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This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [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]

It is often argued that economically marginalized young women occupy a school and post-school underclass, and that this underclass has a particular culture associated with it. Such views provoke a profound ambivalence in many of those who work with such young people. On the one hand, they are anxious to acknowledge the culture of the communities to which marginalized young women belong. On the other hand, they wish to avoid the pernicious implications of underclass theories that suggest disadvantage is the result of the culture and values of marginalized social groupings. This paper offers an overview and feminist critique of the structuralist and cultural or behaviourist strands of underclass theory. It focuses particularly on the work of Charles Murray, a major proponent of the culturalist perspective and the representation of the single mother in this discourse. It then considers how a less punitive theorization of marginalized cultures might be achieved by drawing on and adapting concepts from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The paper reflects on how such ideas might serve as a way of exploring how gender impacts on the forms of cultural capital available to young women in difficult economic circumstances. [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]

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]

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the impoverishment of prospects for those employed in the industrial and agricultural sectors in post-Soviet Russia, young people in vocational education colleges continue to be trained for 'poor work' in traditional large-scale enterprises. This article draws upon qualitative, case-study research in exploring young people's subjective orientations to a route to adulthood that is at once available and yet unviable, as well as their orientations to new forms of education and service sector employment. The article highlights the disjuncture which has emerged between the collectivist, class-based identities and modalities young people construct around transitions into initial vocational education and training (IVET) colleges and the individualized, choice-based narratives they use to describe experiences of later transitions into work. This shift from 'inheritance' to 'individualization' mirrors that among working-class youth elsewhere in the world, for whom the principal dimension of 'reflexivity' in the late-modern context has been the individualized attribution of blame for 'wrong choices'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]