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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]

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]

This paper examines how marginalised youth including unemployed young men and teenage mothers come to be represented through labels such as ‘chav’ and ‘pramface’. It explores the deeply affective nature of these representations, how they leak out into everyday life and come adhere to particular bodies and spaces. A contribution of the paper is to move beyond the familiar terrain of textual deconstruction to further consider how lower working-class young men and teenage mothers manage social class stigma and might themselves speak back to these markers of abjection. In doing so they are seen as creative actors who may come to inhabit these seemingly negative articulations, dissimulate from them or resist them altogether. We conclude that while the stubborn markers of class disparagement cannot easily be displaced, paying attention to how they might be understood and re-evaluated within local youth circuits offers nuanced readings that may resonate more closely with working-class experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that young people's subcultural styles and identities are closely bound up with social class. We show that youth subcultures have been explained in a number of ways since emerging as a subject of serious study in the second half of the twentieth century, and that these explanations are located within a broader social scientific discourse. Fieldwork data collected through interviews with young people in Edinburgh and Newcastle indicate that, rather than being a free-floating lifestyle choice, young people's membership of subcultural groupings is largely determined by social class. In particular, the study shows that young people labelled as ‘Chavs’ or ‘Charvas’ should be understood as a subcultural group with specific social class affiliations. The paper concludes by considering some implications of these findings for theory, for further field research and for practical action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative research on youth transitions in a locale that faces all the objective problems of 'social exclusion' in extreme form, this article explores the ways in which young people are connected to, or disconnected from, mainstream opportunities, lifestyles and outlooks. Case studies are used to uncover the lived experience of single motherhood, drug-related crime and persistent unemployment. These are examined to reveal how they connect, or do not connect, with prevailing academic and policy discourses about 'excluded', 'underclass' youth. We argue that the policy-driven social exclusion paradigm does have analytical advantages over underclass theory. They both fail, however, to capture the diversity of transitions that evolve in areas like this and the way that local networks and cultures can serve to include economically marginal youth. We conclude by questioning some of the basic assumptions of government social inclusion policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]