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Young people form the primary target demographic of new ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt’s significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people’s economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people’s wellbeing. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

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

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

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. peerReviewed

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.

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