelessness in a large Canadian city this paper explores the identity processes at the heart of how young people make decisions about getting by on the street. The paper integrates insights from cognitive sociology and narrative theories of identity to highlight an active, complex, and socially situated decision-making process. In particular, it explores the role played by three types of dispositional processes identified in the dual process and cognitive sociology literature: cultured capacities, dispositions, and cultural scripts. The analysis shows how the young people in the sample used their identity narratives to engage with and underwrite these dispositional influences and connect them back to an internalized sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a ‘palette’ of interdisciplinary methods to explore young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences in the hyper-diverse suburban locations of Chorlton and Wythenshawe, Manchester, UK. This paper contributes to literature on the emerging theme of hyper-diversity by exposing the heterogeneity of young people’s drinking experiences, with a focus on bars, pubs, streets and parks. I demonstrate how young people’s inclusion and exclusion from such spaces is bound up with the traditional identity markers of age, gender and class, alongside more performative, embodied, emotional and affective aspects; for instance, the atmospheres, smell and soundscapes of particular drinking spaces. More than this, the paper enhances understandings of hyper-diversity by elucidating the ways in which young people’s everynight alcohol-related mobilities and diversity interpenetrate each other. Through analysing young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences, I show how young people are hyper-diverse in terms of their alcohol-related lifestyles, attitudes, and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of qualitative research examining young Indigenous Australians’ sexual health highlights the profoundly social nature of young people’s sexual lives. Nineteen peer reviewed published papers were identified for inclusion. Findings reveal efforts made by some young Indigenous Australians to control their sexual lives, mitigate risk and maintain their sexual health. The review identified factors which are conducive to sexual health risks and vulnerability, including incomplete knowledge about STIs and safer sexual practices; gossip and ridicule concerning sexual activity and its consequences; damaging expectations about male prerogatives with respect to sexual relationships; limited inter-generational communication about sexual health issues; inadequate school-based sexual health education; and tensions between Indigenous and biomedical explanations of sexual health issues. Future research priorities include a focus on young Indigenous people in cities and towns across Australia, and in regional and remote settings in New South Wales and Victoria; understanding how Indigenous cultural values support young people’s sexual health; young men’s sexual and service-based practices; and the experiences of same-sex attracted and gender diverse youth. This research would inform the design and delivery of culturally safe and acceptable sexual health services and programmes, underpinned by an understanding of factors in young Indigenous Australians’ everyday sexual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 transitions through institutional environments for young people. Different penal environments have different operational practices and treatment according to arbitrary age-determined constructions of childhood, youth and young adulthood, evidenced by decreasing safeguards. This article demonstrates the reduction of operative and supportive investment in those held, and the shifting perception from children that require 'training' to young people and young adults who are managed and whose particular needs are neglected. The arbitrary nature of transitions presents a paradox between developmental maturity as an individualistic ongoing process and arbitrary age-determined transitions. As such, it is argued that there should be a more developmental approach to caring for young people across penal environments which accounts for their ongoing maturity and complex needs. [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]

The issue of addressing youth violence through criminal justice reform has been extensively studied in the Western world, particularly the United States. However, research investigating similar efforts in China has been relatively limited, with few normative studies being the exception. This paper presents China's approach to tackling youth violence by examining the nation's criminal justice reform initiatives in recent years. Specifically, this study examines China's implementation of a lower age of criminal responsibility and the Supreme People's Procuratorate's system for approving the prosecution of juvenile offenders. These measures do not necessarily contravene the best interests of children. Rather, they are implemented to address public concerns and to prevent unjust outcomes in individual cases. Furthermore, China's criminal justice system continues to emphasize the importance of forgiveness and care for young offenders. Thus, it is crucial to approach the issue of youth violence from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating considerations of pedagogy, criminology, and psychology, in addition to legal measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with theories of networked affect, this paper highlights the importance of new ways of thinking about young women’s relations with social media beyond ‘good or bad’ narratives, and towards more affective, embodied and agentic relations with digital technologies. Drawing upon interviews with 45 young women (16–25 years), we reveal the emergence of new digital intensities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the reshaping of young women’s digital encounters. As well as highlighting the importance of digital technologies for escaping the stressors of pandemic life, digital practices surfaced creativity, connection and moments of joy. Yet for many young women, the ‘positivity imperative’ to perform proactive and productive feminine subjectivities during the pandemic re-turned their digital relations, surfacing negative affects (i.e. guilt, anger, shame) about themselves and their bodies. There was a networked affective ‘stickiness’ of these feelings, prompting some to navigate new boundaries around their social media engagement to protect their own wellbeing. In so doing, we see how the pandemic acted as a ‘jolt or spark’, activating new affective entanglements with digital technologies, and evoking new ethical and affective relations of care with bodies and subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent critiques of the metrocentric nature of global youth studies, this paper explores the role of place in current research on youth political action in Sweden. Drawing on Agnew's [2011. "Chapter 23: Space and Place." In Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by J. Agnew, and D. Livingstone. London: Sage] concept of place and using qualitative interpretive review as our method, we examined three sets of research publications on three different aspects of youth political action in Sweden. Our analysis found that place was addressed differently in each set of publications: youth political socialization and civic engagement were approached as placeless, street protests were examined as place assumed and urban justice movements were studied as place-based. The first two sets of publications contribute to reproducing a metrocentric understanding of youth political action, where urban areas are constructed as the key settings for political action among young people, while rural or peripheral areas are assumed to work in the same way or are depicted as non-political. By contrast, the publications on urban justice movements offered an alternative by exploring political action as place-based. The need to study the place-specific ways that young people do politics is discussed, with its potential to further the understanding of how young people do politics from where they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of a larger ethnographic study on Italian youth mobilities, this paper investigates the transitions to adulthood of young returnees who have gone back to Italy after a period of living and working in Australia. Adopting the 'mobile transitions' approach, we illustrate the ways in which mobility affects transitions to adulthood. We suggest that upon return these transitions unfold like a palimpsest, where the old texts are layered over with new ones, unsettling conventions about adult life and disrupting assumptions that return is a final stage in the transition process. New meanings around adulthood emerge in these young Italians' mobile experience that continue also after return. We explore this through their aspirations for the future and their renegotiation of family relationships. Return for these young movers means bringing home a new perception of their current and future selves and especially of their role within their family of origin and Italian social and political culture. This is significant if we consider that Italy is the 'country of the long family' (Cavalli, A. 1997. "La lunga transizione all'età adulta." In Giovani del nuovo secolo. Quinto rapporto IARD sulla condizione giovanile in Italia, edited by C. Buzzi, A. Cavalli, and A. De Lillo, 38–45. Bologna: Il Mulino), where the youth condition is characterized by a delayed acquisition of autonomy and the consequent late assumption of responsibility and adult roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines young women's experiences of early motherhood focusing on their aims and goals for the future. Young mothers face a particularly complex set of life circumstances by virtue of entering parenthood outside the normative age of motherhood and are likely to experience discrimination, stereotyping and economic disadvantage. We report data from a small-scale qualitative study designed to gather evidence about the experiences, goals and aspirations of young mothers. While the main programs supporting young mothers in Australia focus on education and employment support, we find that young mothers prioritise mothering and focus on the importance of providing full-time care to their children. We find evidence that parenthood is potentially a catalyst for transitioning to more rewarding employment, but this is a secondary goal after motherhood priorities. We also find evidence of active resistance to stereotyping and the challenges these women face as they navigate motherhood outside the standard normative age for this transition. Our findings highlight the need for longitudinal work that can provide evidence of journeys through motherhood, heterogeneity in outcomes, support programs that cater for changing needs and greater recognition of the value of unpaid mothering and care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education and work are two essential parts of young people’s lives. Currently, the relationship between education and work in the youth policy field is predominantly discussed from the perspective of a narrow economic discourse of education to work transitions. This is despite the fact that this narrow paradigm of examining youth transition from school to work which was prevalent in the 1980s and early 1990s has been consistently problematised and re-worked in the past few decades. Drawing on longitudinal data collected from a cohort of Australian young adults reporting their self-assessment of and their reflections on the connection between their study and work, this paper provides new empirical evidence in support of some of the arguments that have emerged within the field of youth studies regarding transition. Grounded in a broader conceptualisation of transition and informed by theories of youth citizenship, this paper highlights the complexities involved in young people’s navigation of education and work, and proposes the metaphor of a double helix which considers education and work as two interconnected venues through which recognition and meaning are achieved by young people in a postmodern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores young Aboriginal women’s views on sex and relationships in Australia – including their beliefs about broader social attitudes relating to sexuality, gender, and well-being – and how these understandings can impact young women’s sexual health. The project adopted a strengths-based approach and used peer interviewing to investigate how Aboriginal young people in urban settings develop and manage their sexual well-being. The findings draw on interviews with 35 Aboriginal young women, between 16 and 26 years old and living in Western Sydney, Australia. Although the young women’s views and experiences were broad and diverse, several key themes were identified. In this paper, we explore how young women’s understandings and experiences of sexual shame were gendered and racialised, how they reconciled shame-inducing discourses by embracing more open and positive views about sexuality and how they drew on various sources to foster self-worth and sexual agency. Moreover, the paper describes what young women saw as the defining features of positive sexual relationships which, in their views, included love, connection, respect, consent, trust, honesty and responsibility. Implications for how young women’s ties to family, community and culture supported them in fostering sexual well-being are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to influence the direction of government policy decision-making, many young people are politically engaged, not through voting and party membership like youth in previous decades, but rather through membership in social, environmental or identity-centered organizations, lobby groups or advocacy organizations, and online groups. In this paper, we investigate the many ways that Canadian Arab youth get involved in the formal political system and examine the nature of that involvement. We have found that Canadian Arab youth show a higher level of political participation than the Canadian youth population as a whole and that rather than being politically alienated, Canadian Arab youth are active participants in Canadian society, as well as an interested and diligent citizenry. We examine the possible forces galvanizing Arab youths' political interest and mobilizing them into action. Based on our findings, we argue that the Canadian political landscape is changing due to substantive contributions from ethnic minority youth, including Arab youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many children under the age of 18 are drawn into unpaid caring roles because they live in families where there is chronic illness, mental health problems or substance misuse, and because other alternatives are not available. Many of these children, widely referred to as 'young carers', provides regular and significant amounts of care, often 'hidden' because of the absence of awareness by professionals in the fields of education, health and social care. While there are some positive outcomes for children, published research also shows that children's caring tasks can have negative outcomes, especially during the transition between school and further/higher education and paid work. This paper presents an overview, cross-national and comparative analysis of the different legislation, policy and service frameworks to support young carers in a number of countries. It utilises a qualitative assessment approach and a 7-point classification to understand the state of development and progress since 2017. While the legislation, policy and service frameworks differ significantly among the observed countries, an international and collaborative research network has emerged in the last five years. This plays a vital role as a driver for increasing the awareness of young carers and further national and cross-national policy developments in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimensions of subcultural practice. In the first part of the paper, I embark on a critical reading of the traditional ‘schools’ of subcultural and post-subcultural theory. I seek to show that they all suffer from a blind spot in regard to collective and material embeddedness. In the second part, I analyse a number of ‘thick’ empirical accounts of subcultural collectivity, creativity and interchange with material and musical objects. I attempt to develop these descriptions further and seek to show how they may benefit from having more attention paid to collective and material embeddedness, as well as to the interchange between these two dimensions in subcultural practice. I hope to thus demonstrate how the embedded perspective may contribute to analyses of subcultural creativity and lived subcultural experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 people who, despite being suitably qualified to progress to university, were anticipating alternative pathways and options. The paper illuminates the centrality of young people's 'learning identities' in their decisions and the role of wider social contexts in structuring their opportunities to embark on higher education. Their 'learning identities' informed their views on the value of higher education and other options in securing future employment. The implications of these findings are highly significant in the context of congested and competitive UK labour markets in which obtaining a degree has become, in very many contexts, the bare minimum for securing employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world where opportunities are increasingly limited, young people are encouraged to become resilient and entrepreneurial in their pursuit of the traditional markers of adulthood. Social enterprise and community organisations dedicated to supporting young people seek to recast these expectations by providing supportive work and training environments and cultures and encouraging young people to find passion and hope in economic conditions that have failed to deliver the security and wellbeing that was promised. These organisations identify and respond to complex issues like unemployment and disengagement, homelessness and housing precarity, and provide personal development, support, education, training and employment options. In this paper, we explore how youth-focused social enterprise and community organisation programmes shape dispositions of resilience and entrepreneurialism. Drawing on the work of Butler and Anthanasiou and Dey and Mason, we argue that social organisations re-imagine the 'social therapeutics' that young people may require in relation to their participation in neoliberal forms of governmentality. We hope to challenge conceptualisations of such interventions as purely bounded by neoliberal and pro-capitalist therapeutic logics, by identifying the complex and sometimes contradictory goals that community organisations and social enterprises work towards in supporting young people to navigate a precarious economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the outmigration choices of young adults from peripheral to urban regions to attend higher education have been researched extensively, young adults' decisions to stay in, nearby, or return to, the peripheral home region have received less attention. This paper explores how young adults who are engaged in higher education re-imagine narratives related to notions of 'leaving' in their mobility biographies to justify their choice to stay in or return to their peripheral home region. We conducted in-depth interviews with postgraduate students in peripheral regions in Denmark and the Netherlands. Our findings confirm the existence of a mobility imperative for young adults in peripheral regions reproduced by both our participants and their social relations. However, we additionally find that young adults re-imagine narratives of 'leaving' which simultaneously correspond with contemporary discourses on place and residential mobility in the form of valuing (dis)connection to place, experiencing urban lifestyles, and life phase transitions, but which also open up possibilities for re-evaluating the attractiveness of often stigmatized peripheral regions. We suggest that narratives of 'leaving' during higher education help young adults to build what we call 'symbolic mobility capital' to mitigate the negative connotations related to living in a peripheral region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pasifika peoples in Australia generally refer to migrants from the Pacific region (Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia) and their descendants. Despite their unique strengths and rich cultural heritage, young Pasifika peoples in Australia can experience challenges navigating different worlds. This paper describes the experiences of belonging and identity that shape Pasifika young people (16–24 years) living in the Logan area, SouthEast Queensland. A total of 30 talanoas with young people were conducted. The research revealed how, through habitual use of places and the performance of everyday life, Pasifika young people create a sense of belonging in place and form dynamic, multicultural identities, and places of belonging, accruing what has been termed 'polycultural capital'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence is Australia compares well with other countries on dimensions of social cohesion, social division and conflict. In addition, the Australian community generally reports high levels of satisfaction and sense of belonging. There are however also areas for improvement in terms of acceptance, integration and citizenship in highly visible minority groups. This paper outlines an exploratory study of social connectedness and the effect of a youth development programme. Research supports the view that such programmes can produce significant benefits for participants, although it is not clear which aspects of these programmes are most effective for any outcome or population group. Validity is strongly evidenced by measuring dimensions of belonging, inclusion and participation, both independently and collectively. Noting social capital is fragile and subject to disruption from forces within and beyond the local group, some policy implications are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a well-documented association between histories of state care and housing instability. This paper examines care leavers' experience of securing housing during the transition out of care through the lenses of liminality, Recognition theory, and precarity. Conducted in Ireland, sixteen care-experienced youth were recruited to a qualitative longitudinal study. The findings demonstrate how aftercare policies and a lack of affordable housing combined to create precarity for many, which also had implications for their feelings of recognition as young people. For those who remained in their foster care placements or transitioned to supported lodgings, housing stability engendered feelings of being cared for by creating a liminal space where growth was supported. Those, on the other hand, who left their foster care placements at the age of 18 or were forced to leave time-limited aftercare housing were pushed into precariousness, placing them at high risk for homelessness and housing exclusion. These young people felt misrecognised and disrespected by the state and the aftercare system. The findings highlight the deleterious consequences of time-limited aftercare supports for care leavers' sense of security and their ability to achieve valued life goals. The implications of the study's findings for leaving care and aftercare policies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the enfranchisement of 16- and 17-year olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, much research continued to prioritise questions of how education influences young people's political engagement. By contrast, this paper advances an original focus on educational outcomes of youth political participation and investigates how political engagement might have educational consequences. Shortly after the referendum, we interviewed a strategic sample of first-time voters aged 16–20, who had voted 'yes' to Scottish independence. We re-interviewed a sub-sample 3 years on, facilitating longitudinal analysis and novel qualitative data. Our analysis demonstrates how, from the perspective of remarkably engaged participants, referendum engagement has three kinds of educational consequences. First, participants describe learning about politics through referendum participation and their subsequent reflection on it. Second, participants understood their political engagements as informing their trajectories into and through post-compulsory education, including subject choices. Third, participants discussed learning about themselves and their career aspirations, 'growing up' and developing 'mature' political attitudes, via ongoing, shifting political engagement. This article contributes significant new insights about youth political engagement and lowering the voting age, by showing how young people understand their political participation as influencing their formal educational pathways and informal learning, about politics and themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois' temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth's management of conflicting feelings by reworking particular experiences of time. We extend Lois' concepts of 'sequencing' (strategic ordering of emotions and time) and 'savouring' (intentional maximizing of specific times) to include a contextualized, gendered angle, while also engaging with the additional concept of 'supressing'. The work draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with left-behind youth from migrant households from rural migrant-sending villages in two districts in Java, Indonesia. By highlighting youth's shifting temporal emotions and how aspirations and experiences of left-behindness are affected, our research reveals gendered strategies of temporal emotion work. Young women enact 'sequencing' and 'savouring', aspiring to stay as a means of restorative, temporal-emotional justice for their families. Conversely, young men are more inclined to enact the 'suppressing' of emotions while aspiring for migration. Among a generation that has grown up in the wake of parental migration, most youth conform to traditional gendered scripts within an older culture of masculinized circular migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experience of 16-17 year olds participating in the Scottish independence referendum and discusses whether it can be seen as positive or negative considering civic attitudes and participation. Using data from two comprehensive and representative surveys of 14-17 year olds, it engages empirically with claims about young people's alleged political (dis-)interest and provides qualifications for commonly believed stories of young people as mere recipients of information given to them by parents and teachers. The paper develops a positive view of young people's engagement in the referendum process and suggests that inputs from parents and schools actually have distinguishable effects on young people, who do not simply 'follow the lead' of others uncritically. The analyses suggest that the discussion of political issues in the classroom (rather than the simple delivery of civicsstyle classes per se) may act as a positive factor in the political socialisation of young people, but suggests that further research is required to examine these effects beyond the specific context of the Scottish independence referendum in particular in relation to questions about whether reducing the voting age to 16 could be expected to generally lead to positive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, youth cafes are accorded prominence in Irish youth policies and research. Youth cafes are drug and alcohol free recreational spaces and research shows that they impact positively on young people. Youth cafes are broadly similar to youth clubs, but they are less structured and are primarily youth-led spaces. This paper draws on qualitative materials from a national study of youth cafes in Ireland, arguing that young people's perceptions of youth cafes are linked to individuality and connectedness. In this paper, we explore these discourses surrounding individuality and connection in detail and argue that youth work in the twenty-first century must simultaneously appeal to young people's need for space to 'be' and to find themselves and provide a structure within which they can relate to others and wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the multiple and contradictory depictions of young people in youth policy and reflects on how youth engagement is constructed in Australian Federal and State policy. In this journal, researchers have been challenged to critically reflect on ‘figures of youth' (Threadgold, 2020) and we take up this challenge and consider how and why ‘figures of youth' are deployed in Australian youth policy. Drawing on an environmental scan of youth policy documents published between 2014-2021, we analyse the ways young people's voices are positioned to legitimate policy claims about what is required to help young people in Australia across multiple domains. Despite the apparent agreement among policy-makers that youth consultation is important in the policy development process, our scan points to a wide variety of interpretations of what ‘youth voice' might look like, how young people participate, and how their contributions are actually utilised. We argue that the persistence and frequent emergence of particular ‘figures of youth’ throughout Australian youth policy reflects the endurance of adult-centric interpretations of youth, and the partial and superficial procedures that claim to engage with young people, but which ultimately privilege the interests of other agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automating workplaces that results in a loss of jobs has become a topic of public debate and study but has paid little attention to differential impacts on age groups. This paper applies OECD data on the risk of jobs being automated to Australian longitudinal survey data following 15 years old students over a ten-year period as they enter the job market. Whilst in the early stages of their working lives, these young Australians often worked in jobs projected to be at high risk of automation, they gradually moved into jobs and occupations projected to be less exposed to automation. Young Australians were also less likely to work in jobs at risk of automation than the average Australian. Besides socio-demographic factors, including educational attainment but also domestic wealth, the incidence and kind of computer use at home were associated with working in jobs at a higher or lower risk of automation, as were young workers' type of employment contract and whether young employees changed employers. Whilst suggestions of large-scale job losses owing to automation may be exaggerated, the socio-economic divide that extends to exposure to at risk occupations ought to be a matter of policy concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates to what extent the likelihood of young people being long-term NEET can be explained by low literacy skills, how this varies across advanced countries, and how this cross-national variation can be explained by education and social policies. We use PIAAC data and include macro-level indicators on education and social policies. We analyze the likelihood of being long-term NEET versus being in employment or in education/training among some 34,000 young people aged 20–30 from 25 countries. We find that low-literate young people are more likely to be long-term NEET. While NEET risks are associated with countries' institutional characteristics, this does not mean that these characteristics and policies always work in favour of low-literate young people. Although high levels of (enabling) ALMP generally reduce the risk of being NEET, they do so less for low-literate young people. Additionally, young people living in social-democratic welfare states are less likely to be NEET, but low-literate young people seem to profit less from this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people arriving alone in the UK due to forced migration face significant hardships including, but not limited to, their history of experiences, current and future uncertainties, and cultural differences. This paper took a critical perspective of current dominant theories of refugee youth through in-depth exploration of lived experiences of coping. Following the authors' involvement in a community youth project and consultation, five young people took part in individual interviews. The participants were living in semi-independent accommodation in or near London, and were all male, while four identified as Muslim and one as Christian. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a culturally relative understanding of coping was developed. These young people were found to be taking active roles in managing their lives in the context of extensive loss, and gaining independence through connection to others. Religious practices were important, with young people making sense of their experiences through worldviews shaped by religious beliefs. While religion was described predominantly in a positive and beneficial light, an area for further investigation is the experience of religious struggle, and how this may impact experiences and coping. Implications for support for young people both from services and in communities are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical relationship between youth subcultures and mainstream media has long been the subject of debate. Some researchers have proposed that, after mixed panic and hype, the media quickly coopts and commodifies subcultural threats. Conversely, others have argued that negative media coverage keeps subcultures coherent and thriving, while positive coverage is the 'kiss of death'. Despite its continued importance, few studies have closely examined this topic and none has quantitatively examined changes in subcultural media representation over time using archival data. This paper addresses this gap though a computer-assisted content analysis of 735 newspaper articles about punk subculture spanning three decades of publication. The results provide mixed support for both theoretical predictions, but fit neither perfectly. Overall coverage is ambivalent in tone, but becomes more positive and less radical over time. Punk takes far longer to commodify than cooptation perspectives predict. It survives positive coverage, but becomes increasingly coherent. The results call into question previous claims about media representation, highlight the need for more synthetic theories of the media's relationship to subcultures, and illustrate the utility of text-mining methods for historical youth studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hip Hop has been shown to influence the identities of Black youth (Love. 2012. Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Peter Lang). However, for Black girls, Hip Hop has a complicated relationship as some representations of Black girls and women are objectified and hypersexualized while others reflect strength and empowerment (Richardson, 2016). The present study examines Hip Hop, Black girlhood, and identity by exploring how Hip Hop influences the gendered racial identity developmental processes of Black early adolescent girls. Further, this study explores how Black girls navigate environmental stressors such as racism, sexism, bullying, and stressful home environments using Hip Hop. Using a Black and Hip Hop feminist lens, this paper utilizes two semi-structured interviews from 6, twelve year old Black girls from the southern region of the United States and participants in a Hip Hop based after school program. Utilizing thematic analysis, the following themes were found: (1) acknowledging identities of strength, independence, and resilience in Hip Hop helps create meaning for gendered racial identities and (2) Hip Hop as a mechanism for healing and therapy against social and environmental stressors. This work follows notable Hip Hop feminist theories and praxis and provides an alternative framework for exploring intersectional identity development for Black adolescent girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]