Cultural contexts of adolescent anxiety: Paradox, ambivalence, and disjuncture

Abstract

The paper offers a critical reading of the dominant ways we frame and understand anxiety in adolescence. These centre on the individual and for the most part limit attention to external and social influences operating at a close scale to the individual. The paper sets out to explore what including perspectives from macro-scale contemporary cultural contexts might reveal and add to how we understand adolescent anxiety. The paper draws on three themes in research on adolescent anxiety: socialisation and development, gender and pressure, environment and uncertainty. Expanding the frame to cultural contexts situates young people's experiences in complex processes from individual to global scales, includes less tangible aspects such as discourse or values, and recognises the importance of experiences of inequalities. The paper proposes that bringing cultural contexts into view reveals a pervasive encounter with paradox, ambivalence and disjuncture in everyday experience through which contemporary adolescent anxiety may be generated and which warrants greater attention. Furthermore, these indicate that some of our most cherished developmental concepts may need a more nuanced understanding of the work they do within the specificities of different cultural contexts.