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Apprenticeships are a common pathway for young people transitioning from education to employment, and adolescence to adulthood. Apprenticeships have undergone considerable reform, and since the 1990s labour market priorities in Australia have resulted in weakening of protections offered to workers through the award system and trade unions. At the same time, mental health issues have increased, with young people carrying a disproportionate burden. The aim of this study was to explore challenges that young apprentices in urban Australian settings face in relation to their mental health. Focus groups were conducted with 54 apprentices, who described a pervasive sense of disposability and poor working conditions as the main challenges to their mental health. These conditions included long work hours, low wages, job insecurity, poor quality education, unrealistic expectations, workplace hierarchies and bullying. Amidst social and economic precarity, apprentices resigned themselves to silently endure poor treatment in their work placements. Findings from this study are especially troubling because, as young people, apprentices simultaneously face a series of life transitions that require support and guidance. This paper brings attention to the workplace conditions that may contribute to young apprentices' vulnerability to mental health problems, highlighting possibilities for structural changes led by policy reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This work builds upon critical youth studies’ concern with capacity building in engaging young people as active agents for social change. This article analyses critical capacity building processes among young women engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR) that sought to co-design a community sport programme in Melbourne, Australia. Participants included the first author, four young women (second to the fifth author), and a critical friend (sixth author). The experience of engaging young women in YPAR foregrounded significant capacity building such as: (a) learning to genuinely listen to young people in order to plan for change; (b) finding creative and flexible ways to build relationships; (c) learning to negotiate the messiness and uncertainty in the research process; and (d) improving problem-solving skills in order to listen and respond to young people in their community. This paper concludes by articulating how YPAR can potentialise the development of critical capacity building in youth studies, nurturing skills and knowledge linked with social justice, activism, and democracy, instead of instrumentalist and technocratic capacity-building models that focus on training and predefined practical skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shifts in young people’s perspectives on and orientations towards the future. Our research comprises parallel qualitative research with young people aged 15–19 in Denmark and Australia. Drawing on a posthumanist account of the world as entanglements of multiple human and non-human agencies and inspired by Donna Haraway’s admonition to stay with the trouble of the world, we discuss how species meet as the coronavirus makes kin with the young people and how the young people’s perspectives on the future become with the pandemic. That is, what intimations of worldings and reworldings can be glimpsed as young people shared their changed perspectives on priorities related to the meaning of life and the sustainability of the (more-than-) human condition from the midst of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social action of young people in the north Indian village of Bemni, drawing on field research over a 20 year period. We argue that a cohort of young people in Bemni in the period 2004–2014 tended to focus on key issues of survival in their social action, what they often termed ‘lifelines’, related especially to infrastructure and schooling. A second cohort of young people involved in social action between 2015 and 2022 combined this focus with a concentration on issues of social inequality and ethical questions of how to sustain the social, environmental and spiritual/cultural fabric of their village. Building viability in this context involves simultaneously ‘thinking in’ to reflect on core issues of survival and ‘thinking out’ to consider how to integrate this quest for survival in relation to broader ethical concerns about society and cultural/spiritual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active labour market policies for young people, backed by the EU Youth Guarantee programme, led governments to trying new measures, amongst them internships for graduates of different education levels. This youth, despite being better prepared than early school leavers, still face problems during their professional insertion processes. Faulty progressions can become ‘lost in transition’ situations (Brinton [2010]. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). This paper analyzes the effects in terms of employment outcomes of a programme with two types of internships: in private firms and in public administration offices. A counterfactual analysis is carried out by matching intern groups of either type with a control group formed from candidates who ended up without an internship. The results from a first analysis with registered data were enhanced by implementing a second analysis based upon survey data, which permitted the inclusion of family legacy variables in a medium-term analysis. Estimated effects are positive and significant for participants in firms’ internships, and negative and significant for interns who worked in public organisations. Additionally, the survey uncovers that work contracts offered by firms after the programme play a positive role. The results should be very useful for decision making in terms of active measures addressing these issues for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper examines perceptions of subjective age identity presented in interviews with eight young people who had been in out-of-home care during their upbringing. Research shows that care-leavers often experience a variety of vulnerabilities and challenges in comparison to their same-aged peers. Additionally, they often do not organise their lives according to the same educational, professional, and relational structures as other young people. In their everyday lives, care-leavers are nonetheless confronted with expectations that assume they have a normal biographical life course, meaning a life that progresses from childhood to adulthood via a relatively stable and predictable pattern. Consequently, they evaluate themselves using socially defined roles connected to formal and informal age structuring. The findings emphasise perceptions of multiple subjective ages at the same time no matter the context, which seems to differ the perceptions of the participants from that of their same-aged peers. Additionally, the findings indicate that perceptions of subjective age and life course developments are flexible and can change in ways that do not follow a normal biographical life course, but despite this flexibility also can consist of experiences of being out of sync with same-aged peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the housing pathways of young adults following the breakdown of a first intimate relationship based on co-residence. In particular it explores the frequent recourse to shared housing and returns to the parental home, and how these options may be seen as steps backward, yet also offer opportunities for support. Findings are discussed in the context of the de-standardisation of transitions to adulthood characterised by uncertainties related to early years of employment and the shortage of affordable housing. Although often not as consequential as mid-life relationship breakdowns for future housing prospects, intimate relationship breakdowns linked to initial co-residence are nonetheless critical life events for young adults, leading to a re-evaluation of their existing relationships and of their plans in relation to housing and family formation. Our findings also indicate that the backwards and forwards movements associated with intermediary housing arrangements and in-between phases are deserving of greater attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A higher education degree has been regarded as an investment that helps young people access good jobs. However, it is increasingly difficult for young graduates to enter the labour market and, more importantly, to access high quality jobs. This paper examines determinants of the wages of young bachelor and master graduates engaged in different contractual arrangements. Linked employer-employee data, namely Quadros de Pessoal (2007 and 2011), were used to compare the impact of standard and non-standard jobs on the wages of post-Bologna graduates who entered the labour market during the economic recession in Portugal. Most graduates start by getting a full-time job, be it stable or flexible. Empirical evidence shows wage differentials linked to the type of contractual arrangement, although the impact in 2007 is not the same in 2011. The contracts that combine flexibility with part-time work have been the most penalised in recent times. The transition of bachelors to the labour market is expected to be more precarious; however, according to data for 2011, master graduates appear to be protected against low quality jobs in Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descriptions of charter schools as militaristic 'boot camps' continue to animate popular discourses. Recently, the upper echelons of the charter school sector, commonly known as Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs), have come under intense scrutiny for their controversial 'no excuses' disciplinary practices. These socialization practices are regarded as investments whereby students are expected to become both adept test takers and 'good', 'disciplined' aspirational citizens. As most 'no excuses' (NE) charter schools operate within segregated, low-income urban communities in the U.S., it can be argued that these schools function as vehicles for behavioral scrutiny and bodily surveillance shaping the lives and subjectivities of economically disadvantaged students of color. A curriculum focused on body control raises significant ethical questions regarding the educative practices for low-income children of color in the United States' divided society. Drawing on discourse analysis, this paper focuses on bodily control portrayed in key texts (handbooks, videos, etc) used by some charter schools before drawing on Bourdieu's tool of habitus to show how a codified corporeal curriculum may work in CMOs, where bodily control is deemed a prerequisite for academic excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much do young people's daily activities differ according to where they live? As a global generation, young people are disproportionally subject to the risks and insecurity of globalization. However, countries differ in their support for young people's inclusion through economic and social participation. Using time use surveys from Australia, Italy, Finland, France, Korea, Spain, the UK and the USA (n = 23,271), this paper investigates national differences in the amount of time young people (20–34 years) spend on paid and unpaid work, study and leisure in each country. Gender gaps in market work and non-market work were widest in the Anglo and southern European countries. In France and Finland, gender differences in daily market and non-market activity were narrower. Young women spent more daily time in study than young men in all countries except Korea, where study time was highest. Young men and young women in social democratic Finland had more leisure time than young people elsewhere. Results suggest that young people's experience of the consequences of globalization is not universal, but that nation-states remain relevant in determining their welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper (1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-intensity mobilisation and (2) seeks to understand how this mobilisation (and prior engagement) impacts future political trajectories of these youth activists as they grow into adulthood. Recruitment and initial engagement in high-intensity mobilisation correspond to concepts used to explain civic engagement in Verba, Schlozman and Brady's ([1995]. Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press) civic voluntarism model. Political trajectories following high-intensity engagement appeared to correspond with engagement prior to participation in the occupation, with those who had lower levels of prior engagement able to sustain their activism well beyond the initial high-intensity engagement. Those with greater activist experiences prior to the occupation and earlier in their youth reduced their engagement following the high-intensity mobilisation. While patterns of trajectories from young adulthood to adulthood appeared, the causal mechanisms varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gang members and membership are oft displayed as fixed and stable entities that are only understood in the context of the gang. This paper purports that membership is a role learned through the process of street socialisation and that gangs should be understood as fluid entities situated within the larger context of street culture. Through member's perspectives, it reveals the main cultural transmitters which facilitated membership in Glasgow, Scotland as street socialisation, territorial othering and storytelling. In discussing the role of these transmitters, the journey into gang membership in Glasgow is told. Exploring the transmitters of membership allowed the meaning making process that members engaged in to emerge which allows gang membership to be understood as a meaningful social activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency in marginalised youth has been studied from various perspectives, yet the challenges that mental health problems pose for their agency remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from a study on youth transitions fractured by mental health problems, this study sheds light on this important issue. The data consists of 49 life story interviews with young adults. Using Ruth Lister's four-dimensional taxonomy of agency, the analysis shows how everyday struggles with mental distress are entangled with the practices of the social security system, medical care, education, labour markets, and work life. It also reveals how emerging attempts at strategic agency can fail or flourish depending on the response of the social and structural context. If strategic agency is restricted by institutional practices, it will soon return to day-to-day struggling or become everyday resistance and cynicism towards the system. However, if the strategic agency is supported by institutional practices, a genuine path out of distress emerges. The paper suggests that taking seriously the experiences of mental distress and situating them in a specific socio-political context is essential for understanding youth agency today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others' needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment - the politics of austerity - and secondly because of Europeanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's participation has become a cliché in western democracies. In the case of Fiji, it is a novel concept, not because young people have not participated before but because they are exposed to new and different ways of involvement. This paper is one of the earliest attempts to explore young people's understanding and experiences of participation in Fiji. It is based on data drawn from an exploratory study conducted with a select group of young people in Suva, Fiji. Forms of young people's engagement although diverse are dominated by the traditional discourse of participation represented in 'performance and responsibility' and tend to be represented in the media and policy circles. This paper shows that young people are not bound by these conceptions but talk of participation as experienced in the hybridized settings of their everyday reality. The study offers a window into understanding young people's participation in Fiji and suggests that a deeper appreciation of this facet of their lives can be achieved with an emphasis on participatory talk with and an exploration of spaces where young people are constantly negotiating the traditional expectations of being young, being dutiful citizens and self-directed individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a large survey of Czech high school students (n = 1103), aged 15–20 years, this paper explores youth prejudice to a wide range of minority groups (n = 21) where family, school, and community contexts are taken into account. General Structural Equation Models are used to explore the determinants of prejudice for 21 minorities using a comparative explanatory framework where the focus is gender differences in prejudice to minorities are examined using three social theories: Social Dominance Theory (SDT), the Theory of Gendered Prejudice (TGP), and Gender Role Beliefs (GRB). This research shows that gender plays a strong role in expressing prejudiced attitudes where females express (a) less prejudiced attitudes toward the Roma, black Africans, Gays and those with mental or physical disabilities, and (b) more prejudiced attitudes towards the homeless, Vietnamese, Muslims, and lesbians. This gendered pattern is explained in terms of insights from SDT, TGP, and GRB. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines complexities and interdependencies of key family relationships which anchor young people’s educational biographies. It is well recognised that young people’s education pathways in late modernity are strongly dependent on their ability to draw on the range of resources available, and that socio-economic status and family resources play a central role in this process. Less is known about how such relationships anchor young people’s education biographies. Drawing on theories of social capital and belonging in dialogue with qualitative interviews, and situated in studies of rural youth and education, this article considers how young people themselves talk and make decisions about their education in relation to complex family connections. These connections, contestations and negotiations between young people and central family members highlight how the late modern economy impacts on young people’s intimate relationships, and sheds light on the ongoing work of youth to resolve such tensions around their schooling in daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the discourse of intimacy in young people’s accounts of sexual health. In interviews with people from Sydney aged 18–25 years, diverse understandings of sexual safeties are offered, reflecting a range of sex partner intimacies. This is seen in participants’ accounts of having a range of different partners, having different experiences with a particular partner, and having sex with friends. This discourse is considered against Australian sexual health websites for young people. In the websites, connections between safeties and intimacies are not explored, and discussion of safety is limited to condom use, as per the concept of ‘safe sex’. How condom use is supported and/or challenged by sexual and friendship intimacies is overlooked. In considering research claims about the missing discourse of pleasure in formal approaches to young people’s sexual health, I extend this to a missing discourse of intimacy. Connections between pleasure, intimacy, safety, and friendship are explored throughout this paper, and theorisations of intimacy as cultural, public, and intersubjective are considered, drawing upon the works of Lauren Berlant and Eva Illouz. It is argued that sexual health research and promotion that engages with young people’s conceptualisations of intimacy will better engage with young people’s sexual cultures, and hence be more relevant and useful to this population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Events related to bullying are so complex that they require a much broader examination than is usually available from a single disciplinary point of view. The purpose of the present paper is to offer new ways of examining this complex phenomenon. We will argue that transdisciplinarity (henceforth TD) could bring a more comprehensive analysis and a deeper understanding to the current state of bullying research. As a way of emphasizing the benefits of a more pluralistic and integrative approach, we will use TD based examples to describe the general context and process we used to develop a new definition of bullying, one that provides a sharper distinction between bullying and general aggression, thus offering the possibility of more targeted intervention strategies. The present paper is divided into three sections, namely, a selected review of the TD literature, an application of TD inspired ideas and tools that examine bullying from a number of interrelated perspectives, and an outline of a conceptual ‘Disciplinary Continuum’, as an example of how TD can be used to examine complex phenomena. Moreover, we will highlight TD’s expanding role in the funding process, as it is increasingly required by granting agencies and governmental ministries as a criterion for universities’ funding. We conclude by outlining ideas for further inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the European Union (EU) passed through a significant economic crisis. All across Europe, European young people are among the groups which are hit hardest, with youth unemployment rates rising to over 50% in member states such as Greece and Spain. In the classical migration literature, it is suggested that such unfavourable economic climate would make people more likely to move abroad. Whereas in press releases we are regularly confronted with stories about South European young adults with tertiary education working in bars in Northern European cities, limited empirical evidence exists as such on the relationship between the recent Euro-crisis and migration aspirations. This paper addresses this gap in the academic literature. Using data from Flash Eurobarometer 395, I investigate which micro- and macro-level characteristics influence migration aspirations of young people across the member states of the EU. The results reveal the importance of individual characteristics and feelings of discontent with the current climate in explaining migration aspirations. Furthermore, I detect a negative relationship of relative welfare levels with migration aspirations, and a positive relationship of the youth unemployment ratio. Together, the results suggest that potential young intra-EU movers are positively selected from the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk has become a dominant part of theory and practice in young people's services over the past 30 years [Kemshall, H. 2008. “Risk, Rights and Justice: Understanding and Responding to Youth Risk.”Youth Justice8 (1): 21–37; Goldson, G. 2000. “Children in Need’ or ‘Young Offenders’? Hardening ideology, organizational change and new challenges for social work with children in trouble.”Child and Family Social Work5 (3): 255–265]. Young people are simultaneously described as ‘at-risk’ and risky, ‘permanent suspects’ [Mcara, L., and S. Mcvie. 2005. “The usual suspects? Street-life, young people and the police.”Criminal Justice5 (1): 5–36] with the potential for committing crime, using drugs, being sexually promiscuous or under-performing in the socio-economic climate [Turnbull, G., and J. Spence. 2011. “What's at risk? The proliferation of risk across child and youth policy in England.”Journal of Youth Studies14 (8): 939–959]. This paper reports on a UK study of youth practitioners’ perceptions of young people in relation to ‘risk’ and how this affects practice. Findings identify a context where practitioners engage with notions of young people as at-risk or risky, managing tensions between external constructions and the ‘real’ individual on an on-going basis. ‘Risk’ becomes malleable, with young people's risk biographies being amplified or attenuated on the basis of the practitioner's view of needs, resource allocations, contracts, targets, practitioner or organisational fears, risk management processes, and the desire to get the best for the young person. Whilst of short-term benefit, this commodification of young people is counter-productive, magnifying the construction of youth as risky others. The paper calls for new approaches to challenge the continued dominance of the youth risk paradigm in practice, policy and the academic youth studies field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apprenticeship programs are promoted to facilitate youth's transition from school-to-work, especially for those who might not otherwise attend postsecondary education. These programs may help youth achieve other markers of adulthood earlier. In this paper, we draw on qualitative interviews with Canadian young men in the skilled trades to explore whether they believe their educational choices have given them an advantage in their transition to adulthood. We also draw from the 2011 GSS, a nationally representative survey, and Cox modeling to examine three early adult transitions – home-leaving, first union, and first marriage – to determine if apprenticeship programs facilitate earlier transitions compared to other educational streams. Our respondents expressed that they transitioned to adulthood more quickly than their peers, due to early employment and avoiding student debt, however, many also had trouble finding stable employment and often took on debt related to their training. Using nationally representative data, we find tradesmen tend to leave home earlier than their peers, they form first unions at younger ages but marry slightly later than their more highly educated counterparts. Our results contribute to our understanding of how apprenticeship programs in Canada facilitate transitions to adulthood among a recent cohort of young men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore how indebtedness increases the economic instability of Chilean young adults working as professionals who are unable to address their financial commitments. This is taking place within a context of sustained increases in consumer debt and the financialization of policies on higher education access. This is a descriptive analysis of the results of a survey created in order to characterize the forms of indebtedness and credit obligations of young professional debtors in Santiago, Chile. We use this to explore how the transition to the adult world using debt can destabilize the socio-economic status of young professionals. Our results show that a rather large percentage of these youths has more debt than income and that educational and consumer debts are the reason for late payments. They also have a harder time handling economic commitments when they have dependents. Young debtors are generally worried about their debt levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 'Rust Belt' city of Geelong in Victoria, Australia, discourses of young people's enterprise and innovation provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing material and symbolic consequences of industrial decline, job losses, and the growing insecurity of employment and income. GT Magazine is a weekly, large circulation magazine in Geelong with a significant focus on the activities and aspirations of enterprising young people. In this paper, we examine, by utilising techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, the particular ways in which young people's innovation and enterprise are framed and enacted in GT Magazine. Our analysis reveals that 'youth' and 'enterprise' are, in GT Magazine, given an embodied form that is powerfully marked by aestheticised, normalised enactments of gender, class and race. In doing this work, we make productive contributions to three key themes in contemporary youth studies: new work orders and the youthful self as enterprise; the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of affective labour in these new work orders; and the emerging spatial turn to examine young people's embodied, place-based experiences of employment and enterprise. We seek to make problematic the sense that solutions to multiple disruptions and crises in capitalism and the environment are to be found in young people's enterprise. Particularly when that enterprise is given form in ways that are aestheticised, gendered, classed, individualised and responsibilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the analysis of data collected from the National Canadian Homeless Youth Survey and addresses the question: why do some youth who received support from social service agencies that cater to the needs of homeless youth self-identify as being homeless while others do not? According to self-report survey data obtained from 1103 young people from over 50 youth homeless service centres from across Canada, findings show that youth who self-identified as being homeless shared several backgrounds and current situational characteristics not common among youth in the sample who did not consider themselves to be homeless. The findings illustrate the importance of past trauma and the intensity of day to day hardship in self-identifying as a homeless young person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses ethnographic discourse analysis to understand how Serbian high school students at 'Belgrade Professional' (BP) respond to coursework and discussions about their individual futures. Contextualizing the conversations at BP within broader local and international social forces, the paper shows how students' perceptions of their future chances are mediated by both the school's outdated promises of secure skilled employment and a broad understanding of Western liberal democracies as 'meritocratic'. In short, I argue that BP students recognize the elective 'choice biography' as a real pathway to adulthood. However, they primarily imagine the choice biography as existing outside of Serbia, while feeling constrained by – even hostile to – such an idea within the country. To counter choice biography framings of futures in Serbia, students mobilize a discourse I call the 'blocked future', comprised of three related narrative tropes informed by the decades-long recession: domestic futurelessness, meritocracy abroad, and local chance. These narrative tropes illuminate the emerging cultural structures in Serbia which reflect how people cope with and processes the conflicting structural demands and unfulfilled promises of the post-socialist transition in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research with 86 young refugees (aged 13–24 years) who were resettled to the UK between 2006 and 2010. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data we explore the educational aspirations and experiences of refugee youth, and how they negotiate post-compulsory education pathways. We find that despite the promise of educational opportunity and transformed life chances enshrined in the notion of refugee resettlement, many of the experiences and barriers to education are not dissimilar in kind to those facing refugee youth in countries of first asylum. Support for young refugees to make successful transitions into and through the education system is critical to their future lives and longer-term integration outcomes. The discussion is set within global discourses of refugee education and the literature of refugee education in the global north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of public interest in and media panic over youth, sexuality, and social media has grown in recent years. In this paper, we explore the discursive practices that are disciplining the digital intimacies of young people through print media discourses. Therefore, we use a Foucauldian feminist approach and conduct a discourse theoretical analysis of 183 news articles published in Northern Belgium between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2016. Our findings show that the discourse in newspapers reporting on youth, sexuality, and social media consists of three recurring discursive practices. First, there is the problematization of social media. Second, this problematization is legitimized by the use of authoritative voices, such as those of academics or other experts. Third, this results in a gendered categorization where young girls are extensively included in the debate and young boys and their digital experiences are most often excluded. This gendered discourse not only perpetuates sexual double standards throughout society but also implicitly disciplines young people to adhere to hetero-patriarchal ideals of femininity and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

At a time of heightened international debate about youth precarity, how do we understand and support transitions to adulthood for people who have been in care? This paper reports on a qualitative longitudinal study of 75 young adults (aged 16–32 years) from Norway, Denmark, and England. All had been in care during childhood and at the time of their recruitment to the study all were in education, employment or training. Against the context of a literature largely focused on transitions specific to 'leaving care', our analysis addresses aspects of early adulthood which are not specific to being care experienced; some (such as romantic break-ups, or moving home) might be considered normative, whilst others (such as changing course or dropping out of university) are less common. Cross-national analysis shows how care and wider welfare systems intersect with informal networks in everyday lives, functioning to scaffold young people, or to exacerbate precarity, as they navigate biographical transitions in early adulthood. The research shows the importance of developing socially and culturally located biographical accounts of 'transition' that recognise the complexities, uncertainties and essential interdependence of everyday lives and emerging adulthoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 added significant stress and anxieties to the already precarious lives of many young people. Despite this, there is emerging evidence that young people are able to demonstrate remarkable resilience in the midst of economic uncertainties that render the trajectories of their futures uncertain. The pressure to be resilient, to find effective ways to manage the uncertainties inherent to the liberal democracies of the twenty-first century, can be significant. The consequences of failure include deteriorating health and well-being, losses in motivation and hope, economic marginalisation, and ambivalence about the markers of what is means to be an adult. In this paper we spotlight moments in post-GFC television that have drawn on these social narratives, depicting young people's experiences of resilience and uncertainties. We view these moments as more than just television or popular culture. The stories we tell are allegorical, but they are not mere fictions. We focus on the popular television comedy Broad City (2014-) that focusses on the marginalised lifeworlds of trendy, college-educated, young hipsters Ilana and Abbi who are barely getting by in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on a mixed methods study that sought to analyse determinants of youth labour market and educational disengagement in Peru. It begins by questioning the widespread focus on NEET – youth not in employment, education or training – as a measure of youth vulnerability in countries with extensive informal labour markets where labour precarity can be as problematic as unemployment for young people's futures. A broader category of 'urban vulnerable' youth, including both NEET and precarious workers, is proposed and used as the basis for analysing the factors that influence young people's trajectories. Key factors and shocks in youth trajectories are identified through qualitative life histories, and are tested using cross-section and panel survey data. Findings from the study have implications for the analysis of youth labour market vulnerability in the Global South, as well as for the policies that seek to address this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The precarity of young people's transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the 'contamination' of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of 'leisure precarity'. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people's experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear 'empty' or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, millions of young people migrate away from their home provinces for higher education and employment in China. However, less is known about the extent to which Chinese young people may benefit economically from their migration. Analyzing nationally representative data from the new China College Student Survey, this paper examines the impact of inter-province migration on the starting salaries of Chinese young people after undergraduate studies. Utilizing the method of propensity score matching, this research reveals differences in the economic returns to migration for higher education and for work, and between young people of rural and urban hukou origins. The economic premium attached to inter-province education migration is largely mediated and thus explained by socioeconomic disparities across Chinese provinces. By contrast, young people's work migration generates a positive economic premium, over and above the wage disparity between sending and host provinces. Underlining the context-dependent nature of the migration premium, the results draw attention to China's institutional features – i.e. the structural configurations of education and work migration and the hukou system – in shaping the economic returns to youth migration. Rural and urban young people's differential access to the migration premium may also exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities in post-reform China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Spanish adolescents' knowledge of six dimensions of human sexuality: anatomy and sexual physiology; sexual health; sexual behavior and human sexual response; affection and sexuality; sexual identity; and sexuality and society. A questionnaire to evaluate their knowledge was administered to a sample of 3853 adolescents aged between 12 and 18 (M = 14.40, SD = 1.44) from 38 secondary schools throughout Castile and Leon (Spain). The results show that adolescents of both genders, mainly those enrolled in lower-secondary education levels, tend to be misinformed about sexuality. Taking into account all the analyzed dimensions, results reveal that adolescents' knowledge of sexual identity is significantly greater than that of sexuality and society, or of anatomy and sexual physiology. In addition, women show more detailed knowledge than men, although the margin between genders is quite small. Finally, this work highlights the need for sexual education in order to promote more thorough scientific knowledge of sexuality among Spanish adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main rights of European citizens is freedom of movement, enabling them to live, work and study in the EU member states. However, it is only minority of Europeans who aspires to use their European passports and cross the national borders. In this paper we focus precisely on those who declare the wish to move to another EU member state. We point to Janus-faced character of mobility aspirations, distinguishing between feeling free to move versus feeling forced to move. We argue that this distinction sheds light on a new social division. Based on the Eurobarometer data (85.1OVR) we illustrate how the two groups, 'free to move' and 'forced to move', are equipped with different resources. In particular, feeling forced to move correlates with financial deprivation on an individual level and residence in a poorer, smaller country with higher levels of youth unemployment. In addition, our results suggest that aspirations for European mobility are linked with the sense of youth marginalization in their nation states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on youth homelessness has documented the unique and complex ways that youth relate to one another on the street and engage with their social environments. This work draws from a varied set of concepts, including concepts from subcultural theory, the youth geographies literature, and Bourdieu's practice theory. However, little work to date considers how to integrate these different conceptualizations and perspectives on how young people experiencing homelessness engage culture and organize themselves socially in the course of their time on the street. This paper explores this question by using interviews and fieldwork with a group of 39 homeless and street-involved young people in Canada. Through this analysis, I outline a multilayered and practice focused perspective that focuses on the active way that young people engage and navigate the diverse social and cultural landscapes of street life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews, this article explores young adults' everyday experiences of 'logging in' and their accounts of their engagement with social media platforms, in particular Facebook. By doing so, it shows how 'logging in' can turn into feelings of being 'locked in' – both in relation to personal data-mining and expectations of participation. The paper highlights the complex ways in which young adults responded to these feelings and negotiated connection and disconnection on social media platforms by deploying tactics of limitation and suspension. For example, in order to regain control of their time and negotiate their relationships, young adults tactically used Facebook Messenger's previews to bypass read receipts and temporarily suspend connection. Using de Certeau's distinction between 'strategy' and 'tactics', the article argues that although young adults managed social media platforms on an individual level (by deploying 'tactics'), their understandings and negotiations of the platforms were significantly shaped by the platforms' designs and features, by the strategies of the corporations owning and operating them as well as embedded within the asymmetrical relations of power of platform capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, young women in the West have been addressed as ‘Top Girls’, symbols of social progress and emblems of a new meritocracy. The 2008 financial crash and subsequent implementation of austerity measures have further called into question the realisation of such promise and potential as evidence suggests that the young and women have suffered disproportionately within the post-crash landscape in the UK and beyond. This paper draws on longitudinal data to interrogate the promises and failures of neoliberal and post-feminist articulations of aspiration and meritocracy as these are lived and negotiated by young women making transitions in the midst of the ‘crisis’. Attending to the biographical accounts of two participants occupying different class locations, I explore their transitions and perceptions of the uncertainties and risks characterising ‘austere times’. I demonstrate how, despite similarities in their experiences of a stunted graduate labour market, social class shaped how they responded to and made sense of the pressures and predicaments they encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

Cotê has called for a focus on a political economy analysis, where young people should be thought of as ‘youth-as-class’. Cotê positions youth as having false consciousness, arguing that youth studies is too focussed on subjectivities and a potential apologist for neo-liberalism. While we acknowledge the central importance of economic considerations, this paper critically engages Cotê’s claims while developing an approach to political economy that recognises the importance of inequalities between young people. We engage with a number of Cotê’s claims arguing that his position underestimates the diversity of work in this area and the importance subjectivities to any analysis of political economy. We also identify a number of conceptual problems with ‘youth-as-class’ and the ‘false consciousness’ heuristic. We develop an alternative approach outlining a more integrative understanding of the relationship between the political and the economy highlighting the importance of subjectivity. We draw on ideas of political ecology; reflexivity and consciousness; and concepts from Bourdieu. Our approach recognises that young people's lives can be shaped by economic forces and by classed symbolic and moral forces. Young people are not passive dupes, but are in a constant reflexive struggle to respond to circumstances not always of their own making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility has been a central tenet of UK Government public policy, viewed as a silver bullet to creating a socially just and ‘fair’ society as well as an economically successful one. Within policy discourse young people's aspirations are deemed of critical importance to achieving educational success and in turn social mobility. However, within both popular and policy rhetoric ‘place attachment’ is routinely posited as a serious hindrance to successful realisation of aspiration, putatively because it embeds young people in ‘place’ (e.g. a particular community or geographical location) and prevents them from accessing employment in national labour markets. This paper, however, problematises the notion that ‘place attachment’ and ‘spatial mobility’ are necessarily mutually exclusive. Calling on data from a qualitative study of young people's aspirations in two distinctive regions of South Wales, UK, the analyses reveal that despite the largely localised ‘imagined futures’ of these young people they held very ‘high’ aspirations for professional forms of employment, which for some young people meant moving away from home and locality in order to achieve. The paper calls for a rethinking of how young people's aspirations are conceptualised both in government policy and academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young graduates in England often return to the parental home after a period of living away during their university studies. Little is known, however, about why they return and how coresidence with parents fits within a life trajectory. This paper reports upon an in-depth cross-sectional qualitative study of young graduates’ coresidence with their parents. It identifies a five-part typology of the purpose of coresidence as perceived by the graduates: a base camp for exploration before settling into adulthood; a launch pad for careers; a savings bank, in particular for future property purchases; a refuge for respite and reflection; and a preferred residence, whether on account of comfort, cultural practice or to support parents. The paper further explores how far these purposes were associated in young adults’ accounts with social structures, individual agency or some combination of these. It concludes that the default understanding of graduates’ return and coresidence as a residual function when other options fail is insufficient. Such a generalisation obscures the different purposes which the return can enable; it overplays some notion of a broken biography rather than the positive contribution of coresidence to graduates’ trajectories towards adulthood and to their life experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the current youth transition system in Poland focusing on the role of industry partnerships with vocational upper secondary schools. On the example of the aviation cluster in the south-eastern Poland, this paper assesses the strong industry-led partnership established in 2007 with local schools and authorities in delivery of aviation-specific programmes, and its impact of local youth transitions to labour market. In contrast to Poland's national trend towards weak cooperation between industry and the vocational education sector, three major dynamics regarding the aviation cluster's influence on vocational education are observable. The region benefits from: strong leadership from local industry in influencing the supply of particular skills by local vocational education and training (VET) schools and universities; a high level of willingness of local government authorities at the mayor's and municipality's offices to support the aviation cluster's influence on VET; and a free-market model of student choice influencing the practice of local VET schools and training centres. Such cooperation is valuable for businesses and local institutes of education. However, these processes affect the equal chances of successful school-to-work transitions for graduates stratified in different educational pathways, and successful transitions are still constrained by the structure of Poland's system, which is increasingly assuming ‘education logic’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a single case study of one street gang in one London borough. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 gang members, or former gang members, and seven practitioners. The practitioners and gang members/ex-gang members reported different perspectives on how the gang was structured and drug dealing was organised. The gang members/ex-gang members suggested that the gang is a loose social network with little recognisable formal organisation. Although individual gang members sell drugs, the gang should not be viewed as a drug dealing organisation. Rather it is a composition of individual drug dealers who cooperate out of mutual self-interest. Therefore, some gang members are best described as independent entrepreneurs while others are subcontractors looking to ‘go solo’. The seven practitioners, however, tended to describe a more hierarchically structured gang, with formal recruitment processes. This divergence of perspective highlights an important consideration for policy and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses political generations theory to examine the main youth mobilisations during and since the twentieth century: pre-1939 fascist and communist movements; the student movements of the 1960s and 70s; movements that challenged colonial and neo-colonial rulers in less developed countries and young people's involvement in the revolutions that saw the end of communism in East-Central and South-East Europe in 1989. Conclusions from this review of the past are used in considering the likely significance of subsequent outbursts of political activism among young people: the ‘colour revolutions’ and other instances of youth mobilisation in former Soviet republics and other ex-communist countries; the Arab Spring and the series of movements that have challenged neo-liberalism – Anti-Globalisation, the Indignados and the Occupy movements.The paper notes that youth mobilisations that have led to the formation of new political generations that have changed their countries' politics then transformed the countries have typically extended over several decades, that initially youthful leaders have sometimes been middle-aged or older before achieving political power and that many of their actions on achieving power have been at variance with their youthful ideals. In conclusion, it is argued that it is still too early to tell whether any of the recent youth mobilisations signal the formation of new political generations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]