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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]

Despite a growing concern about gangs in Britain, academic research that focuses on gangs remains scarce. Drawing on data from the ESRC-funded ethnographic research YOGEC (Youth Gangs in an English City) project, this paper explores the negotiation of space and place by young people living in inner-city areas affected by gangs. Using a combination of fieldwork observations and focus group and interview data, this paper charts the experiences of non-gang-involved young people living in known gang areas. These young people's restricted use of space, arising as a result of gang rivalries and the policing of inner-city areas, results in exclusion, marginalization and victimization. We illustrate how young people are identified as 'high risk', and how they continually negotiate a range of risks bound up with the territory that they inhabit and subsequent spatial boundaries that are formed. In doing so, we provide an understanding of the lives of young people who reside in places and spaces inhabited by gangs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to advance debates in youth studies about the contemporary relevance of social structures of class, race and gender to the formation of youth subcultures. I demonstrate how drawing on a cultural class analysis and education literature on learner identities and performativity can be productive in theorising the continued significance of class, and indeed also race and gender in young people's lives. In examining school-based friendships and (sub)cultural forms through empirical research in urban schools, I argue that not only are young people's subcultural groups structured by class, race and gender but also they are integral to the production of these identities. By examining the discursive productions of two school-based subcultures as examples: the ‘Smokers’ and the ‘Football’ crowd, I further argue that these identity positions embody resources or capitals which have differing value in the context of the urban school and thus demonstrate how race, class and gender privilege are maintained and reproduced through youth subculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the previous seven years the application of a social generation paradigm or ‘theory’ has gained increasing currency as a method in analysing young people's relationship with the life course. Whilst not a new concept or approach its resurgence and reconfiguration to ‘new’ times has seen some writers positioning it as a ‘new orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ within youth studies. In this it is seen as providing a conceptual framework that better helps us understand the complexity of circumstances and conditions that shape youth identities in late modern society. In this paper we examine and explore the underlying assumptions and claims that are made by those advocating the social generational paradigm, raising questions and seeking further clarification on a number of key themes. We accept youth studies needs to move beyond ‘old models’ that define and understand social context as a simply a tension between ‘structure or/and agency’ or as a ‘flavour’ to social action. To conclude therefore we propose the need to have an approach that is ecological and both accepts ‘social change’ and ‘continuity’ as critical parts of the life course, one that recognises the nature and influence of power and social reproduction, especially for different social classes, in shaping the experience of being young. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to consider continuities as well as change. Building on an earlier paper, this article provides a rejoinder to recent contributions to this debate written by Woodman and Threadgold. Attending to some misunderstandings, misinterpretations and oversights, the article aims to clarify and re-emphasise some important points I have made previously. In particular, the article argues for a coherent and comprehensive critical review of Beck's corpus before we uncritically and readily incorporate his perspectives into our ways of theorising the contemporary social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I compare socio-economic experiences and community perceptions expressed by socially and economically disadvantaged young people with those of university students living in the same post-industrial community. I consider markers of distinction among these young people in relation to their family and educational experiences. I also critique overlaps in their perceptions of their community with specific focus on recreational infrastructure and physical environment. Youth insights suggest that the downturn in the economy has had an impact on their families' ability to provide the traditional kind of support expected of working-class families. The resulting gaps in local cultural and social capital influence school successes and ultimately, economic life chances for youth in already marginalized communities. Despite varying life chances, all participants held similar perceptions of their community. Their shared views beg the question: can collaborations among fractions of young people strengthen efforts to advocate for social and economic security and comfort for all youth within and across disenfranchised communities? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the work on youth cultures and subcultures that emerged from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS) during the 1970s. I engage with a number of recent critiques of the 'youth sub/cultures project', including Thornton's influential work on rave and club cultures and its troubled engagement with class. I argue that the focus of the youth sub/cultures project on mediated cultural practices through which young people constitute themselves and their (gendered, classed and racialised) positions remains of value, especially the emphasis on a 'symptomatic reading' that locates these processes in a 'conjunctural analysis'. I end by exploring the legacy of this project for understanding youth, class and culture in contemporary late modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hobbema, Alberta, Canada is a community comprised of four First Nations. As with many of Canada's Aboriginal communities, Hobbema's population is young. High rates of socio-economic disadvantage, violence, family dysfunction, and substance abuse are linked to colonization, residential school policies, and discrimination. Crime rates, including gang-related crime in the area, are disproportionately high. In 2005 two police officers created the Hobbema Community Cadet Corps, a program which offers youth a pro-social alternative to criminal activity and gang involvement. The program provides youth with the opportunity to learn the value of group identity, discipline, and camaraderie. It also provides opportunities for recreational activities and travel otherwise unavailable to many in this impoverished area. This paper provides a description of the HCCCP, an overview of its activities and structure, and situates it within the crime prevention through social development framework which emphasizes the importance of building protective factors and reducing risk factors surrounding youth. Finally, a preliminary evaluation which highlights some of the challenges faced by program instructors is offered. The authors caution against relying solely on individualizing imperatives in attempts to deal with social structural issues of the types faced by citizens in Hobbema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of a 'death' of class in popular and policy discourse, this paper argues that social class is still a major force at work in young people's lives, particularly in the context of schooling. We argue that young people's subcultural groups are classed, in the way in which they are constructed in discourse. Drawing on a data set of 68 interviews with white, middle-class young people in three different cities in England, we argue that class can be seen and felt in young people's constructions of the 'chav', where white, working-class young people's ways of being and doing in the context of schooling, stand in stark contrast to the normative middle-class subject, and become pathologized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The local neighbourhood has an enduring significance for British urban, working-class youth in relation to their transitions, cultures and leisure practices. This paper examines these interrelated issues by drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken in 'Manor', a deprived, multi-ethnic East London neighbourhood. It explores the transitions taken by black, white and mixed-parentage young males (and some of their female peers), transitions that were formed by the interaction of paid work opportunities with youth cultures and leisure practices ('road' and 'grafter' cultures), ethnicity, gender and social networks. Even within a single deprived and stigmatized neighbourhood such as Manor, a number of transitions could be identified. These include 'grafting' at manual, masculine 'dirty work' in the construction industry; going to college allied to 'clean', service-sector work; and an 'alternative' route of 'working on road' by undertaking a variety of low-level, illegal money-making activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, through the theoretical lens of life-course research and reproduction theory, we employ 15 years of longitudinal data from the British Columbia, Canada Paths on Life's Way project to examine the extent to which educational and career pathways of this cohort of 1988 high school graduates are gendered, individualized, prolonged, diversified; to determine marriage and parenthood patterns in relation to educational and occupational participation and outcomes across time; and to assess the extent to which social class still matters. We employ a transition probabilities analysis to follow the journeys of over 730 individuals from high school through the post-secondary system and work by identifying a sequence of significant stages. We then correlate these transition rates with relevant factors that influenced respondents' lives. We demonstrate quantitatively that although the life courses of young women and men are experienced differently, there is an overall regularity in outcomes. Their 'choices' at key transition points are to large extent shaped by external structures and social class and gender differences are evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]