Search

This paper uses field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2021–2022 to analyse the efforts of Kinnauri young people to critique and address social and environmental crises in their region. The expansion of capitalism, poor governance, and climate change are contributing to major environmental loss and social crises in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Young people with origins in the region are becoming important in critiquing this process, especially at the everyday level and through social media. They focus especially on how Kinnauri ‘existence’ has been ‘hollowed out’ and fragmented through social and environmental change. At the same time, Kinnauri young people seek to repopulate and integrate ‘existence’, especially through identifying particular symbols – or metonyms – that express the possibility for recuperating social and environmental life. In making these points, we offer a case study in how a marginalised indigenous community is actively and creatively responding to capitalist intensification and climate change through building new viabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the self-narratives of young nonbinary individuals in Italy, shedding light on the challenges they face, thereby contributing to a nuanced understanding of these phenomena and their societal implications. In pursuit of this research goal, an exploratory study was conducted between July and September 2021, involving in-depth interviews with 26 young adults aged between 18 and 30 who identify as non-binary. The qualitative data gathered was analyzed using a reflexive thematic method. The findings reveal specific forms of social unease and discrimination experienced by nonbinary individuals, with primary stressors including a lack of recognition, limited knowledge on the subject and a dearth of socio-cultural visibility. These stressors manifest in varying degrees of discomfort, shaping daily life and interpersonal relationships. At the same time, participants’ narratives underscore a strong desire for societal change and inclusivity. Some nonbinary individuals express determination to challenge and redefine societal norms related to gender identity, emphasizing the importance of education and awareness for fostering understanding and acceptance. Following the thematic analysis, the article concludes with critical reflections and potential policy recommendations to create a more inclusive environment for all sexual and gender identities in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of deindustrialization, many rural areas in the Global North face challenges such as an ageing population, declining welfare systems and limited job and educational opportunities, problems that have been enhanced by decades of depopulation. Young people have left the countryside for careers in larger cities, contributing to stigmatization of those who stay in rural areas. In Sweden, however, statistics show a slow but steady trend of remigration to rural areas, which is described in municipal and state discourse as positive and necessary to ‘save’ the countryside. This paper examines the perspective of rural youth who feel differently about such counter-urbanization. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article shows how young men involved in Swedish greaser culture perceived the influx of urban (re)migrators as a threat to their rural lifestyle and the rural place where they wished to stay. This is interpreted as an expression of subcultural, place-based and temporal resistance towards urban and neoliberal ideals that simultaneously reinforce white, masculine values. As these young men will be part of a rural future, they must be considered in the formulation of sustainable politics for rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how collective capabilities at a neighbourhood level can support youth voice and empowerment. By applying Ibrahim's 3C collective capabilities model in a new context with young people, we propose that it offers a useful framework to demonstrate the existing value and extend the social justice potential of youth work practice. Our findings aim to address the concern that youth work in Scotland supports individual but not collective transformation. They offer a framework to analyse the development of collective youth capabilities, with the potential to hold policy makers to account for commitments to youth decision-making such as The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill. The 3C model conceptualises three key processes in the development of collective agency as conscientisation, conciliation and collaboration. The model recognises the personal and group processes of engagement that lead to grassroots action, but also prompts analysis of power relations between grassroots actors and the institutions that govern public decision-making. Drawing on a case-study example, we highlight the ways in which youth work practice might extend its social justice potential, highlighting the need for collaboration and power sharing with policy institutions in order to support meaningful youth empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and economic impacts of COVID-19 have been devastating for many, and collectively young people generally fared worse than older adults, with the impact amongst young people also being highly uneven. Most studies on this topic focus on Global North contexts, with experiences in the Global South being less well understood. Focusing on young people in Nepal and Indonesia who were especially exposed to the fallout from the pandemic (in part due to their occupations), this paper analyzes over 1400 weekly diary entries from 100 respondents written across four months in the first half of 2021. Participants recall increasingly precarious individual and family situations due to pandemic-related livelihood upheavals and insufficient access to social protection. Amongst diverse ‘coping strategies’, many turned to debt to smooth fluctuating incomes – leading to both financial and social obligations and forcing sometimes life-altering decisions such as leaving education and moving into risky work. Spiralling indebtedness may have consequences for livelihoods across young people’s life-courses; with futures mortgaged to survive precarity at the peak of the Delta wave of COVID-19. Looking ahead, policy makers should reconfigure disaster responses and social protection with a youth-lens to ensure a robust, fair and sustainable recovery from future crises, mitigating inter-generational scarring effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, one fifth of individuals aged 15–24 are 'not in employment, education or training' (NEET). NEETs have become an increasingly important notion in international debate, although criticisms are directed at its all-encompassing nature and lack of concern with the intergenerational, gendered, social and systemic inequalities that influence young people becoming NEETs. Prevalence of youth NEETs is especially high in Latin America, with women disproportionally affected. Brazil has one of the highest absolute numbers of NEETs in LAC. This paper uses data from the last Brazilian census to examine contextual drivers of NEETs in Brazil, and to critically assess broader implications for policy. In Brazil, states with higher coefficients of social inequality and levels of criminality are more likely to have higher proportion of youth NEET. Globally, social inequalities associated with gender, race and crime are pervasive drivers of young NEET status. Latin American youth are in a particularly disadvantageous position. Policies that aim to overcome social exclusion and marginalisation of youth need to focus on systemic drivers of the NEET condition among vulnerable subgroups of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2019 with secondary school students in Kigali, Rwanda, this paper aims to shed light on the stance of Rwandan youth on recent policies and discussions about post-genocide reconciliation and peacebuilding. This article discusses the narratives articulated by Rwandan youth on three levels: positioning in relation to the Rwandan government, positioning the self and others in their communities and positioning the self in relation to 'Ndi Umunyarwanda' (I am Rwandan). The discussion of these narratives is based on the concepts of participatory spaces and positioning theory. The findings show that the legacy of the genocide, as well as the reconciliation process, is being performed through everyday actions by the youth. However, the limitations of participatory spaces prevent Rwandan youth from having their positions communicated, negotiated and diversified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 the Australian settler colonial context. A race critical analysis of these major concepts that foregrounds colonialism, racialised migration schemes, multicultural policies and everyday racism has yet to be applied in any substantial way. This approach has the potential to unsettle the colonial and racialised logics inherent within these concepts and examine how they normalise whiteness in Australia. In exploring how these concepts are predominantly applied, critiqued and engaged with, we ask, how does youth studies as a field reproduce Northern colonial systems of knowledge production? We demonstrate the necessity of naming race, racism and processes of racialisation explicitly within the Australian field, not merely to include 'others' but to investigate how dominant conceptual paradigms produce racialised and minoritised Others and mainstream whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the world, the harms and profits of oil exploration are distributed unequally. This inequality has sparked violence in many oil communities, leading to calls for redistributive approaches as an effective way to address petro-violence. Despite the inclusivity potential of distributive mechanisms, distributive agencies are often not level playing ground for community members. The capacity of excluded groups to participate meaningfully in the development agencies is shaped by the operation of symbolic violence. Using ethnographic data and symbolic violence as a theoretical basis in this paper, I map out three doxas – lazy youth, gerontocratic and deviant – which hinder youth participation in the oil development process. I show how these doxas enable institutional leaders in two development agencies in the Niger delta region of Nigeria to accumulate various forms of capital and occupy positions of power in the networks while simultaneously limiting young people's political participation, employment prospects, and stereotyping them as social threats. Several other dimensions of symbolic domination are discussed: including the misrecognition, acceptance, and resistance of these doxas by the youths themselves. I conclude with a brief reflection on the implication of these doxas for achieving inclusive development in the Niger delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growth in analysis of women and conflict, this has tended to overlook the specific experiences of young women. Likewise, in research on youth, conflict and peace, the term 'youth' is often short-hand for young men. Young women's experiences are regularly absent from research and policy discourse, and as a consequence, also absent from public understanding and practice responses. In this paper, we prioritise the views of and on young women to forefront their experiences of one specific form of conflict-related violence – paramilitary violence. We demonstrate that forefronting young women's experiences, and adopting an understanding of violence beyond that which privileges physical violence, unearths the multiple ways in which conflict-related violence is experienced. We further demonstrate how adopting an intersectional lens that prioritises age and gender can surface the specific experiences of young women, and the various ways in which these become silenced by cultures that omit, coerce, reduce and minimise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 activities affects students' academic performance. The main findings are as follows: (1) high SES students were more likely to participate in extracurricular activities than low SES children. (2) Students' social relationships in school, including supportive friendships and teacher praise, are positively associated with academic performance. (3) Participation in extracurricular activities had no direct impact on eighth grade students' academic performance or any indirect effects by structuring students' social relationships in school. Our findings suggest that extracurricular participation does not contribute to students' academic performance in a context characterised by a high-stakes testing system such as that of China. In such a context, engagement in extracurricular activities, as a way to accumulate cultural capital, may facilitate individuals' future socioeconomic success on condition that their educational success is foreseeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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, then (when possible) the subsequent lives, of three post-1945 British cohorts: the immediate post-war cohort who completed education between 1945 and 1960, their children who passed through the same youth life stage in the late-1970s and 1980s, and finally the post-war cohort's grandchildren, the millennials who have completed their education since the late-2000s. The analysis searches for gilded and jilted sections within each of these cohorts by comparing their lives with those of their parents. It shows that no cohort has been uniformly gilded or jilted, and that the label (jilted or gilded) which appeared most appropriate when a cohort was making its education to work, and family and housing transitions, has often looked inappropriate by the latter part of their lives. The paper argues that it is too early to apply gilded or jilted labels to any sections of millennial youth, and that current appearances that they are victims of generational inequity are due to a long-term failure to match increased investments in human capital within families and in education with investments in the economy and housing that would enable the millennials to convert their human capital into commensurate jobs and accommodation suitable for new family household formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth in Egypt hold rising aspirations for their adult lives, yet face an increasingly uncertain and protracted transition from school to work and thus into adulthood. This paper investigates how labor market insertion has been evolving over time in Egypt and how the nature of youth transitions relates to gender and social class. The study examines 19,925 respondents from the 2012 wave of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey. We demonstrate that recent youth cohorts face poorer chances of transitioning into a good job than previous cohorts, despite large increases in educational attainment. Social class is playing an increasing role in determining the success of the transition from school to work in Egypt. Whether youth successfully make transitions to formal jobs, embark on such transitions and fail, or pursue more traditional careers in informal employment or family businesses or farms depends on a complex and changing interaction between their own educational attainment and the resources of their families. In light of these findings, we discuss the policies that can help facilitate more successful transitions for struggling youth in Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the social attachments and detachments of 16- to 29-year-old young adults who are not in employment or education, and consequently not part of the sociability related to work or school. While the characteristics of this group tend to be well documented, there is less empirical research on their social relations. Here, the aim is to explore the interlinkages between young adults' structural and social marginalisation through an analysis that draws upon two types of interlinked datasets: follow-up surveys and online group discussions conducted among a sample of young adults recruited from targeted youth services during 2017–2018. Leaning on empirical evidence, the paper argues that structural marginalisation is associated with the social marginalisation of young adults. With the use of both quantitative and qualitative data, the paper provides new youth-specific insights into the arguments made in the previous literature on financial constraints and stigma as mechanisms between structural and social marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 at age 29–38. Earnings and employment perception converged over time, but debt did not. Socio-demographics were most strongly associated with outcomes, but earnings were also greater for churners and for young people in extended education increasingly combined with work. Transitions that combined learning and work seemingly strategically or ‘flexibly’ appeared most rewarding in the medium term, although neither compensated for socio-economic difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 a surplus population in need of risk management, and youth workers as the producers of young workers. Furthermore, I will consider the interfering subjectification effects produced by an intake and assessment tool (Your Story) utilised by a non-government FLO provider. These discourses underpinning Your Story and FLO render young people and their workers as relational beings or economic citizens respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has found that persistently delinquent youth or more violent youth were less popular than their less delinquent peers [Young, Jacob T. N. 2014. "'Role Magnets'? An Empirical Investigation of Popularity Trajectories for Life-Course Persistent Individuals During Adolescence." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 43 (1): 104-115]. However, recent research has also found that weapon carrying is associated with being more popular in adolescence [Dijkstra, Jan Kornelis, Siegwart Lindenberg, René Veenstra, Christian Steglich, Jenny Isaacs, Noel A. Card, and Ernest V. E. Hodges. 2010. "Influence and Selection Processes in Weapon Carrying During Adolescence: The Roles of Status, Aggression, and Vulnerability." Criminology 48 (1): 187-220]. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key goal in youth studies is to gain holistic understandings of what it means to be young. However, a significant impediment to achieving this has been the tendency of youth studies to develop along siloed and stratified subfields. In keeping with the goal of creating more productive dialogue between subfields in youth studies, this paper examines the intersections between research in youth citizenship and youth transitions to consider the fresh insights and cross fertilisations that such an analysis may yield. This examination reveals a sense of dissatisfaction in both subfields with traditional normative and linear models of citizenship and transitions which rely on step-wise and sequential notions of time. In response, the paper advances a new research agenda which posits more temporally, spatially and relationally-sensitive understandings of youth citizenship and transition. Drawing on Ingold (2007. Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge), this agenda proposes the use of three alternative metaphors – genealogical, wayfaring and threads – which could hold the potential to unsettle the normativity and linearity of previous youth transitions and citizenship frameworks, and thus provide deeper insights into what it means to live and to be young citizens in times of transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are increasing concerns that social pressures, such as family changes and social media, are 'invading' the sanctuary of the bedroom with the result that students arrive at school tired and stressed. This paper seeks to examine whether these concerns are justified and contribute to the growing literature on the social dimensions of sleep through examining the rest and routines of two cohorts of young people aged 12-13 and 14-15 years old. Our research indicates that, in general, most young people have 'reasonable' amounts of sleep and routines. But, a significant proportion does go to school tired, with apparent negative consequences for their well-being. The paper examines some of the within-cohort variations, in particular, the significance of volume of sleep, routines and engagement with social media and how these may reflect the material and cultural circumstances of the young people. The paper concludes by arguing for more research on the complex social causes and consequences of sleep deprivation among today's youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper forms part of a discussion with scholars working in the field of criminology and youth crime, in particular those who are interested in sport, gender, and desistance from violence. Furthermore, this paper challenges previous work into the sport of boxing and desistance from violence, and therefore argues for a more nuanced approach, by incorporating more feminist epistemologies, and inclusive masculinities into this complex phenomenon. Drawing upon contemporary research, this paper discusses prior literature on sport and desistance from violence, and further develops the concept of sport as a tool for reduction in violent youth crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the intergenerational family relationships are typically seen through the prism of contemporary parents supporting their children long into adulthood, offering their households as 'feathered nests' during extended transitions to adulthood. However, the majority of research in this realm comes from established welfare states of Western Europe and the Commonwealth and less explicitly addresses inequalities that mark these processes. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal research on transitions to adulthood in Poland, we use a data set of 127 interviews with university students and graduates to illustrate the process of leaving home in the Central and Easter European context. The paper accounts for both the objective (extensive/limited economic capital or resources) and subjective (fast/slow pace) dimensions crucial for how young people move out from parental homes. Our main contribution is a typology of Temporizers, Gymnasts, Runaways and Protectors as ideal types of pathways to leaving home in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SchoolStrike4Climate protests have renewed interest in youth political participation, but there has been little scholarly explanation for how young people came to be involved in such actions. While most studies focus on the motivations of participants, this paper considers the role of youth-led organisations in fostering political interest and action for climate justice among young people. Through a case study of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), we argue that over 15 years this youth-led organisation has played a key role by building an enduring organisational base and using multiple strategies to foster understanding and commitment among young people in Australia towards issues of sustainability and action on climate change. Key to the AYCC approach is a climate justice narrative in which young people are legitimate political actors responding to the climate crisis. This narrative manifests in the organisational structure, youthful hybrid repertoires of action and peer-based, educative initiatives. From our analysis, we propose the concept of 'educative movement-building' to describe the unique way young people are making organisations and generating broad support for climate justice in Australia with implications for studies of environmental activism and democracy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on a longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic study, explores the intersection between youth transitions, migration and relationships. It considers the complex ways in which rural Bolivian young people move back and forth between work and education, between home and migrant destinations as they strive to form their own household and develop new relationships, whilst continuing to maintain interdependent relations with their parents and siblings. It presents three life stories which outline the key role of relationships in shaping youth transitions and migrant trajectories. Whilst the three pathways are different, they also encompass some similar features: the complexity of deciding between school or work, the key role of migration, the importance of social networks and old/new relationships, and the impact of birth-ordered and gendered household relations. In particular the paper argues that the concept of negotiated and constrained interdependencies is a useful way of understanding the flexible and opportunistic yet limited nature of youth transitions in a context of migration. The paper is based on fieldwork which involved tracking down 14 of the 18 households who had been involved in my doctoral research over 10 years ago, and of these 14 households one or both parents and two or three of the siblings were interviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 analysis of young people based on their housing choices and aspirations. With empirical evidence from a two-round social survey, this study explores the 'not leaving home' pattern of the housing choices of young people in Hong Kong. With some supplementary subgroup analysis, the cohort label of a 'post-80s generation' in Hong Kong is challenged. Contradictions are revealed in the views of our young people about housing and family life, and further analysis is conducted to examine the impacts of economic and sociocultural factors in the local context of Hong Kong. This study argues that we need to look beyond the shared features and subgroup differences and consider how sociocultural factors, particularly gender, marriage, education, and social norms, interact with economic factors to shape housing choices, aspirations and apparent contradictions in the viewpoints of young people regarding their personal development and housing futures. In doing so, the paper also engages with debates around intra and intergenerational dynamics and inequalities. The paper focuses on Hong Kong but these debates have international resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of youth skills development programs are often limited to assessing changes to employability and earnings over a short period of time, and often are unable to explain why impacts occurred or never transpired. This article, drawing on a capability approach, aims to expand the outcomes assessed as well as the time over which impacts might occur in order to understand how such programs can foster livelihoods and multidimensional wellbeing. This paper illustrates how findings from a mixed-methods longitudinal study of a livelihoods program in Uganda and Tanzania can address limitations of short-term, quantitative studies. Quasi-experimental results demonstrated the program had an impact on knowledge and skills necessary to secure a livelihood, but this paper draws on qualitative data over five years to show how two specific knowledge and skills are enacted toward livelihoods, or not. The findings discussed include how knowledge of savings is not enacted, in many cases, in the anticipated savings behaviors to secure and sustain livelihoods, and how confidence in work skills take considerable time and other supports to be enacted in securing and sustaining work. The qualitative longitudinal data provide rich detail of the contextual factors that influence youth's livelihoods and wellbeing over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on youthful drinking is extensive, the literature has been geographically skewed towards urban settings. As a potential corrective to this, our focus in this paper is on youthful drinking in rural Denmark. Based on 22 in-depth interviews with young drinkers, this paper explores the drinking practices of rural youth. More specifically, drawing on Antonsich's [2010. "Searching for belonging–an analytical framework." Geography Compass 4 (6): 644–659] notion of place-belongingness, we examine how sentiments of belonging relate to locally embedded drinking practices. We highlight the extent to which rural drinking places are characterized by the participation of young men, whose educational and professional aims are predominantly tied to the local community and activities within it. In so doing, we show that these contexts are primarily associated with 'drinking a single', as opposed to drinking to intoxication like their urban peers. We argue further that these 'lighter' but frequent forms of alcohol use, which we term 'congenial drinking', are related to accomplishments of place-belongingness and stand out as a gendered, classed and place-bound phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Rein and Schon (1993. "Reframing Policy Discourse." In The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, edited by F. Fischer, and J. Forester, 145–166. London: UCL Press., 1996. "Frame-Critical Policy Analysis and Frame-Reflective Policy Practice." Knowledge and Policy: the International Journal of Knowledge Transfer and Utilization 9 (1): 85–104), we explore the ways in which 'young people', 'vulnerability', 'risk', 'prevention' and 'prevention practice' were defined and framed by practitioners engaged in the design, delivery and commissioning of drug prevention interventions for young people in contact with the criminal justice system. We argue that practitioners describe their work in terms of both a preventative frame – based on a 'deficit' model – and a transformative praxis frame, more in line with an increasing shift towards 'positive youth justice' where practitioners aspire to actively involve the young person in a process of change. The implications of those, often competing, frames are discussed in relation to the development of prevention approaches and the challenges in designing drugs prevention for this group of young people. The paper is based on interviews and focus groups with thirty-one practitioners in England and is part of the EU funded EPPIC project (Exchanging Prevention Practices on Polydrug Use among Youth in Criminal Justice Systems 2017–2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective wellbeing (i.e. life satisfaction and happiness) impacts youth's social, economic and political participation. Prior studies have documented cross-national variation in subjective wellbeing of adults but there is a lack of data on the prevalence and correlates of subjective wellbeing among youth in low and middle income countries. This paper utilizes data from an international dataset – Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys to assess the influence of structural and micro-level factors on the subjective wellbeing of youth (ages 15–24) in 29 countries or regions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. We find that within countries, global life satisfaction and happiness are associated with age, education attainment, place of residence, marital status, household wealth and exposure to mass media. Significant interactions between age, gender and education are observed. However, none of the country level development indicators account for cross-national variation in youth's SWB although there is some indication that income inequities between countries may influence youth's SWB. The findings underscore the need for objective measures of subjective wellbeing to understand the conditions in LMICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'You've gotta befriend them but not be their friend' is how one youth worker thoughtfully described the secret to successful youth practice. This paper draws on experiences of youth workers in the United Kingdom to consider how the growth of digital technologies comes to be negotiated and articulated in professional practice. Situating these experiences alongside young people's accounts, this article highlights a distinction between young people's relationship with the digital and adult perceptions of youth and technology. The aim of this paper is to consider what factors contribute towards this divide and where adult perceptions come from, if not from the experiences of young people themselves. The article then goes on to discuss the potential consequences of the presence of technology and discourses surrounding the digital for youth worker's engagements with young people in professional practice. Overall, this article argues for the enduring relevance of youth workers and physical youth centres in a digital age and joins several scholars in critiquing the chronic under-investment in youth workers and provision in the UK and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which young people use digital platforms develop with experience, and are guided by changing understandings of what they should – and should not – be doing online. As such, young people continually develop tacit rules and understandings that guide their platform participation. While based on social interactions with peers and other online contacts these rules are also technologically situated through the architecture of the platform. Based on research with Australian teenagers, this paper explores the ways in which Facebook shapes the communicative practices of young people, and how these were experienced and interpreted by them. Using the platform as a framework for the study demonstrates that some aspects of the Facebook architecture were particularly significant in structuring socialities, particularly: notifications and login for establishing habitual digital practices and norms; the prominence of images to (re)present identity; and the use of metrics (i.e. 'likes' and 'friends') to negotiate identities and relationships. Each of the participants initiated a range of strategies and rules to negotiate the ways in which the technological and the social were experienced through the platform. The paper concludes by considering the dominant values and social relations implicated through Facebook – and how they often reproduce dominant offline values and power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the NEET category. We argue that it is both too focused on individual responsibility and too homogenizing to enable the development of public policies and measures capable of responding to the needs of the most excluded youth. We respond to these needs using a qualitative approach that has allowed us to account for the diversity of young people, especially the most marginalized, living in lower-class neighborhoods of the Brussels region. Our approach generates a NEET/non-NEET typology that helps deconstruct NEET as a statistical category by identifying social situations that are both diverse and temporary. This typology challenges the tendency to reify young people and to hold them responsible for their own circumstances. Furthermore, our typology shows how NEET situations result from trajectories shaped by structural dynamics as well as relations and processes of inequality. These may stem from social class, experiences of migration, or the intersection of the two, and inevitably exercise an effect on both school and job market environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores young women's expectations on future work-family reconciliation in Finland, a Nordic country well-known for the promotion of gender equality. Utilising Sen's capabilities approach, we content-analysed thirty individual interviews to identify differences in women's expectations and their perceived capabilities in future work and care. The results showed that irrespective of their labour market status and educational attainment, the women's expectations were contradictory, reflecting a current Finnish gender culture that embraces both the ideal of shared parenthood and the primacy of maternal care. Between-group differences were also found. The employed women perceived themselves as having the capability to balance work, family and, personal time in the future. The women who were studying and had higher education- and career-related expectations perceived themselves as capable of combating gender inequality in their future working lives. In contrast, the unemployed women perceived their capabilities in both their future work and care as limited, thereby constraining their agency to realise their choices in work-family reconciliation and family decision-making. These findings indicate that Finnish women's expectations on future work-family reconciliation are shaped by institutional, societal and individual socioeconomic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modernity, responsibilization has become a tool for addressing public issues in citizens’ access to public goods, including the sphere of environmental protection. In Russia, having insufficient institutional, legislative, political, and discursive support, the emphasis has lately been put on the role of individuals in protecting the environment. Taking account of the ambivalent context of environmental activity, this paper aims to reconstruct the justifications that environmentally engaged youth in Moscow attach to their environmental engagement. We focus on the case of Moscow as a ‘bridge’ between the Western templates and the local institutional setting. The empirical basis of the research is 36 in-depth interviews with Muscovites, who are persistently engaged in caring for the environment. The empirical results show that the environmental engagement of the youth is justified as an anchor of one’s identity of a reflexive, autonomous, self-managing subject. The results allow to broaden the concept of responsibility and citizenship among the youth in the states where a clash between neoliberal policies of responsibilization and the actual institutional context can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses how the Covid-19 pandemic affected young people’s alcohol-related assemblages, trajectories of becoming and identity claims in Sweden. The data is based on longitudinal qualitative interviews among heavy and moderate drinking young people (n = 23; age range 15–24 years). The participants were interviewed two to three times before the Covid-19 pandemic and once at the end of it, between 2017 and 2021. The analysis draws on actor-network theory and narrative positioning approach. The analysis demonstrates how the lockdown produced trajectories of becoming boring, normal, stress-free, self-caring, self-confident and shielded. In these trajectories, drinking was positioned into relations that either increased young people’s capacities for well-being or decreased them. Due to the lockdown, some participants learnt to be moved by relations that contributed to replace drinking with competing activities, while others experienced that the lockdown made drinking a more attractive activity, turning it into a collective force that helped them to overcome isolation. The results show how drinking is a heterogeneous activity which may increase or decrease young people’s capacities for well-being, depending on what kinds of assemblages and trajectories of becoming it is embedded in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While dialogues with the youth in the EU are understood as an important mechanism for co-shaping the EU youth policies, they are constantly confronted with the problem of the non-inclusion of unorganized youth. Applying the Foucauldian analytical problematization approach, the article illuminates three historical periods that led to the formation of the contemporary problem of the non-inclusion of unorganized youth in dialogues in the EU. The first period is the 1970s when, as a response to the youth protest, the European Community organized the first dialogues. The second at the beginning of the 2000s with political struggles on how to conduct dialogues with young people in the EU. Finally, the third period relates to the processes of institutionalization of dialogues with youth after the adoption of 2001 White Paper on Youth that resulted in the adoption of the Structured Dialogue as an official mechanism for co-shaping EU youth policies. In the article, we show that the inclusion of unorganized youth is a persisting problem that always represents an unfulfilled goal. This enables unorganized youth to be formed and framed as an object to be known and a target of political interventions of the EU youth policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant debates and digital upskilling strategies in Scotland have been long underpinned by the notion that engagement with technologies can transform young people's lives. This paper offers a critique of such dominant understandings and contributes to the scarce research on the impact of technologies on disadvantaged young people's life chances. It reports on qualitative fieldwork exploring everyday lives, transitions and technology use amongst 22 NEET-identified Scottish young people aged 16–24, drawing on thinking tools from Bourdieu. Findings show that participants followed 'accelerated' transitions towards vocational pathways, whilst technologies played a liminal role in making occupational choices. Furthermore, processes underpinning the post-16 transitions policy field were found to strongly shape the young people's trajectories, directing them towards the least valuable options in terms of work and training. Concurrently, uncertainties about how to navigate the realm of work and perform the self in relation to the labour force constituted a common feature of participants labouring subjectivities and these were reflected in the ways they used technologies while looking for opportunities. However, even when the young people acquired digital employability skills, these had little impact on their transitions as the old social divisions were a much stronger influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the concepts of cultural narrative to examine career choice among post-Soviet Russian teenagers going into higher education. Drawing on insights from cultural sociology more broadly and the cultural autonomy thesis more specifically, we demonstrate how the cultural narrative of a university degree as a 'must-have at all costs' subjugates various career decision-making logics identified, while downplaying individual agency and reflexivity. We argue that, by misdirecting career choice from opportunities to constraints, the dominant narrative serves to limit, rather than diversify, young people's career choice and social mobility potential. We go on to theorise the interplay between culture and social institutions. Drawing on the cultural interpretation of Unified State Exam – a neoliberal educational governance tool – we show how cultural narrative hijacks institutional interpretations and usages, re-grounding neoliberal sensibilities in Soviet-era ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While past research into young people’s transitions out of the parental home identified a distinct student housing pathway offering an institutionally supported ‘housing advantage’, more recently scholars have pointed to widespread housing precarity among university students, reconceptualising the housing challenges students face as a ‘hidden curriculum’ that reinforces inequalities. Meanwhile, time spent navigating this hidden curriculum in increasingly widespread purpose-built student accommodations (PBSA) has the potential to reshape the student habitus, fostering future preferences for the high-density, privatized urban space PBSA represents. This paper re-examines these notions, drawing on interviews with 27 students in Waterloo, Canada, regarding their past experiences and future expectations of housing. While the interviews reveal a multitude of pathways, concepts of housing advantage and hidden curriculum are not as contradictory as they may appear, with many students benefitting from supports offered by university residences before facing an expensive, discriminatory and predatory rental market. Although students’ experiences normalized high-density living, they did not necessarily supersede long-term preferences for detached home ownership, and access to amenities was more important than private space as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With analysis occurring during a heightened concern with the Black Lives Matter movement and knife crime in the U.K., this paper aims to delineate the characteristics of a street code, constituting a specific dominant and often hegemonic form of 'street masculinity' found on an inner-city housing estate in London called Maxwell. The fieldwork ran over nine months in 2019, involving 48 Black, Asian, and minority ethnic men aged 18–22. Using an ethnographic methodology, the principal methods of data generation were observations, interviews and informal conversations. The main theories this study draws on to understand 'street masculinity' were Connell's and Messerschmidt's dominant, hegemonic, subordinate and complicit masculinity forms. Findings centre on data from two young men who exemplify different patterns of masculinity performing the street code. Findings are presented under a series of characteristics that make up the game of the 'on-road' street masculinity and include (1) authenticity, 'swagger' and not being 'pussy'; (2) a preparedness for violence; (3) knife-carrying; (4) a presence on the digital street. Although this way of living drove a desire for respect and group status, there was also an underlying and pervasive sense of vulnerability derived from risk-taking and anticipation of danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediate living arrangements, like shared flats, collective accommodation or double residence, have become increasingly common due to the individualization of life scripts, and because of economic and cultural shifts in western societies. However, they have been assumed to be negligible in Mediterranean Europe, where housing transitions are 'late but simple'. This paper challenges this assumption, using Catalonia (Spain) as a case study. Data coming from the 2017 Catalan Youth Survey offer some clear-cut results. First, shared flats and double residence are not uncommon among Catalans: respectively 15.7% and 8.1% of youngsters experience them sometime during their twenties. Second, multinomial regression models show that double residence implies economic reliance on parents, it is most common among university students, especially those with well-off parents, and among young people coming from rural areas. Conversely, shared flats appear to be linked to precarious economic situations, and they are common among young immigrants, and those living in the city of Barcelona. Both arrangements are transitory, being less frequent among older people. Some expected predictors of intermediate living turned out to predict double residence instead, so this semi-dependent practice could be the equivalent of 'living away from home' for youngsters in 'familistic' territories as Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the call for more research on the 'missing middle' by reporting the findings of a small-scale qualitative longitudinal study in the North of England exploring the labour market transitions of young people completing compulsory schooling with mid-level qualifications and seeking employment. It found that participants desired training which aligned with their skills, interests and future work intentions. Participants were drawn to seek apprenticeships because they offered 'earning and learning' in a real-life work environment. However, for the vast majority, apprenticeships were not available, so they turned to college to articulate their choices and gain work-related training. Qualifications were gained in order to gain leverage in the job market and help them achieve 'getting on' work. However, often a period of 'pinballing' between their ambitions and the reality of the labour market ensued due to the lack of desirable quality work available. The majority of participants were still resisting 'going nowhere' work and making efforts to achieve 'getting on' work when interviewed, however, some had stopped making the effort and resigned themselves to on-going poor quality work. The process of biographicity was, for them, a reconciliation with on-going low-quality work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article distances itself from the scholarship's tendency to describe youth leadership through the prism of the adult world. Leaning on ethnographic data, I explain how adolescent leadership is an outgrowth of social relations and cultural symbols that are perpetually negotiating the status quo. As part of an extensive study on female youth leaders, the paper focuses on the rich array of insignia that are made, worn, and exchanged by my research subjects: teenage female members of the Israeli Scouts (a co-ed Jewish youth movement). More specifically, I examine how the creation and display of material symbols on clothing mirror the leadership identity of Girl Scouts. In contrast to their uniforms and rank, which conform to restrictions and a formal hierarchy, the subjects engender a dynamic, non-formal, and open-ended set of symbols that visually represent power and status within their social group. Among the principal contributions of this study are insights on the nature of adolescent leadership and how it is wrought, maintained, and renewed within social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines individual, peer and societal factors associated with young people's instigation of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, including abuse and control through new technologies, in their intimate relationships. The mixed-method research included a survey of 4564 young people aged 14–17 across five European countries. Young people's advisory groups were convened in each country to work alongside the research teams. Across the European sample, 38% of boys and 45% of girls stated they engaged in some form of emotional violence, 10% of girls and 6% of boys reported the use of physical violence and 20% of boys and 4% of girls reported using sexual violence (pressure and/or physical force). A range of intersecting factors, including wider experiences of violence and abuse, gendered attitudes and consumption of online pornography, were associated with the use of intimate violence, although these differed by gender. The research provides new European insights through measuring the association with three discrete forms of IPVA as well as exploring perpetration by both males and females. A Prevention and intervention programmes seeking to respond to violence in young people's relationships need to develop effective strategies to address the interplay of these factors across young people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has demonstrated positive individual and community benefits from youth civic engagement. But not all youth have access to opportunities for engagement. Race and class have been identified as key factors that can influence opportunities. Other factors may also contribute to disproportionality in this important realm. System-involvement, for example, is an important factor requiring focused attention. This paper contributes to the research on youth civic engagement by examining opportunities and barriers for system-involved youth. An intersectional lens is used to highlight youths' system-involvement as a key variable and offers suggested strategies for better supporting the civic engagement of these youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing proportion of youth in the Global North are of migration background, many of whom engage in mobility across countries, through which they establish and maintain transnational networks of peers. While young people's local peer relationships have been established as a source of social capital, studies have to date ignored the role of transnational peers. This is largely because young people's mobility has been over-simplified, obscuring mechanisms that enable transnational peer relationships to emerge and thrive. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork in Germany and Ghana with 20 young people of Ghanaian background (aged 15-25), this paper employs a mobility lens to show how transnational peer relationships provide social capital to migrant youth. We find that, through these relationships, migrant youth gain (1) educational motivation, as has been found in the literature on local peer relationships, and (2) transnational frames of reference, which is particular to transnational peer relationships. As such, we argue for an expansion of the concept of peer relationships to include those built and maintained through transnational mobility in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of migrant youth's support systems and the valuable social capital that transnational peer relationships provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand why young women engage in the (sub)culture of badness whilst 'on road', as opposed to more conventional employment pathways, it's imperative to consider their access (or lack of) to legitimate opportunities. Living in deprived urban areas creates a set of conditions which can impact on life chances, thus demonstrating the continued importance of intersecting factors class, gender, race and place in their lives as they navigate precarious transitions against a backdrop of neo-liberalism and racial disadvantage. The Teesside transitions literature, based on white young people from a deindustrialised area of the north-east of England, is considered in terms of its usefulness of thinking about young women 'on road' in London, given that the interest in capturing and analysing their experiences has been notably absent in the British criminological literature. Consequentlyvery little is known about those who are entrenched in road culture as the majority of what we know around crime and violence is focused on the experiences of young men, so experiences of young women of colour are even more limited. This paper has begun to make some headway in terms of addressing these gaps so they are more visible in marginalised urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to historicise the formation of youth studies in Australia with a specific focus on how the absence of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and other race critical and postcolonial scholars has produced particular research cultures, trajectories and traditions that have thus far made it difficult to incorporate race and ethnicity as central to an Australian youth studies agenda, both theoretically and methodologically. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples of how racialisation plays out in Australia, it will be argued youth studies, as a field, needs to respond to how race as a complex, global, structural phenomenon comes to bear on the development of young people's identity making, life choices and lived experiences a necessary scholarly development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]