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In this paper, we begin to explore the connections between Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people’s intersecting identities and their everyday practices of constructing viable alternative lives in settler-colonial Australia. Drawing upon a series of in-depth narrative interviews and workshops with Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people that occurred across a four-year period (2019–2022), the paper discusses the core ways in which Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ young people are actively engaged in collective and individual processes of remaking their lifeworlds in efforts to realise viable socially inclusive and just communities of belonging and welcome. The article first briefly introduces key concepts and summarises the broader concerns of the young people involved in the research, as articulated during in-depth narrative interviews. The young people identify key areas they believe need to be seriously taken up for consideration in building alternative Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ futures. Young people collectively articulated these as enabling alternative futures of pleasure and desire, creating opportunities for gender, sex and sexuality education and, finally, collectively creating safe spaces for Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ gathering, welcoming and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the concepts of cultural narrative to examine career choice among post-Soviet Russian teenagers going into higher education. Drawing on insights from cultural sociology more broadly and the cultural autonomy thesis more specifically, we demonstrate how the cultural narrative of a university degree as a 'must-have at all costs' subjugates various career decision-making logics identified, while downplaying individual agency and reflexivity. We argue that, by misdirecting career choice from opportunities to constraints, the dominant narrative serves to limit, rather than diversify, young people's career choice and social mobility potential. We go on to theorise the interplay between culture and social institutions. Drawing on the cultural interpretation of Unified State Exam – a neoliberal educational governance tool – we show how cultural narrative hijacks institutional interpretations and usages, re-grounding neoliberal sensibilities in Soviet-era ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political participation of youth is growing in importance with the proliferation of youth parliaments, councils, and online campaigning. Yet, these sites are not accessible to all youth, especially those from minority, or refugee communities. Activism by these types of youth is often denounced or reduced to dehumanising narratives of their experiences. This paper aims to explore alternative spaces for and political participation of refugees through participatory art and exhibition spaces, which are critical for devising policies for pre-emptive peacebuilding and challenging potential intercommunal conflict. In this paper, we draw on a Photovoice project in Istanbul, Johannesburg and a refugee settlement in South-West Uganda (Oruchinga) that brought youth from FDPs and host communities together to reflect on their everyday experiences. All these sites are marked by increasing anti-refugee sentiments and xenophobia, where the voices of refugees are often denied and misinterpreted, making them compelling cases to elaborate on alternative participation methods and spaces for the political participation of refugees. The paper engages with the idea of epistemic (in)justice and resistance as an overarching condition to explore how the youth developed collective political voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediate living arrangements, like shared flats, collective accommodation or double residence, have become increasingly common due to the individualization of life scripts, and because of economic and cultural shifts in western societies. However, they have been assumed to be negligible in Mediterranean Europe, where housing transitions are 'late but simple'. This paper challenges this assumption, using Catalonia (Spain) as a case study. Data coming from the 2017 Catalan Youth Survey offer some clear-cut results. First, shared flats and double residence are not uncommon among Catalans: respectively 15.7% and 8.1% of youngsters experience them sometime during their twenties. Second, multinomial regression models show that double residence implies economic reliance on parents, it is most common among university students, especially those with well-off parents, and among young people coming from rural areas. Conversely, shared flats appear to be linked to precarious economic situations, and they are common among young immigrants, and those living in the city of Barcelona. Both arrangements are transitory, being less frequent among older people. Some expected predictors of intermediate living turned out to predict double residence instead, so this semi-dependent practice could be the equivalent of 'living away from home' for youngsters in 'familistic' territories as Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the call for more research on the 'missing middle' by reporting the findings of a small-scale qualitative longitudinal study in the North of England exploring the labour market transitions of young people completing compulsory schooling with mid-level qualifications and seeking employment. It found that participants desired training which aligned with their skills, interests and future work intentions. Participants were drawn to seek apprenticeships because they offered 'earning and learning' in a real-life work environment. However, for the vast majority, apprenticeships were not available, so they turned to college to articulate their choices and gain work-related training. Qualifications were gained in order to gain leverage in the job market and help them achieve 'getting on' work. However, often a period of 'pinballing' between their ambitions and the reality of the labour market ensued due to the lack of desirable quality work available. The majority of participants were still resisting 'going nowhere' work and making efforts to achieve 'getting on' work when interviewed, however, some had stopped making the effort and resigned themselves to on-going poor quality work. The process of biographicity was, for them, a reconciliation with on-going low-quality work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article distances itself from the scholarship's tendency to describe youth leadership through the prism of the adult world. Leaning on ethnographic data, I explain how adolescent leadership is an outgrowth of social relations and cultural symbols that are perpetually negotiating the status quo. As part of an extensive study on female youth leaders, the paper focuses on the rich array of insignia that are made, worn, and exchanged by my research subjects: teenage female members of the Israeli Scouts (a co-ed Jewish youth movement). More specifically, I examine how the creation and display of material symbols on clothing mirror the leadership identity of Girl Scouts. In contrast to their uniforms and rank, which conform to restrictions and a formal hierarchy, the subjects engender a dynamic, non-formal, and open-ended set of symbols that visually represent power and status within their social group. Among the principal contributions of this study are insights on the nature of adolescent leadership and how it is wrought, maintained, and renewed within social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates young people’s mobile practices of ‘making do’ as they negotiate work, study and play in the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on Singapore, and drawing on original empirical data derived from online journaling by twenty participants, the paper elaborates on their practices of ‘making do’ when working from home. Using an interdisciplinary approach spanning youth, cultural and architectural studies, the paper considers new formations and appropriations of domestic time and space. Critically situating the home as a hybrid domestic characterised by its porous public-private space and multiple-disjunctive time, ‘making do’ is evident in a range of spatial tactics: from occupying temporary mobile spaces to altering physical spaces with objects and devices, to time-sharing, to developing practices that affirm and contest ascribed social roles. Through switching objects and roles in the hybrid domestic home, our study participants not only created new mobilities within the immobile constraints of the pandemic home, they also transformed the spatial and temporal norms of study, work and play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we draw on the findings on teens' transmedia practices from the research project Transmedia Literacy carried out in eight countries from Europe, Latin America and Australia between 2015 and 2018. An ethnographic approach that combined different research methods, including questionnaires, participatory-creative workshops, interviews, media diaries and online community observation, was used to explore what teens are doing with media. In this article we focus on how teens perform their digital identity on Instagram. This social network is notably popular among young people, and the practice of taking, editing, selecting, hiding and sharing photos and videos through it is part of teenagers' everyday lives and online interactions. We argue that this curating process encompasses several aspects that are central to teenagers creating a digital persona on Instagram, including content creation, validation through 'likes' and 'followers' and socio-technical automation. This curation can lead in certain profiles to a professionalized use of the platform, so that the self becomes an object of marketing and promotion for career and business purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding what youth aspire is widely considered to be a critical step towards recognizing further changes in societies. This article explores young people's aspirations, including personal and collective desires, in a less-studied social setting, Yazd in Iran. This paper also examines the differentiating roles of gender and family income for the importance and chance of accomplishment attached to these ambitions. The data for this study comes from an initial explanatory phase followed by a survey comprising 2700 youth in Yazd. Our findings suggest that marriage-based and political aspirations are the most and least important dimensions, respectively. We also found that the importance given to aspirations and chance of their realization are generally, but not consistently, different in terms of gender and family income. Accordingly, young women, compared to young men, commonly attended more to their ambitions but perceived them as less reachable. In most cases, youth from low-income families considered their desires less accessible than others. Drawing an importance-expectation matrix for each gender group, 'having a healthy body and soul in aging' was introduced as a critical aspiration with the widest gap. We discuss the results and implications vis-à-vis contextual and structural conditions in which the youth are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change (CC), warming at 'double the global average rate'. The southern African region is already a CC hotspot with climate variability exposing stark societal and biophysical ecosystem vulnerabilities. South African and southern African youth are beginning to claim their place at various CC negotiation tables adding to the voices of government and various civil society groups. In this paper, written by a group of youth activists, civil society organisation leaders, educators and climate scientists, we track the journey that a group of young change-makers and local government officials (in the age range 15–24) have taken in securing a seat at the policy table. The challenges, caveats and course corrections that have been taken in the Johannesburg Youth Climate Action Plan (YCAP) process and the wider country, are interrogated. This YCAP Johannesburg experiment provides a useful learning exercise for subsequent CC policy and practice engagements in the country and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an examination of 'frexting' ('friend' + 'sexting'), which is defined as the exchange of personally-produced intimate images among friends. It draws upon accounts of frexting shared by teenage girls during a 2016 study investigating sexting conducted in Surrey, England. Frexting is theorised as a form of homosociality among girls and explores the extent to which and how it reflects, reproduces and subverts the dominant gendered social order within youth digital intimacies. The analysis suggests that while frexting involves intimate self-representation away from the male gaze, it reflects and reinforces a post-feminist cultural landscape characterised by (self-)scrutiny and regulation of girls' bodies and bodily self-representations. Frexting worked to demonstrate an authentic, relaxed, carefree and confident but, importantly, non-sexual sensibility, with implications for who and what constitutes legible participation. While subverting normative interpretations of girls' bodies as inherently, and problematically, sexual, frexting did not fundamentally trouble the post-feminist cultural landscape within which the girls were operating. The paper concludes by arguing that for frexting to become a truly emancipatory endeavour, it is necessary to dismantle the socio-cultural context that restricts and regulates girls' abilities to relate to and represent their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a backdrop of increasing cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female, young people have been positioned within the wider social imaginary as radical trailblazers for a new, progressive gender order. This paper provides original insights that empirically ground and interrogate such claims. Drawing on findings from focus group interviews held with 136 young people (aged 16–24) in the UK, the paper demonstrates how young people's understandings and narrations of gender diversity both support and contest linear progress narratives. We show how young people position their acceptance of gender diversity in contradistinction to older generations. However, this narrative of generational progress was undermined and complicated by tensions and ambiguities within young people's talk. Our findings suggest that, alongside being accepting of gender diversity, young people also experience confusion and misunderstanding which may mean that they are more comfortable with stable and binary forms of gender diversity. Moreover, some young people express ideological resistance to gender diversity, informed by wider debates around 'identity politics'. Overall, we stress the importance of situating young people's gender talk amidst multiple discursive constellations through which increasingly politicised struggles around the meanings of 'gender' are currently playing out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses empirical evidence to explore the nature of employment transitions for a cohort of marginalised young people in England. The findings presented reveal the importance of past experiences, largely determined by prevailing opportunity structures, in shaping the present and reiterate the need to see transition as a historical process. Longitudinal data collected as part of an evaluation of a youth employment programme called Talent Match provides the evidence for the paper. The routes participants took in terms of securing and sustaining employment are examined. The paper develops a typology of different transitional groups to explore these routes based on the movement (or lack of) into and out of employment. The relative importance of different factors in explaining the groupings are assessed, with results underlining how the ongoing change participants were encountering in the present was inextricably linked to their past. In response, this paper suggests a reemphasis on understanding youth as both a stage of 'being' and 'becoming', seeing youth as both a condition in its own right but also part of the life course process, and calls for a more dynamic understanding of youth transitions among policymakers and those designing youth employment programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people and their housing conditions are closely linked, since housing determines whether an individual can lead a smooth transition from dependence to independence. Nevertheless, young people across many societies face growing problems in achieving this transition, which can be attributed to rising house prices and the lack of affordable alternatives to homeownership. Moreover, young people are likely to have vastly divergent experiences and outcomes depending on their tenure. This paper explores these issues in relation to young people in Beijing. The paper argues that the housing issues in Beijing have distinct local characteristics. Drawing on a unique dataset of 83 housing stories, this paper explores housing differentiation and experiences amongst young, promising middle-class people in Beijing. This paper attempts to answer the following research questions: What factors contribute to young people's access to homeownership in light of the rising house prices in Beijing? How is homeownership differentiated by different classifications? The answers to the research questions are the key to understanding the differentiation of homeownership amongst young, promising middle-class people in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the need to better understand intercultural relationships among rural youth. Altered relations of labour, finance and power have seen the growth of international migrant labour across rural spaces of the Global North from the Global South, notably nations of the Pacific, Asia and Africa (Argent, N. 2011. "What's New about Rural Governance? Australian Perspectives and Introduction to the Special Issue." Australian Geographer 42 (2): 95–103). This paper focuses on Australia, where labour relations, humanitarian programs, visa categories and mobility desires have led to new rural futures (Hugo, G. 2014. "Immigrant Settlement in Regional Australia: Patterns and Processes." In Rural Change in Australia: Population, Economy, Environment, edited by R. Dufty-Jones and J. Connell, 52–82. Farnham: Ashgate). Young people are at the forefront of these changes, with youth forging pathways and relationships for themselves and their families. However, within the burgeoning literature of rural intercultural relations we know little about young people's social relationships within these transforming places. This paper outlines a framework to progress such an agenda and focuses on conditions, capacities and identity resources within rural trajectories. It argues that empirical scholarship on these intersecting concepts may generate insights into young people's relationships within today's transforming rural multicultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 economic crisis has had particularly negative effects on the youth labour market outcomes in Southern Europe. Thus, it is hardly surprising that many Southern European youngsters see migration as the only way to escape from under-employment and precariousness. In this context, the article studies the reasons for emigration to Mexico of a group of young graduates from Italy and Spain. The paper is based on 42 in-depth semi-structured interviews with young graduates, aged 29 years old or less on their arrival in Mexico. The article first explores the relevance of the economic crisis as the main reason behind the migration of this group. It is revealed that the interviewed graduates had a precarious labour incorporation back in their countries of origin, and migration appeared as a means to further their careers. Second, the paper analyses the interviewees' labour incorporation in Mexico; in many cases this coincides with an extended university-work transition, since many of them had not secured full-time permanent jobs before their arrival in Mexico. Finally, the paper explores the interviewees' future plans. These depend not only on their work experiences in Mexico but also on their degree of social and cultural integration in the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth studies has called for new ways of thinking about transitions for young people. This paper argues for new ways of understanding times during transition, particularly for young people with complex support needs. Young people (16–26 years) with complex support needs are those who experience multiple forms of social disadvantage, and who depend on siloed services to support them. Complex support needs are created by the intersection between a person and a complex system of services including education, health, disability, health, mental health, homelessness, youth justice and child protection. In this context, transition has been understood as a physical movement between and within separate services. Using the arts based method of body mapping with 31 young people with complex support needs from three Eastern states of Australia, this paper reports on how young people themselves experience transition. Young people identified three distinct times during transition that resonated with existing literature on critical moments, liminal periods and meaning making times. However, these times were not sequential or singular, nor were they a reflection of service transitions. Instead, this paper contends that times during transition were not as much about moving forward, as about simultaneously living with complex and chaotic pasts and presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a ‘palette’ of interdisciplinary methods to explore young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences in the hyper-diverse suburban locations of Chorlton and Wythenshawe, Manchester, UK. This paper contributes to literature on the emerging theme of hyper-diversity by exposing the heterogeneity of young people’s drinking experiences, with a focus on bars, pubs, streets and parks. I demonstrate how young people’s inclusion and exclusion from such spaces is bound up with the traditional identity markers of age, gender and class, alongside more performative, embodied, emotional and affective aspects; for instance, the atmospheres, smell and soundscapes of particular drinking spaces. More than this, the paper enhances understandings of hyper-diversity by elucidating the ways in which young people’s everynight alcohol-related mobilities and diversity interpenetrate each other. Through analysing young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences, I show how young people are hyper-diverse in terms of their alcohol-related lifestyles, attitudes, and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the number of children in custody declines, the complex needs of many of them have increased. A review of the youth justice system stated that education needs to be the central pillar in preventing offending. Research suggests that education fails children, by prioritising reputation and the standards agenda over providing care and education that meets individual needs (Runswick-Cole. 2011. "Time to End the Bias Towards Inclusion." British Journal of Special Education 38 (3): 11). This paper explores this failure for children prior to and in custody itself, and relates this to a theoretical model that combines children's need and self-efficacy. It suggests that until children are guaranteed an environment where their basic needs are met, there is little hope of either education or training helping them to access a life free from crime, whatever other policy changes in custody are implemented. This research shows that current provisions, for children in custody, fail to support children's needs around safety, belonging and self-esteem. Thus, it is no surprise that children in Secure Training Centres fail to self-actualise their educational abilities, as they lack the self-efficacy to successfully engage with education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case management is promoted as a trademark of community service practice with young people funded by neoliberal social policy. In spite of this, case management practice and case managers have largely escaped the attention of youth scholars. In this paper, we examine the funding parameters of two youth case management services in Australia to reveal the governing effects on young people, case managers and NGOs. We develop an analytical framework that exposes the compounding effect of interacting governable spaces that facilitates a critical analysis of case management revealing the problems of governance within this seemingly generic practice method. Shifting focus from the young person as the object of governance to include the case manager and case management as separate but interacting governable spaces, provides new insights into the problematisations underpinning case management practice with young people. We argue compounding governable spaces provides insight into the infantilisation of young people that is amplified and reinforced within and between case managers, and case management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a study of the life course of 40 young people (aged 18–35) in Bologna (Italy), who are active in eight different political organizations. It explores whether the political organization, given that the city's political context is the same for all participants, affects the variation of their pathways. It does so by answering the following question: which phases in the lives of young participants are interconnected with the political organizations they are engaged in? To evaluate the impact of the organizational context on young participants, we will take into consideration three dimensions: the degree of bureaucratization, forms of action, and political orientation. Situated at the intersection of youth and social movement studies, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the connections between primary and political socialization processes in shaping young participants' mobilization and sustained participation within different political organizations. Our empirical findings show that, if the degree of bureaucratization was constantly salient in the two phases, on the other hand political orientation was more salient during participants' mobilization and the forms of action during participants' sustained participation. In the conclusion, the paper critically discusses the empirical findings of our analysis of the respondents' narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on empirical data from two individual research projects, this paper extends the literature on child and youth incarceration and offers a previously unexplored analysis of experiences and transitions through institutional environments for young people. Different penal environments have different operational practices and treatment according to arbitrary age-determined constructions of childhood, youth and young adulthood, evidenced by decreasing safeguards. This article demonstrates the reduction of operative and supportive investment in those held, and the shifting perception from children that require 'training' to young people and young adults who are managed and whose particular needs are neglected. The arbitrary nature of transitions presents a paradox between developmental maturity as an individualistic ongoing process and arbitrary age-determined transitions. As such, it is argued that there should be a more developmental approach to caring for young people across penal environments which accounts for their ongoing maturity and complex needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminally exploited young people are often found with tangible evidence of criminality, challenging traditional notions of the victim offender dichotomy. This paper presents criminally exploited young people’s narratives regarding their lived experiences in Wales. It offers a nuanced perspective of victimhood by drawing on their personal accounts of how they were offered a false sense of hope by individuals who manipulated their unmet needs and limited resources to garner their trust. Young people appeared resigned to exploitative relationships and violence because of their powerlessness and lack of opportunities but rationalised their involvement rather than acknowledging themselves as victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people in residential alcohol and other drug (AOD) services build meaningful relationships with workers during their stays. In this paper we use an ethics of care framework to explore what young people said about care, how it was delivered and what they valued about it. Drawing on three waves of longitudinal interviews conducted with 38 young people over 12 months, we discuss our findings according to two overarching themes – opportunities enabled by care and limits to care. Young people’s descriptions highlight the potential for care to challenge stigma, enhance self-worth and wellbeing, enable respectful staff-client relationships, and foster positive relationships crucial for maintaining engagement. At the same time, young people described challenges around providing both individual and collective care, coproducing care in structured environments, and facilitating care as young people transition out of residential services. These findings shed light on the delicate balance between care provision and contextual constraints within AOD settings. This emphasises the need for ethical relationships built on clear communication, mutual respect, and ongoing forms of care. Recognising the value of care work, especially in transitions out of acute treatment services, is essential for reshaping funding approaches to prioritise meaningful and continuing care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perfectionism has been a popular topic of interest in psychological research over the last three decades, with research focusing on youth emerging in the early 2000s. However, the term ‘perfectionism’ is rarely used outside of a psychological framework. Despite lexical differences, girlhood studies researchers have employed a sociocultural lens to study ‘supergirls’: teenage girls who strive to have it all, at all costs. Although these literatures seem to explore a similar phenomenon, they tend to remain disparate. Consequently, this paper argues for the utility of a multidisciplinary framework for studying youth perfectionism to bridge these two seemingly opposite, yet mutually informing, literatures. First, disciplinary understandings of youth who strive for perfection in psychology and girlhood studies, respectively, are summarized. In the following section, a multidisciplinary reading of the extant literature is applied to offer a nuanced account of who a teenage perfectionist may be and how perfectionism might manifest among diverse youth. This article concludes with a call for researchers from both psychological and sociocultural backgrounds to embrace a multidisciplinary framework for research with perfectionistic youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical youth studies understands contemporary youth transitions as an interplay between long term changes in labour markets and state approaches to welfare and the regulatory presence of societal norms about the 'right kind' of transitions and the 'right kind' of young adult citizens. This work is intersectional, with emphasis given to class, gender and race and ethnicity. However, in comparison less focus is given to disability, even though it shapes youth transition possibilities. This paper highlights the problems created by paying insufficient attention to disability, alongside making the case that there are conceptual tools useful to critical youth studies within disability studies. (1) Disability studies approaches to inequality help make the case that material inequalities are still an important factor in young people's lives. (2) A focus on disability supports arguments that as forms of state support dwindle, family is increasingly significant – and problematic – as a resource in youth transitions. (3) Critical disability studies can help explore the significance of normative embodied markers of transitions for young people making their way towards adulthood. (4) Collaboration can encourage deeper recognition of the relational quality of transitional processes and move away from a linear understanding of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young vocational graduates face many expectations related to the norms of worker-citizenship when entering the labour market. Due to contemporary uncertainties and the new realities of adulthood, meeting these expectations may not be easy. These expectations might also conflict with young adults' desires. This paper examines how vocational education graduates position themselves in the labour market and what kind of worker-citizenship they produce in their working-life stories. The study is based on 32 individual interviews with 18- to 25-year-old vocational graduates with different positions in the Finnish labour market. The findings support earlier research on the importance of assuming the position of worker-citizen for these graduates. In new adulthood, they aim but are also forced to shape their worker-citizenship when, for some, vocational qualification has not redeemed its promises. Based on empirical findings, the article argues that ideals maintained in vocational education may need to be shaped within the unpredictable realities of new adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing independence of young adults has become more complex and uncertain in Europe over the last decades. Previous research suggests that patterns of independent living and housing demand have become more differentiated and socially stratified, especially since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). The decline in homeownership and the availability of social housing has been accompanied by an increase in private renting and shared accommodation. Moreover, young adults have increasingly relied on their parents for both material and non material support to overcome constraints and achieve independent living. This paper examines how the relationship between parental background and both young adults' leaving home, and their first housing tenure changed during the GFC in different European housing contexts. Using longitudinal data from EU-SILC (2008–2018), the results show that parental background still plays a significant stratifying role in the housing independence of young adults from the pre – to the post-crisis period, particularly in terms of first tenure status rather than home-leaving. The influence of the housing context on both housing market opportunities and the role of parents in young adults' independence shapes the shift from co-residence with parents to living independently in either homeownership or rented accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, the Italian labour market has seen increasing unemployment, job contract instability and lower wages as a result of the global economic crisis and the policies fielded by successive governments to reduce labour market rigidities, regarded as the primary cause of high unemployment, for young people and women in particular. This paper analyses young workers' job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is relevant for workers' well-being, but it has also been shown to affect workers' productivity and hence firms' performance. We analyse overall job satisfaction and satisfaction for two job dimensions, stability and pay. We contribute to the existing literature by investigating whether job stability can compensate for a lower wage and whether the opposite is true, i.e. if a higher pay can compensate for job instability. Our findings show that overall job satisfaction is affected only by pay level. However, when we consider satisfaction with stability and pay satisfaction jointly, the type of contract seems to be more relevant than the pay in determining the probability of being either satisfied or dissatisfied with both dimensions. Therefore, if different dimensions of satisfaction are considered, both stability and pay are relevant, and there appears to be no compensating effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the main dynamics behind the patterns of friendship between Muslim youth and the Anglo-Australian majority in Australia, from the perspectives of young Muslim Australians. In particular, we focus on the extent to which race and religiosity play a role in shaping these friendship patterns. We use qualitative data obtained from 64 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with young Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24. Building upon the existing notions of religious homophily, we show that our respondents separate public acquaintances from close friendships and confine their acquaintances with the Anglo-Australians to the public sphere. Young Muslim Australians perceive the drinking culture of Anglo-Australians as a major barrier to socialisation in private spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education and work are two essential parts of young people’s lives. Currently, the relationship between education and work in the youth policy field is predominantly discussed from the perspective of a narrow economic discourse of education to work transitions. This is despite the fact that this narrow paradigm of examining youth transition from school to work which was prevalent in the 1980s and early 1990s has been consistently problematised and re-worked in the past few decades. Drawing on longitudinal data collected from a cohort of Australian young adults reporting their self-assessment of and their reflections on the connection between their study and work, this paper provides new empirical evidence in support of some of the arguments that have emerged within the field of youth studies regarding transition. Grounded in a broader conceptualisation of transition and informed by theories of youth citizenship, this paper highlights the complexities involved in young people’s navigation of education and work, and proposes the metaphor of a double helix which considers education and work as two interconnected venues through which recognition and meaning are achieved by young people in a postmodern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores young Aboriginal women’s views on sex and relationships in Australia – including their beliefs about broader social attitudes relating to sexuality, gender, and well-being – and how these understandings can impact young women’s sexual health. The project adopted a strengths-based approach and used peer interviewing to investigate how Aboriginal young people in urban settings develop and manage their sexual well-being. The findings draw on interviews with 35 Aboriginal young women, between 16 and 26 years old and living in Western Sydney, Australia. Although the young women’s views and experiences were broad and diverse, several key themes were identified. In this paper, we explore how young women’s understandings and experiences of sexual shame were gendered and racialised, how they reconciled shame-inducing discourses by embracing more open and positive views about sexuality and how they drew on various sources to foster self-worth and sexual agency. Moreover, the paper describes what young women saw as the defining features of positive sexual relationships which, in their views, included love, connection, respect, consent, trust, honesty and responsibility. Implications for how young women’s ties to family, community and culture supported them in fostering sexual well-being are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many children under the age of 18 are drawn into unpaid caring roles because they live in families where there is chronic illness, mental health problems or substance misuse, and because other alternatives are not available. Many of these children, widely referred to as 'young carers', provides regular and significant amounts of care, often 'hidden' because of the absence of awareness by professionals in the fields of education, health and social care. While there are some positive outcomes for children, published research also shows that children's caring tasks can have negative outcomes, especially during the transition between school and further/higher education and paid work. This paper presents an overview, cross-national and comparative analysis of the different legislation, policy and service frameworks to support young carers in a number of countries. It utilises a qualitative assessment approach and a 7-point classification to understand the state of development and progress since 2017. While the legislation, policy and service frameworks differ significantly among the observed countries, an international and collaborative research network has emerged in the last five years. This plays a vital role as a driver for increasing the awareness of young carers and further national and cross-national policy developments in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to influence the direction of government policy decision-making, many young people are politically engaged, not through voting and party membership like youth in previous decades, but rather through membership in social, environmental or identity-centered organizations, lobby groups or advocacy organizations, and online groups. In this paper, we investigate the many ways that Canadian Arab youth get involved in the formal political system and examine the nature of that involvement. We have found that Canadian Arab youth show a higher level of political participation than the Canadian youth population as a whole and that rather than being politically alienated, Canadian Arab youth are active participants in Canadian society, as well as an interested and diligent citizenry. We examine the possible forces galvanizing Arab youths' political interest and mobilizing them into action. Based on our findings, we argue that the Canadian political landscape is changing due to substantive contributions from ethnic minority youth, including Arab youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of qualitative research examining young Indigenous Australians’ sexual health highlights the profoundly social nature of young people’s sexual lives. Nineteen peer reviewed published papers were identified for inclusion. Findings reveal efforts made by some young Indigenous Australians to control their sexual lives, mitigate risk and maintain their sexual health. The review identified factors which are conducive to sexual health risks and vulnerability, including incomplete knowledge about STIs and safer sexual practices; gossip and ridicule concerning sexual activity and its consequences; damaging expectations about male prerogatives with respect to sexual relationships; limited inter-generational communication about sexual health issues; inadequate school-based sexual health education; and tensions between Indigenous and biomedical explanations of sexual health issues. Future research priorities include a focus on young Indigenous people in cities and towns across Australia, and in regional and remote settings in New South Wales and Victoria; understanding how Indigenous cultural values support young people’s sexual health; young men’s sexual and service-based practices; and the experiences of same-sex attracted and gender diverse youth. This research would inform the design and delivery of culturally safe and acceptable sexual health services and programmes, underpinned by an understanding of factors in young Indigenous Australians’ everyday sexual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the UK, transition to university has become regarded as the 'normative' next step for young people following completion of their post-16 education. This paper examines the views of 23 young people who, despite being suitably qualified to progress to university, were anticipating alternative pathways and options. The paper illuminates the centrality of young people's 'learning identities' in their decisions and the role of wider social contexts in structuring their opportunities to embark on higher education. Their 'learning identities' informed their views on the value of higher education and other options in securing future employment. The implications of these findings are highly significant in the context of congested and competitive UK labour markets in which obtaining a degree has become, in very many contexts, the bare minimum for securing employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence is Australia compares well with other countries on dimensions of social cohesion, social division and conflict. In addition, the Australian community generally reports high levels of satisfaction and sense of belonging. There are however also areas for improvement in terms of acceptance, integration and citizenship in highly visible minority groups. This paper outlines an exploratory study of social connectedness and the effect of a youth development programme. Research supports the view that such programmes can produce significant benefits for participants, although it is not clear which aspects of these programmes are most effective for any outcome or population group. Validity is strongly evidenced by measuring dimensions of belonging, inclusion and participation, both independently and collectively. Noting social capital is fragile and subject to disruption from forces within and beyond the local group, some policy implications are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world where opportunities are increasingly limited, young people are encouraged to become resilient and entrepreneurial in their pursuit of the traditional markers of adulthood. Social enterprise and community organisations dedicated to supporting young people seek to recast these expectations by providing supportive work and training environments and cultures and encouraging young people to find passion and hope in economic conditions that have failed to deliver the security and wellbeing that was promised. These organisations identify and respond to complex issues like unemployment and disengagement, homelessness and housing precarity, and provide personal development, support, education, training and employment options. In this paper, we explore how youth-focused social enterprise and community organisation programmes shape dispositions of resilience and entrepreneurialism. Drawing on the work of Butler and Anthanasiou and Dey and Mason, we argue that social organisations re-imagine the 'social therapeutics' that young people may require in relation to their participation in neoliberal forms of governmentality. We hope to challenge conceptualisations of such interventions as purely bounded by neoliberal and pro-capitalist therapeutic logics, by identifying the complex and sometimes contradictory goals that community organisations and social enterprises work towards in supporting young people to navigate a precarious economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pasifika peoples in Australia generally refer to migrants from the Pacific region (Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia) and their descendants. Despite their unique strengths and rich cultural heritage, young Pasifika peoples in Australia can experience challenges navigating different worlds. This paper describes the experiences of belonging and identity that shape Pasifika young people (16–24 years) living in the Logan area, SouthEast Queensland. A total of 30 talanoas with young people were conducted. The research revealed how, through habitual use of places and the performance of everyday life, Pasifika young people create a sense of belonging in place and form dynamic, multicultural identities, and places of belonging, accruing what has been termed 'polycultural capital'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 39 in-depth interviews with young people experiencing homelessness in a large Canadian city this paper explores the identity processes at the heart of how young people make decisions about getting by on the street. The paper integrates insights from cognitive sociology and narrative theories of identity to highlight an active, complex, and socially situated decision-making process. In particular, it explores the role played by three types of dispositional processes identified in the dual process and cognitive sociology literature: cultured capacities, dispositions, and cultural scripts. The analysis shows how the young people in the sample used their identity narratives to engage with and underwrite these dispositional influences and connect them back to an internalized sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional view since the early 2000s has been that participation in higher education (HE) is a risky pathway for disadvantaged young people in England; the social risk of entering an alien environment combines with the financial risk of rising costs and questionable long-term returns. This riskiness has been constructed as a major barrier to participation. However, national administrative data cast doubt on whether this analysis still holds true. Despite significant rises in tuition fees, the proportion of disadvantaged young people entering HE has continued to rise, with advantaged groups seemingly being more price-sensitive. Data from recent qualitative studies has also suggested that young people are now less attuned to risks. This paper considers whether circumstances in wider society have shifted perceptions of risk. The volatility resulting from the global financial crisis appears to have repositioned HE as a less risky option than early entry to the labour market, especially with more jobs becoming 'graduate', while the social risk has declined as HE has diversified. The paper draws on theoretical perspectives from Beck, Boudon, Simon and Kahneman to argue that many disadvantaged young people now view HE as a form of 'insurance' against an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In countries worldwide, Outdoor Education (OE) offers rich possibilities for learning. OE has been researched for many decades; however the field lacks an integrating framework for its different historical, geographical and disciplinary conceptualisations. The outcomes of OE programmes are well documented and appear diverse, yet also have common attributes suggesting there is scope for unifying approaches. Although substantive barriers to the conduct of OE programmes have been identified, these have seldom been synthesised. This paper offers a narrative review of the literature addressing three key questions designed to look rearward at where OE has come from: (i) how is OE conceptualised, and what theoretical models have been used in OE? (ii) what evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of OE programmes? (iii) what are the barriers to conducting OE programmes? The paper then advances onward with an integrated framework for reconceptualising OE and providing insights into how the field may be strengthened and augmented.20124 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal definitions of sexual consent emphasise 'freedom' as central to valid consent; however, power inequalities may complicate freedom. This paper discusses findings from a two-stage focus group study with young people (aged 13–23) in England exploring the implications of power inequalities for sexual consent. In Stage 1, 77 participants explored and ranked the types of power inequalities they felt were common within young people's sexual relationships, with age, gender and popularity being identified as the most common power inequalities. In Stage 2, 43 participants discussed power inequalities using scenarios based on the Stage 1 findings and considered their implications for sexual consent. Thematic analysis of the data produced two themes: powerless and powerful roles in consent communication and power inequalities implicitly constrain freedom to consent. Consent communication was constructed as a unidirectional process whereby those with more power initiate, and those with less, gatekeep. Such roles require deconstruction to position consent as mutual and actively negotiated by partners. Further, since power inequalities were seen to place implicit constraints on freedom to consent, we advocate for an explicit exploration of power and privilege within Relationships and Sex Education to equip young people to recognise, challenge and negotiate these constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how everyday practices in a day shelter for undocumented youth interfere with binary narratives of belonging versus non-belonging. Tapping into scholarship on a home in the face of displacement and marginalization, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the so-called ‘Youth Living Room’ in Amsterdam. Caught up in migration management, the undocumented young people present here experience structural exclusion and are cut off from welfare arrangements in the Netherlands. But while their precarious situation was reinforced even further under COVID-19 measures, in the Youth Living Room, undocumented youths engaged in mundane practices that incited feelings of belonging. In the absence of a house and faced with the closure of public space, the Youth Living Room as a semi-public place accommodated ‘homemaking practices’. These homemaking practices, I argue, attest to the complexities of belonging and rather suggest alternative orderings to a dichotomized politics of belonging; this paper shows that homemaking practices in this semi-public shelter alert us to the inherent situatedness of being at home in society. Situated belonging then challenges our political imagination to ask what collective practices of homemaking we want to engage in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of addressing youth violence through criminal justice reform has been extensively studied in the Western world, particularly the United States. However, research investigating similar efforts in China has been relatively limited, with few normative studies being the exception. This paper presents China's approach to tackling youth violence by examining the nation's criminal justice reform initiatives in recent years. Specifically, this study examines China's implementation of a lower age of criminal responsibility and the Supreme People's Procuratorate's system for approving the prosecution of juvenile offenders. These measures do not necessarily contravene the best interests of children. Rather, they are implemented to address public concerns and to prevent unjust outcomes in individual cases. Furthermore, China's criminal justice system continues to emphasize the importance of forgiveness and care for young offenders. Thus, it is crucial to approach the issue of youth violence from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating considerations of pedagogy, criminology, and psychology, in addition to legal measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]