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In accounts of local Islamist jihad, little attention has been directed to how young women exercise agency when they face arranged marriages with jihadi fighters. They undergo a different kind of life transition, one that has rarely been examined in youth studies. This paper reports on a study of how young female Muslims in arranged marriages with mujahidin men navigated their transitions to adulthood in Eastern Indonesia. The study employed an ethnographic approach, including live-in observation and interviews. The data was analysed using a biographical narrative approach. We found that some young local women were married off to previously unknown mujahidin men. As the Muslim–Christian conflict raged around them, they navigated their roles of wife and mother while embedded in a jihadi network justified by Islamist ideology. Later, following the arrest of their husbands, they gained some agency and asserted a more independent adulthood by actively shaping their own life trajectories. The analysis extends our broader knowledge of (female) youth transitions in civil conflict situations in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings a youth lens to the study of care by empirically examining the accounts of young adults who pursue paid adult social care employment. The youth lens includes drawing on youth studies – particularly youth transitions – literature, which is combined with paid care work scholarship in a novel way. Young adults’ experiences as paid care workers are peripheral in youth studies and care work scholarship, despite this work’s increasing prevalence. The article examines the experiences of young adults pursuing, starting out and doing this work, through qualitative empirical research in Teesside, north-east England. A key finding of young people’s unpaid caring for adults influencing their pursuit of paid adult social care work is identified. The article contributes to understanding of youth transitions, particularly in relation to care work, and offers insights regarding the reproduction and sustainability of the paid adult social care workforce. It augments the growing sociological literature of Teesside [Shildrick, T., R. MacDonald, C. Webster, and K. Garthwaite. 2012. Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press], and converses with work that foregrounds care work’s gendered and classed dimensions [Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage; Stacey, C. L. 2011. The Caring Self: The Work Experiences of Home Care Aides. Ithaca: Cornell University Press]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adolescents in foster care endure frequent disruptive transitions, often culminating in discharge to independent living rather than reunification or adoption. Former foster youth fare poorly once on their own, with high rates of homelessness and social disconnection. This study explored the use of the Bridges Transitions Framework near the end of placement to help youth cope with the transition to adulthood. Methods: In this exploratory study, the framework was integrated into a foster agency's programming; then, we assessed outcomes using administrative data and youth interviews. Thirty-five youth participated. Status of employment, education, and social support was collected 18 months after exposure to the framework. Results: The participants reported moderate to high levels of social support, which is often limited or absent among foster care leavers. Relative to rates reported in state-level foster care data, participants had substantially higher rates of school enrollment after discharge. With very few empirically assessed models available for this population that specifically address internal coping with such substantial life changes, the Transitions Framework offers a tool that may help foster youth navigate aging out of care. Securing lasting and meaningful social support and employment and completing education remain elusive for former foster youth. Conclusions: To confirm the utility of the Transitions Framework, it is recommended to assess it with a large sample and matched comparison group over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When young people exit out‐of‐home care, they face high rates of social and economic marginalisation, as well as poor health and educational outcomes. Although there is limited longitudinal research available on the specific types of post‐care support that are most effective, a number of smaller studies show that young people can avoid these negative life trajectories if provided with assistance and advice as they transition from care to independence. Uniting NSW.ACT delivers multiple programs designed to support young people as they transition from care to adulthood, including Foyer Central, the Extended Care Pilot Program, the Premier's Youth Initiative and Futures Support and Planning (led by the Burrun Dalai Aboriginal Corporation in partnership with Uniting). This article draws on evidence from the independent evaluations of each of these programs to explore the nature of the coaching relationship and to argue that it should indeed be adopted in NSW, due to its beneficial impact on young people and ability to help them achieve positive outcomes in housing, employment and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our analysis of young people who have stayed in rural communities contributes to a 'relational turn' in youth studies that rejects substantialist approaches to make visible the range of relationships beyond simply educational qualifications and employment that inform youth life projects. This relational turn recognises that 'youth' is a product of classificatory struggles that become routinised into taken for granted concepts. Our analysis challenges the tendency to see geographical mobility as a normative component of contemporary youth transitions; and rejects the assumption that geographical immobility for rural youth is necessarily associated with disadvantage. Drawing on Yuval Davis' concept of belonging we use longitudinal survey and interview data from rural Australians that left school in 2006 and who stayed in rural locations. Drawing on this data we employ a biographical approach that focuses on their everyday practices and narratives of life projects to explore the dynamics of belonging to place and community over time. Our qualitative analysis of youth narratives supports a relational analysis of belonging to reveal significant similarities between the life projects of rural 'stayers' and those who moved to urban areas emphasising belonging through relationships to place, work, family and friends and the personal recognition these elements bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scale of migration has increased exponentially in recent decades in much of Southeast Asia. Emerging longitudinal evidence suggests lasting impacts of parental migration on their children's education and well-being. However, little is known about how parental migration during childhood shapes youth's transition to adulthood. This study thus used two waves of survey data collected in 2008–2010 and 2019 from households (N = 872) in Thailand to assess 1) the long-term impacts of parental migration on young adults' labour activities, marriage, and childbearing, and 2) how these impacts vary based on which parent(s) migrated and whether they are international or internal migrants. We found that maternal/biparental migration, compared with paternal migration, more significantly affected young people's labour activities and age at marriage. Moreover, these effects appear to be more pronounced for males than females. Additionally, parental migration's impacts on youths' transitional outcomes vary by internal or international migration of their parents. These results highlight the gender-specific and context-dependent nature of the long-term implications of parental migration. This study thus provides new empirical evidence to advance the understanding of the diverse patterns of transitions among Asian youth in the context of parental migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential of youth transitions to explain and contextualize young people's engagements with politics. It starts with the discussion of the alleged detachment between young people and politics, recently challenged by research on alternative engagements and Do It Ourselves (DIO) politics (Pickard, Sarah. 2019. Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in the 21 Century Britain. London: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:). Then follows the discussion on the contributions which different currents on youth research have brought to the role of youth transitions in young people's engagements with politics. Youth transitions are afterwards defined as the strategic setting where intensive and plural engagements with politics may emerge if certain conditions are met. This is the context where a sense of place in the structural spectrum of inequality starts to develop and the correspondent agentic response blossoms, fostered by crucial encounters with significant others and the occurrence of critical moments. This account is brought by a qualitative approach based on the biographical records of a group of intensely mobilized young people, which retraces the individual processes of engagement made through transitions during education and from education to work, highlighting the contribution that transitional features may bring to the development of successful 'militant careers' (Filieulle, Olivier, Lilian Mathieu, and Cécile Péchu. 2009. Dictionnaire des Mouvements Sociaux. Presses de Sciences Po. doi:) and to incorporate contemporary young people's subjectivities in the political process. [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]

Youth justice commuting problems need better recognition due to the complex dispersal of practice sites and prevalence of characteristics associated with journey barriers. Applying a transport poverty framework to the youth justice population develops adult-focused research and establishes youth transport poverty for the first time. Data from 28 young people and 33 practitioners in two high-deprivation, post-industrial English towns suggests that free transport offers a partial solution. Recommendations indicate that inclusive communication and established education sector policies could support youth justice accessibility, help understand connections between over-representation and commuting problems, and support other contexts like education to employment transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the commodity cycle of natural gas alters the aspirations of youth working in the informal sector. Focusing on the gas industry in Mtwara, Tanzania, this article explores how the development of the industry influences the work aspirations of young men seeking financial independence. Drawing from ethnographic research, participant observation, and interviews with young men between 2020 and 2022, I demonstrate how working as motorcycle taxi drivers during the "gas rush" availed young men a newfound respectability linked to their upward socioeconomic mobility, a key marker in their transition to adulthood. As one of the more accessible and lucrative livelihoods, this article demonstrates how becoming a motorcycle driver acted as a transient conduit in their dual transitions from school to work and transitions from young men to adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adolescents in foster care endure frequent disruptive transitions, often culminating in discharge to independent living rather than reunification or adoption. Former foster youth fare poorly once on their own, with high rates of homelessness and social disconnection. This study explored the use of the Bridges Transitions Framework near the end of placement to help youth cope with the transition to adulthood. Methods: In this exploratory study, the framework was integrated into a foster agency’s programming; then, we assessed outcomes using administrative data and youth interviews. Thirty-five youth participated. Status of employment, education, and social support was collected 18 months after exposure to the framework. Results: The participants reported moderate to high levels of social support, which is often limited or absent among foster care leavers. Relative to rates reported in state-level foster care data, participants had substantially higher rates of school enrollment after discharge. With very few empirically assessed models available for this population that specifically address internal coping with such substantial life changes, the Transitions Framework offers a tool that may help foster youth navigate aging out of care. Securing lasting and meaningful social support and employment and completing education remain elusive for former foster youth. Conclusions: To confirm the utility of the Transitions Framework, it is recommended to assess it with a large sample and matched comparison group over time.

From an international comparative perspective, the four nations of the United Kingdom have robust legal and policy frameworks governing care leaving. Measures taken include access to aftercare workers; pathway planning; introduction of extended care arrangements (permitting young people to remain in placement beyond 18 years); and specific types of financial support. The paper explores commonalities and differences in approaches across the United Kingdom and illuminates how resource constraints, placement availability, workforce challenges and cultural norms may result in implementation gaps and a postcode lottery of provision. Findings lend weight to calls for attentiveness to and systematic evaluation of the implementation process to understand the challenges encountered in embedding effective support for care leavers. Findings also highlight the value of further comparative studies that explore the systems and subsystems of law, policy, and practice in the four nations to contribute to more-informed leaving care policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Global Financial Crisis, Italy has become (again) a country of emigration for young people, with over one million Italians aged 18–34 living abroad [Fondazione Migrantes, ed. 2019. Rapporto Italiani nel Mondo 2019. Roma: Tau Editrice]. As the country of the 'long family', transitions to adulthood in Italy feature a distinctive, prolonged and late move out of the parental home. Transnational mobility thus provides not only an escape from high youth unemployment and economic stagnation, but allows young Italians to craft new ways to make an independent adult life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 young Italians in Australia, we show how transnational mobility intersects with transitions to adulthood, focusing on experiences of independent dwelling and career trajectories in a unique, non-EU context. We argue that trajectories towards adulthood can be altered, anticipated, delayed and suspended by transnational mobility, and that young Italians actively renegotiate family expectations and migration requirements as they build 'adult' lives. While Australia's relative economic stability provides opportunities for transitions 'blocked' in Italy, both adulthood and settlement are seldom fixed arrival points, and young people flexibly reconfigure their pathways as they navigate a complex immigration policy environment. Further, despite the freedom that considerable distance from family provides, transnational intergenerational relationships remain an important influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people’s emergent position in the life-course means that they are widely perceived to embody the future, with their ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ in youth considered important portents of the future viability, prosperity, and moral character of wider society. In many regards, this futurist lens is reflected in research within youth studies, including in the extensive youth transitions literature and in temporal and relational streams of research exploring young people’s ‘imagined futures’ in the context of rising precarity, uncertainty and risk in the contemporary period. While this emphasis on the future is undoubtedly important, it has contributed to the significance of the past in young people’s lives being overlooked and, moreover, often erroneously characterises the future as somehow temporally disembodied from what precedes it. In this article, I argue that there is a need for more meaningful engagements with the past in contemporary youth studies. Specifically, I suggest there is considerable value in Jacques Derrida's (1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge) concept of hauntology for enriching current understandings of youth. This article describes how hauntology’s pantemporal focus represents an increasingly timely and important conceptual tool through which to capture, analyse, and address the structural and temporal complexities confronting contemporary generations of youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young parents (defined as entering parenthood aged 25 and under) are often considered to be a homogenous population, yet this encompasses a broad age range. This article develops a critical analysis of ‘young’ parenthood based on empirical evidence from young parents themselves. Data is drawn from two connected qualitative longitudinal research studies about young parenthood spanning 8 years, focusing predominately on the UK, but also including empirical evidence from Sweden. The sample comprised young parents aged 18–25, a sub-group of ‘young’ parents that are often overlooked in policy and existing research about teenage pregnancy. The focus on young parents aged 18–25 troubles and deepens existing conceptualisations of ‘youth’ and of normative transitions to adulthood. The findings show that young parents conceptualised the timing of their entry into parenthood in relation to preparedness and the resources available to them within a context of elongated youth transitions. To this end, UK social policy would benefit from deprioritising youth policies constructed around young parenthood prevention as they serve to stigmatise and entrench socio-disadvantage. Instead, welfare systems have an important role to play in supporting young parents’ preparedness, to help them and their children to flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews how young people's education-to-work transitions have changed since 1989 in former communist countries that have subsequently become full members of the European Union (EU). The sudden collapse of the command economies led to an equally abrupt breakdown in earlier routes into working life. Subsequently, the new independent states have reconstructed their education and training, and their market economies have developed. They now exhibit similar variations in rates of youth unemployment, progression through higher education, and mixtures of academic and vocational secondary education as older EU member states. However, there are features that continue to set all ex-communist countries apart, irrespective of whether they have become full EU members. These are low local rates of pay and westward migration. Its new member states have joined the Southern countries in a European periphery. Yet, there may be sufficient winners in the European core and periphery to keep Europe united. [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]

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]

The process by which young people leave home in South Africa is central for understanding the lives of the country's young adult population, as well as, their role in the structural household change that has occurred over the post‐apartheid period. However, hardly any quantitative work has been conducted on this process and no work exists on trends. This study provides nationally representative trends of home‐leaving for young adults in South Africa for the first time using a stacked series of annual cross‐sections between 1995 and 2011. Different home‐leaving rates by race converged in the late 90s and steadied in the 2000s. Most South Africans only left home by age 25—but whether this can be interpreted as 'delayed' or not is complicated by diverse family patterns and the presence of stretched households. Home‐leavers are especially dependent on labour market income in the absence of social grants targeted at the large unemployed young adult population. Since young women face higher unemployment rates than young men, women were notably more reliant than men on marriage as a pathway out of the parental home. Over time, young male home‐leavers are living alone at higher rates, meaning they have contributed to general household proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivations to participate in diaspora tourism 'birthright' programs have widely encompassed themes of heritage exploration, including a desire to develop personalised attachments to people, places, and memories connected to ancestral heritage or a 'homeland'. Despite the popularity of such programs among young members from the diaspora, the additional role that life course positioning plays in structuring motivation is less understood. In this paper, I analyse the motivations shared through semi-structured interviews with a group of young Hungarian-Australians who attended a 10-month 'birthright' diaspora program in Hungary. By applying a rite of passage lens to their stories, I highlight that uncertainties about the future, escaping the mundanity of everyday life, and the burden of impending adult responsibilities, were strong factors shaping their gap year motivations and overall view of the program. The paper thus encourages a more nuanced interpretation of diaspora tourism motivation through a liminal and youth transition context. It also prompts further thinking toward the role and representation of such programs as alternate rite of passage events, representing a critical point of transition between life stage endings and beginnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we will argue, do not capture adequately the meanings students attribute to these aspirations. By means of in-depth interviews and combining a critical realist approach to social action with capabilities approach, the paper explores the educational and professional aspirations of students at the end of secondary TVET in Chile. We consider that high educational aspirations of secondary TVET students in Chile need to be understood as a reflexive response to significantly high social inequalities in the country, the precarity of working conditions in a highly liberalised labour market, and the enduring neoliberal tenet of meritocracy. We also argue that understanding aspirations is key to reimagine TVET's roles and purposes at individual, institutional and national levels, towards fairer opportunities for human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of family socio-economic status (SES) as a buffer for adolescents with mental health disorders (MHDs) against entering precarious school-to-work trajectories. We follow a cohort born in Norway in 1992 from the age of 16–25 using data from administrative registers. We find that externalizing disorders, to a higher degree than internalizing disorders (registered in the 16–18 age range), are associated with subsequent precarious school-to-work trajectories (measured from January 2011 to December 2017) for both genders. In boys, high family SES seems to buffer the negative impact of externalizing disorders on entering precarious school-to-work trajectories, but not for internalizing disorders. In contrast, in girls, high-SES families partly buffer the negative impact of internalizing disorders, but not for externalizing disorders. Thus, this paper broadens the current perspective on how the impact of MHDs on entering school-to-work trajectories is interrelated with social class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy orientations of advanced neoliberal democracies situate young people as rational actors who are responsible for their own career outcomes. While career scholars have been critical of how this routinely ignores the unequal effects of structural constraints on personal agency, they have long suggested that young people should have access to the best available ‘roadmaps’ and advice to navigate the uncertainties baked into the contemporary economic landscape. Complementing the significant attention that is given to the (potentially emancipatory) experience of formal careers guidance, we present findings from a multi-method study. We explore young Australians’ (aged 15–24) navigation of careers information through a nationally representative survey (n = 1103), focus groups with 90 participants and an analysis of 15,227 social media comments. We suggest that the variety of formal and informal sources pursued and accessed by young people forms a relational ‘ecology’. This relationality is twofold. First, information is often sequential, and engagements with one source can inform the experience or pursuit of another. Second, navigation of the ecology is marked by a high level of intersubjectivity through interpersonal support networks including peers, family and formal service provision. These insights trouble a widespread, but perhaps simplistic, reading of young people having largely internalised a neoliberal sensibility of ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’ in their active pursuit of a range of career advice. Throughout our analysis, we attend to the ways that engagement in the career information ecology is shaped by social inequalities, further underscoring challenges facing careers guidance and social justice goals.

This article proposes a Marxist political economy (MPE) of youth to explain the material conditions of young people in developed economies. Central concepts of capitalist accumulation, labour-power and value are utilised to historicise and situate young people in relation to wage labour under capitalism. The article conceptualises how contradictory processes of capitalist accumulation impact young people through an analysis of the actions of private capital, labour and the state. The theoretical approach is supported with UK data which illustrates how young people have experienced challenges in education, labour market transitions, and work and employment conditions. The article reveals how a combination of structural economic change, state regulation and low-road employer business strategies which generate poor quality work have all contributed to the decline in the value of youth labour-power in the UK. The article also provides methodological insights for using the MPE approach in future youth studies research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education determines life chances across the globe, but human capital and skill formation offer context-specific advantages in the labour market during the transition from school to work. Our study focuses specifically on the varying effects of low skill on youth 'not in employment, education or training' (NEET) statuses via educational attainments. Using Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, we estimate the extent to which country-specific relative low skill levels affect young people's probability of reporting long-term NEET statuses across contexts. We find that low skill and education have differing effects on the probabilities of reporting NEET statuses cross-nationally. We also conduct mediation analyses to examine to what extent the negative signalling effects of low education explain the impacts of skill disadvantages on NEET statuses. We find that the indirect effect of low skill through education is particularly important in countries with vocationally oriented education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people in orphanages are exposed to compounding structural inequalities tied to local, national, and global processes. Popular criticisms of orphanages highlight the potential harm of institutionalised living, including abuse and exploitation associated with the global rise of voluntourism and the intensified disadvantages young people face when transitioning out of institutionalised care. Yet, these concerns often lack cultural specificity and understanding of complex lived experiences from the Global South, instead reinforcing a simplistic image of young people in care as passive or damaged victims. This article examines the narratives of young people who grew up in an orphanage in Thailand. Now in their early 20s, nine young Thais participated in interviews and a focus group which they saw as self-advocacy regarding their experiences of care as the orphanage shifted from a small residential house of 40 children to a larger institution with 100 children. Participants reported a loss of intimate care as the orphanage grew, damaging their sense of self and precipitating their using strategies to obtain desired forms of care, with implications for their adult relationships. Such insights are important for informing alternative care policies that nurture the sort of care that matters to those with lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates young university graduates who actively engage with critical reconversion processes in their relationship to work, by abandoning a relevant field of study and embarking on self-made projects in other areas. They are motivated by meaningfulness, freedom and creativity, albeit having to remain in underemployment or even unemployment. The flexibility of young workers and the individual capacity to reconvert have been at the core of policy discourse for the knowledge economy. There is, however, little evidence of youth experience of mismatch and reconversion trajectories, especially for highly skilled youth. Based on biographical narratives of graduates in Cyprus, this article investigates transformations in young people's relation to work in a context of economic crisis and precarity. The findings suggest that new fluid relationships with work are being negotiated by young people, moving across the boundaries of matched and mismatched employment, work and non-work. These are founded on the development of new subjectivities that put into question the social construction of work and its relation to value for youth in post-Fordist societies. For these young people from upper-middle classes, a compromise seems to be forged between an agentive stance of search for emancipation and embodied neoliberal imperatives of the knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy orientations of advanced neoliberal democracies situate young people as rational actors who are responsible for their own career outcomes. While career scholars have been critical of how this routinely ignores the unequal effects of structural constraints on personal agency, they have long suggested that young people should have access to the best available 'roadmaps' and advice to navigate the uncertainties baked into the contemporary economic landscape. Complementing the significant attention that is given to the (potentially emancipatory) experience of formal careers guidance, we present findings from a multi-method study. We explore young Australians' (aged 15–24) navigation of careers information through a nationally representative survey (n = 1103), focus groups with 90 participants and an analysis of 15,227 social media comments. We suggest that the variety of formal and informal sources pursued and accessed by young people forms a relational 'ecology'. This relationality is twofold. First, information is often sequential, and engagements with one source can inform the experience or pursuit of another. Second, navigation of the ecology is marked by a high level of intersubjectivity through interpersonal support networks including peers, family and formal service provision. These insights trouble a widespread, but perhaps simplistic, reading of young people having largely internalised a neoliberal sensibility of 'entrepreneurial selfhood' in their active pursuit of a range of career advice. Throughout our analysis, we attend to the ways that engagement in the career information ecology is shaped by social inequalities, further underscoring challenges facing careers guidance and social justice goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on interviews with 164 young beneficiaries (of) and 128 professionals in charge of lifelong learning policies in eighteen regions located in nine member states of the European Union in 2017. Drawing on the concept of 'opportunity structures', we analyse variations between regional institutional arrangements and interactions between professionals and young adults. Our findings suggest that the crux of lifelong learning policies is the coordination between different policy areas so that they can respond to the multidimensional challenges that young adults face during their life transitions in diverse regional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural sector has become an important part of the 'new economy' and has affected artistic practices as well as the road to becoming an artist. By discussing two female students' paths to aesthetic education, the article sheds light on some of the sociopolitical and economic conditions that students in transition between elementary and upper secondary school in Sweden encounter when entering aesthetic education with musical aspirations. The results give insight into the ways in which young people reason when entering a precarious sector that demands a high amount of personal investment and planning. It also shows the ways in which social class still plays a pivotal role in the choice of and reflection on educational goals. Further, the article discusses how creative desires can transcend the economic instrumental expectations that surround the world in which the students live. Thus, it provides a contemporary understanding of how young people navigate a world of profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International students are a critical source of income for UK universities, and yet reports indicate that their numbers have been in decline since academic year 2010-2011. Consequently, UK universities need to work harder to attract international students than ever before. This paper uses qualitative interviews with international office staff based at UK higher education institutions together with observational research at recruitment events which took place in Hong Kong in 20l7 to demonstrate how the urban has a critical role to play in the international student migration industry. The paper showcases three urban encounters in the recruitment process: the higher education recruitment fair; the connections universities draw between themselves and other urban locations; and by considering how predeparture events mobilise the urban landscape to communicate dynamic learning experiences. The retelling and analysis of these encounters demonstrate how universities, and the UK, create, foster and embed the geographical imaginary in their recruitment processes in order to entice and encourage brand loyalty from prospective students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from education to work in the global economy is no longer a straightforward one-time move for young people. In Bulgaria, this change started with the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy in the 1990s and was accompanied by the arrival of high rates of early school leaving, youth unemployment, and a growing group of disengaged youths (NEETs). The European initiatives in support of youth labour market integration are translated locally, with a narrow focus on "employability" while neglecting the many educational, training, and social needs of young people. The analysis in this paper is informed by the theoretical framework of life course research. It starts with an elaboration of the recontextualisation of EU policies such as the Youth Guarantee in the local realities of socioeconomic structures using Eurostat and national data. Second, we present 4 case studies (selected out of a total of 42 in-depth interviews) of young adults aged 18–30 in order to highlight the ways in which young people's individual agency filters and influences the institutional policies and practices regulating youth social integration. Our qualitative analysis reveals the multiplicity and diversity of youth journeys into work through the institutions and social structures and the inadequacy of the applied policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite ample research on Hungarian young people from Transylvania, few studies have focused on comparing different groups of youngsters, or on the special subgroup of the youth. Using data from the Hungarian Youth Research, a Transylvanian sub-sample (N=2000) and a large scale survey (N=1239) was carried out among Hungarian college students from Transylvania, we probe similarities and differences in life events and transitions to adulthood in these two groups of the youth. In this paper we give an overview of the marital status, living and working conditions and future plans of youngsters. Despite the fact that a large group of young people wish to start a family around their midtwenties, they seem to be in a “waiting game” and postpone marriage and childbearing. Our analysis revealed that the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed the college students’ lifestyle: a large portion of the respondents reported significant changes in their living conditions and living environment. In the short run, the consequences of Covid-19 hit students with rural residents more than citydwellers, and older cohorts – already active in the labour market – more than younger ones. Regarding partnership selection, we found that Hungarian ethnicity and linguistic homogeneity are the most important cultural criteria in the mechanisms of partnership selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain has suffered greatly from the consequences of the economic crisis, and these have affected young people’s transitions to adulthood. Using a biographical approach, we have analysed the educational, labour and personal pathways of a group of young women aged 26–28 over ten years (2000–2010). The qualitative methodology and the biographical approach allowed us to categorise five models of transition to adulthood, constructed from the interaction and intersection of four analytical variables: the centrality of work (paid or domestic and care work), attitudes (more or less dependence), the prevalence of traditional gender roles and the centrality of education/training. These models are framed in a macroeconomic context of strong economic and social crisis characterised by precariousness, a shortage of jobs and labour instability. The results of this study allowed us to make visible the situation of young women in Spain while offering possible solutions to their clear disadvantages and social vulnerability.

The present article is a study of the opportunities and constraints for youth transitions from education to employment vis-a-vi the structural relationships (of compliance and discrepancy) between the sectors of education, training and the labor market. The analysis examines the deficiencies in the coordination of the demand and supply of skills in Bulgaria, which hinder the successful employment integration of the current young generation. The mismatches in the system are highlighted on the national and the regional level where we focus on the contextual cases of Blagoevgrad and Plovdiv functional regions. The paper reveals that there is a discrepancy between labor supply and demand in the skills systems in both regions where less than half of university graduates work in the specialty they have acquired during studies. One of the conclusions of the study is that social changes under way require new strategies and approaches of lifelong learning policies that should go deeper into the regional and local level taking into account both the needs of young people for training throughout their lives and the needs of the regional labor markets.