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Lifting the aspirations of disadvantaged young people has been a key focus within youth policies, often constructed as a solution to the complicated problem of achieving social mobility. A growing body of work critiques such policy discourses for their inadequate conceptualizations of aspirations. Particularly, the problematic framing of community culture and the tendency to allocate the problem of low aspirations to individuals' psyche and cultural upbringing have been critiqued. Despite such critiques, this article argues for the importance of analysing disadvantaged young people's aspirations, as aspirations play a crucial role in determining outcomes. However, further theorizing is needed to capture a more nuanced view on the intersection between material and social embeddedness and individual agency. The concept of social citizenship aspirations is introduced to develop a framework for understanding the reproduction of youth inequality, which also acknowledges agency as an expression of how young people themselves create meaningful lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic illness can disrupt many aspects of life, including identity, social relationships, and anticipated life trajectories. Despite significant scholarship on chronic illness, we know less about the ways in which chronic illness impacts feelings of loneliness and how people with chronic illness deal with loneliness. Drawing on concepts of biographical disruption and liminality and data from walking and photo-elicitation interviews with 14 people, we aimed to explore how people with chronic illness experience loneliness in their everyday lives. Tracing how past and present illness experiences are implicated in the lived experience of loneliness and the strategies people use to manage loneliness, our findings illustrated that being caught in a liminal state where participants struggled to maintain and adapt to a new normality in life with chronic illness was a central thread woven throughout their experience of loneliness. Although participants drew on their personal agency and adopted strategies to account for, manage, and limit disruptions from chronic illness and loneliness, they found that their strategies were not completely effective or satisfactory. Chronic illness and loneliness continue to be largely considered as an individual’s problem, limiting opportunities for people with chronic illness who experience loneliness to seek support and social connection. Our research highlighted that chronic illness and loneliness need to be acknowledged as both a personal and collective problem, with multi-level responses that involve individuals, communities, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]