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What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive. The Everyday Childhoods project invited children and their families to take part in the creation of an open access public archive documenting everyday childhoods using a range of multimedia data. Families and researchers were invited into the archive, encouraged to imagine different kinds of secondary use and to speak directly to future user of their data through short films and postcards. This paper raises questions concerning the place of the archive in different disciplinary traditions; the roles of researcher and archivist in safekeeping, gatekeeping and caring for data collections; and the place of qualitative longitudinal research as a site of innovation within a new data landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What Really Counts? was a sound art installation created in 2019 through a collaboration between a sociologist and a multidisciplinary artist, working with in-depth interviews with young men recorded as part of a British feminist social research project in 1990, exploring sexualities and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In this article, we describe the evolution and staging of the sound art installation project, situating it within interdisciplinary literatures on the use of sociological archives and reanimation of analogue media in a digital age. Working within a fractured tradition of curated sociology, we consider the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration for refreshing sociological analytic practice, revealing the unrealised potential of archived data sets and utilising temporal displacement as a generative analytic strategy for feeling history. We are working with a 30-year time span characterised by a stretching of intergenerational experience in relation to expectations for and mediation of sex/gender. The project attempts to realise the potential for an experimental sociological practice through the staging of open-ended past–present encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we engage critically with how metaphors have been used in sociological youth studies, including a turn to new metaphors that capture the foreclosure of futures and experiences of waiting, delay and non-institutional temporalities. Drawing on the resources of queer theory we challenge the developmentalism that underpins youth studies, employing notions of the impasse and growing sideways to capture the open-endedness of young adult lives. Working with data from a qualitative longitudinal study of Danish youth, we focus on how 47 young people responded to an invitation to talk about and through an object that represented the last three years of their lives. These rich accounts can be understood as examples of Paul Riceour's 'metaphoric discourse', characterised by the simultaneity of 'is' and 'is not'. The article first offers a schema of the biographical objects (trophies, hobbies, mortal, connective and protest) that captures the work of 'being in time' for young adults, mapping this onto the formal and informal markers of adulthood. We then engage with participants' own metaphorical thinking in greater depth – suggesting that the paradoxical metaphors that emerge from their talk can expand how we understand the struggle for maturity. The metaphor of open-endedness is offered as a hybrid term, allowing us to look in two directions at once: capturing and comparing transitions as part of a project of social justice, while also recognising the limits of such frameworks for understanding the experiences of a new generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings psychosocial methods into conversation with methodological and ethical debates arising from the reuse of qualitative research material, and with issues of ethnographic practice. Our empirical grounding came from the psychosocial technique of reading research texts aloud in a group, listening in an affectively attuned way, and sharing our responses. The texts we revisited—infant observation notes of interactions between a young mother and her baby—were originally gathered for the Becoming a Mother project. We identified affectively dense and compelling episodes in the data and, as we detail with examples, examined the textual sources of the experienced meanings and affects that these events evoked in group members. We discuss the epistemological and ethical complexities and challenges of this approach to the archiving and reuse of qualitative empirical material and show how the process of slow, affectively attuned reading of field notes and interviews may enrich qualitative research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over recent years, the 'social' has been reclaimed in different strands of academic debate. In this paper, we facilitate a conversation between three of these strands — feminist theory, late modern sociology and social capital theory — to draw attention to the problematic nature of the claims that social capital theories make for feminist theory and politics. We introduce two papers, by Lisa Adkins and Barbara Misztal, which provide distinct but related responses to the challenge of reclaiming the social. We point to three themes that they have in common, but which they define and respond to differently: the 'social' and the public/private divide; politics and the relationship to the world; and the temporality of social theory. We end with our reflections on the importance of this conversation, exploring how realignments in the relationships between theoretical and empirical concerns have the potential to reinvigorate the relationship between feminist theory and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people's transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality between the genders. The debate is moved beyond 'pitiful girls' and 'can-do girls' by exploring how young women in the UK and Finland anticipate and try to avoid being locked into the lives of adult women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young people's evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdom, have been followed over a five-year period using repeat biographical interviews. We present first the themes that emerged from a cross-cut analysis of the first of three rounds of interviews distinguishing between relational and individualised understandings of adulthood. We then present a model we developed to capture the ways that young people sought out opportunities for competence and recognition in different fields of their lives. Finally a case study that follows a young woman through her three interviews illustrates how these themes can appear in an individual trajectory. We offer the model and case study as a way of exploring a more subjective approach to citizenship in which participation is not deferred to some distant future in which economic independence is achieved, but is understood as constantly constructed in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is about the age of consent in Great Britain, in light of a review of legislation on sexual offenses based on gender neutrality. The author explores the perspectives of young people through discussion of a proposal to change the age of consent for heterosexuals to 14. The focus group shows the way youth understand the institutionalization of heterosexuality, how they might use the current legal framework, and the factors they think make sex legitimate. The topics include protection from abuse and timeliness of sex.

The 'Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communities in the UK over a five-year period. A principal aim of the study is to identify 'critical moments' in young people's biographies and to explore how these moments are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. This article reports on an analysis of the first of three rounds of one-to-one interviews. We begin by mapping young people's critical moments, exploring the relationship between the social and geographical location in which they live and the kinds of events that they report as having particular biographical significance. We suggest that the character of these 'critical moments' is socially structured, as are young people's responses to them. The argument is illustrated by case studies that show the interaction of choice, chance and opportunity in three young people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on sex education policies in Great Britain. Cultural specificity of sex education; Origins of sex education policy in England; Politicization of sex education.

The article discusses data derived from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project to show the range of pressures on young women to engage in sexual practices, which are risky, violent or not pleasurable. If women are to be able to negotiate the boundaries of sexual encounters so as to ensure both their safety and their satisfaction, the way in which both men and women are constituted as sexual subjects has to change. Intellectual empowerment helps to ensure that women can act effectively on their positive conceptions. But, the concept of empowerment as a contradictory and contested process, is intended as a starting point for considering practical strategies for transforming pressured sexual relationships between women and men. Empowerment is complicated by the divisions between women such as those of class, race, ethnicity, culture and religion, but women's accounts of their experiences remain a primary source of understanding how these contradictions are dealt with in practice. From their accounts of their experiences, knowledge of a positive female sexuality can be created which perhaps can be developed in ways, which can be put into practice by those who need the knowledge.