Wild and Tame Zones: Regulating the Transitions of Youth at Risk

Abstract

ABSTRACT Transitions from school to work were, in a less reflexive modernity, relatively simple processes to manage for large populations of young people. The concept of youth, as a transitional process, emerges as a truth which dominates governmental horizons when these transitions become problematic, and when the practices for regulating these transitions become problematic. Contemporary recompositions of youth transitions can be understood in terms of the structuring influences of global Information & Communication networks. This paper argues that one consequence of these transformations is increased uncertainty and anxiety in relation to the regulation of large populations of youth. In a material and metaphoric sense, certain populations of youth occupy ‘wild and tame zones’ in the governmental spaces of the contemporary Liberal Democratic nation state. Drawing on the Australian context, this paper argues that the emergence of a Vocational Education and Training agenda in schools can be conceived in terms of governmental attempts to regulate the inhabitants of these wild zones.