Middle-class Young People Research Articles

"The Internet Is Keeping Me from Dying from Boredom": Understanding the Management and Social Construction of the Self Through Middle-Class Indian Children's Engagement with Digital Technologies During the COVID-19 Lockdown.

This paper unpacks how everyday lives of urban middle-class children were mediated by digital technologies during the COVID-19 national lockdown in India. In contemporary India, children's engagements with digital technologies are structured by their social class, gender, and geographical locations. The resultant disparities between "media-rich" and "media-poor" childhoods in India are stark (Banaji 2017). In this paper, we argue that the national lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed India's "media-rich" children to particular threats and obstacles. Based on semi-structured interviews and mapping exercises with 16- to 17-year-old urban middle-class young people, we explore how being confined to their homes for an extended period when their schools shifted to online delivery of teaching and learning; young people negotiated risks and sought digital opportunities in the management and social construction of the self (Callero 2003, 2014). While the majority of existing studies focus on societal anxieties around children's digital media use, in almost a medicalized and pathological fashion, and its impact on parenting practices (Lim 2020; Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020), we shift the attention to study this social phenomenon to help understand how children reflect on their engagement with technology and shape their own well-being through social construction of the self. Our findings demonstrate that children are reflexive users of digital technologies, as they navigate network failure issues, the demands of online classrooms, their own mental health and social relationships, and deploy the affordances of digital technologies to combat loneliness, nurture contact with friends, and explore educational and career resources. These strategies, in the management and social construction of the self, play out within the discourse of pedagogized middle-class childhood in India, which is imbued with notions of academic success and failure (Kumar 2016; Sen 2014). Media-rich middle-class young people's management and social construction of the self, in the context of crisis and uncertainty, helps promote our understanding of the relationship between social structure, self-structure, and behavior choices, implications of this for child well-being, and reproduction of social inequality in society.

The homology between the private and the public fields in higher education

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted. The research task was to examine the discourses that construct the limits of the public and private fields, and the kind of homology that emerges. Four discourses were identified: support, business, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. The private field distinguished itself from the public fields through the discourse of business and attached itself to it through the discourse of support. The dominance of the symbolic power of transformed economic capital in the private field mobilised in the public field was misrecognised during the admission process as ‘motivation’. The homology between the two fields was strong yet hidden.

Outsmarting regulation: how tobacco websites and social media targeting young people

This paper aims to describe the content of tobacco company websites and social media then evaluates whether they have complied with the regulation or not. As addictive product cigarette has become one of the most regulated product in the world, including in Indonesia. While almost all countries in the world have a total ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (TAPS) in all media; Indonesia only limits TAPS, not totally bans it. The methods in this research are observing five websites from the five biggest tobacco companies in Indonesia and their social media, between May-June 2019, focusing on outlook; content; updating frequency; and link to other media. The result shows that the tobacco industry’s websites and social media are a form of indirect tobacco advertising. The five sites practicing brand stretching strategy. The sites and social media are targeting young people by focusing their content on activity, product, lifestyle, and profile of upper and middle-class young people with their typical language. By doing so, the companies normalize their brand into young people’s life. The conclusion of the research shows tobacco industry promotion strategy through new media seems to outsmart the TAPS regulation, whereas, in practice, this promotion is conducting several violations on existing regulation in Indonesia.

“A minha vida não pode parar”: itinerários abortivos de mulheres jovens

Resumo: Neste artigo objetivamos analisar como a classe e a raça constituem diferentes itinerários abortivos para mulheres jovens de uma região metropolitana do Brasil. Foram entrevistadas oito jovens com idades entre 19 e 28 anos, sendo quatro de classes populares e cinco de classes médias, três brancas e cinco negras. Como resultados, encontramos diferenças de classe e raça nos itinerários. As jovens brancas e de classes médias apresentam percursos mais curtos, conseguem dispor de uma rede de informações um pouco mais consistente e relatam um processo decisório mais conflitivo. As jovens negras e de classes populares narram itinerários mais longos, dispõem de uma rede de apoio mais precária e seus processos decisórios são mais imediatos.

Race, privilege and the exclusivity of farm internships: Ecological agricultural education and the implications for food movements

Internships have become a prominent way of training new ecological farmers across North America. This paper interrogates the social identities of these interns asking: Who is being trained as the next generation of ecological farmers and what are the implications for food movements more broadly? Our research reveals a series of privileges associated with the ability to work for little or no remuneration and to access rural spaces where most internships are located. We argue that, while providing valuable knowledge and skills, the dominant model of ecological farm internships privileges white, middle-class young people and creates barriers to entry for racialized people, thereby limiting access to the subsequent education, training and other privileges awarded as part of the experience. In addition, this model hinders opportunities for building a more diverse ecological farming sector by reproducing a particular kind of farmer, limiting the impact of food movements.

Gendered emotion work and the micro-practices of heterosexuality: Two middle-class teenage partner relationships

This paper uses close analysis of two couples to examine the micro-practices and processes of gendered power within middle-class young people's intimate partner relationships. It is based on in-depth interviews with 14–16 year old young people in an affluent area of England. The paper argues that intimate relationships can be spaces of intense pleasure, as well as providing a site of calm and escape from the peer surveillance of the broader social network. However, they can also be oppressive sites of constriction and control, and reproduction of traditional gendered narratives; in these couples, the young women were rendered responsible for the “emotion work”. The young women, though, often disavowed and downplayed inequalities, negotiating the contradictory and schizoid nature of contemporary girlhood.

Of Mindsets and Men: Tackling Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Privilege in Delhi

As efforts to engage men and boys in gender justice work have proliferated across the globe, so too has evidence of the potential for this work to reinforce rather than deconstruct gender inequalities, resulting in calls to assess the assumptions that underpin this work. Although a significant amount of male-based gender justice work is based in the Global South, analytical literature on efforts to engage men and boys and on pro-feminist men has been largely confined to the Global North. This article responds to the need for a better understanding of how the tensions and risks of involving men in gender justice work are dealt with in the Global South, with an exploration of the narratives of fifteen male and one assigned male at birth (AMAB) middle-class young people working to promote gender equality in New Delhi, India. I demonstrate that there is great diversity in perspectives and approach among male and AMAB gender justice workers in Delhi. While many identified as feminists, felt the need to be accountable to women’s organizations and critiqued the idea of men as victims of patriarchy, others distanced themselves from the “radical” and “political” nature of feminism, expressed concerns about the centrality of women in gender justice work and framed men as equal victims of patriarchy. I argue that the latter approach is underpinned by a focus on “mind sets” and individuals as the locus of change. In the absence of discussion of power, the structural and the political, a focus on the personal risks creating room to question the extent of female oppression and male privilege, undermining feminist goals in the interests of a more “inclusive” approach to gender justice.

Sound Systems

Sound Systems

From rakhi to romance: negotiating ‘acceptable’ relationships in co-educational secondary schools in New Delhi, India

Based on a multi-method study conducted with middle-class young people (aged 15–17) in three secondary schools in New Delhi, India, this paper focuses on heterosocial dynamics within school peer cultures as an important site of learning about gender and sexuality. Findings indicate that young people negotiate and adapt rakhi (brother-sister) relationships to form less strictly platonic heterosocial friendships, which leave open the possibility of romance. Students’ preferences for certain heterosocial relationships are considered within the context of wider cultural narratives. For example, students often rejected rakhi relationships, tied to traditional, conservative values, in favour of heterosocial friendships associated with more modern and desirable social patterns. Moreover, students’ own definitions of acceptable heterosocial interactions within peer cultures suggest that they are adept at negotiating norms of gender segregation that are enforced in co-educational schools. In contrast to other formal and informal sources of sexual learning available to them, experiences and stories of romances circulating in schools seemed to offer students alternative, more positive ways of understanding teenage intimacy and sexuality.

Gendering the middle classes: the construction of conductors’ authority in youth classical music groups

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical mus...

Ariel Heryanto. Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture

Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen CultureAriel HeryantoSingapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014, xiv+246p.At the risk of rehashing the old orientalist cliches we must acknowledge that contemporary Indonesia can be a bewildering place. This holds true both for outside observers and for engaged in fashioning the practice of daily life. During my daily motorcycle commute to Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta (Jogja) in 2012-13, the massive billboards at major intersections never ceased to fascinate me and make me question what I thought I knew about Indonesia. Advertisements for self-help seminars by Muslim televangelists competed with images of Korean boy bands; Coca-Cola offered itself as the perfect drink for breaking the Ramadan fast; an appliance store suggested buying a refrigerator to celebrate Kartini Day (a national holiday honoring a Javanese princess who promoted education for women); and portraits of political candidates in stock poses blocked the view of Monjali, a massive monument left-over from Suharto's authoritarian New Order which now housed a nightly display of Hello-Kitty-themed paper lanterns. In March 2013, after a bar fight led to the murder of an off duty solider and a commando squad broke into the prison and executed the suspects, banners applauding Kopassus (the elite army special forces) and denouncing preman (street thugs) mysteriously appeared at these intersections. I was constantly amazed by what one saw on the street of Jogja. Fortunately, Ariel Heryanto's latest book offers wide-ranging and insightful analysis into Indonesian political culture and cultural politics since the fall of Suharto in 1998. Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture is a brilliant study of the diverse and seemingly contradictory forces at play in the world's fourth largest nationBook state. This ethnography of urban Indonesian youth and mid-career professionals explains that what I witnessed in the streets of Jogja were public manifestations over the struggle for identity. Heryanto delves into the ways in which his subjects actively negotiate consumerism, Islamicization, social media, and the violent legacy of authoritarianism.While an important book, Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture will frustrate some readers. Despite the title, Heryanto is very clear that the book is not a history of Indonesian cinema. Nor is it an encyclopedic account of Indonesian television and film. Rather, the book uses screen culture (television, film, and social media) as a prism to explore post-New Order identity politics. Heryanto analyzes films, televisions shows, and aspects of social media to understand the ways in which are actively engaged in the construction of their own identity. That his study discusses certain Indonesians is seen in his clear focus on urban middle-class young people and mid-career professionals (what Americans used to call Yuppies: young upwardly mobile urban professionals) in several Javanese cites, including Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang, Bandung, and Malang. Thus, this is not a study of all elements of Indonesian society, only of a privileged subset. Heryanto states that his analysis is narrowly qualitative rather then broadly quantitative. But the author's admittedly tight focus does not diminish the work's larger significance. Indeed, this may be one of the most useful contributions to the understanding contemporary Indonesia, comparable to John Pemberton's history of the present, On the Subject of Java, which probed the New Order in the mid-1980s (Pemberton 1994). Perhaps the most striking feature of Identity and Pleasure is Heryanto's ability to find meaning in seemingly trivial and mundane aspects of popular culture.At times Heryanto's description of Indonesian cultural politics can seem pessimistic. Cynical politicians use Islam to garner support from pious voters and Muslim televangelists seem more preoccupied with promoting a path to material wealth than spiritual salvation. …

Unintended volunteers: the volunteering pathways of working class young people in community sport

ABSTRACTSport has become a major setting for youth volunteering in the UK. Volunteering has become understood as a means of enhancing responsible citizenship and of adding various capitals to young people’s identities. Much research on young people’s volunteering in sport has typically (and sometimes by default) focused on middle class experiences, highlighting the combination of instrumental and altruistic motives for volunteering, the importance of family and school in decisions about volunteering and its perceived longer-term benefits. This article focuses on the experiences of young working class volunteers and is based on an evaluation of five community sport projects that were part of the StreetGames Building a Participation Legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Disadvantaged Areas initiative. Data from a combination of semi-structured interviews and focus groups were analysed to understand working class young people’s volunteering pathways, including their initial engagement, motives and understanding of challenges and benefits. The findings from this study indicate that, in contrast to many middle class young people, these young people’s routes into volunteering were not part of a strategic career plan, but occurred contingently and with support from coaches. Young people subsequently suggested that volunteering and its scope for gaining formal training helped them to develop skills associated with desirable forms of social and cultural capital that might lead to labour market attachment, particularly in sport. These findings have important implications for understanding how social class shapes pathways into youth volunteering in the UK and for developing appropriate policy to encourage a wider range of young people to volunteer.

Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

Educational outcomes of young people in Scotland who are deaf or hard of hearing: intersections of deafness and social class

This article focuses on the intersection between deafness and social class in the context of the unstable economic circumstances in Scotland following the 2007 recession. More specifically, this research investigated the following in the case of young people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH): (1) the interaction between educational attainment and post-school outcomes, and social class; (2) post-school educational experiences in relation to social class. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 young people (aged 18–24) who are DHH. Interview data were analysed alongside administrative and survey data on school and post-school outcomes, and policy documentation. It was found that, in line with the mainstream population, social class is strongly associated with educational outcomes and post-school destinations. The interviews revealed that middle-class young people who are DHH were able to use social networks and the advocacy of parents to mitigate the negative consequences of deafness; this contrasted with the more troubled post-school experiences of young people from less advantaged social backgrounds. This research suggests that if the life chances of deaf young people are to be improved, both social class and deafness need to be taken into consideration by policy-makers and practitioners.

Hitchin’ a Ride in the 1970s: Canadian Youth Culture and the Romance with Mobility

Today, a “gap year” is regarded as an excellent opportunity for a young person to travel for his or her personal growth. However, in the 1970s, civil society saw dropping out of school or work and drifting around as the sign of youth alienation and crazy hippie ideas. In 1969, the Trudeau government struck a task force to investigate why thousands of middle-class young people were observed hitchhiking along the Trans-Canada Highway. This article looks at the federal government’s reaction to the “transient youth” subculture through the lens of what hitchhiking meant to restless teenagers and twenty-somethings. In the early 1970s, Canadian thumb-travellers subverted hegemonic class and gender expectations by putting a new twist on the rituals associated with traditional Canadian tourism. By self-consciously adorning themselves with backpacks, beads, Canada flags, and long bushy hair or by flipping a peace sign to oncoming traffic, they performed rituals of a romantic subculture. Then, as now, their road stories highlight more than the monotonous and carnivalesque moments of alternative travel; they can be read as key biographical moments when understandings of landscapes, national identity, and citizenship were formed.

Le strutture con tipo: uno studio di alcune configurazioni dell’italiano parlato

The aim of this article is to deal with structural and functional issues regarding the expression TIPO, in constructions such as ci vediamo tipo alle cinque. This paper argues that this element is not simply a filler, but is linked to particular focus issues. After a review of the previous accounts of TIPO, particularly in dictionaries and semantic studies, the article concentrates on formal, functional, and pragmatic issues concerning TIPO structures. This element seems to have interesting functions when put in specific environments. The sample of the study is made up of middle-class young people aged eighteen to twenty-five. TIPO rarely appears in written texts, so it seems to be a typical element of spoken texts of Italian native speakers.

Drug Use and HIV Risk Among Middle-Class Young People in Guatemala City

This qualitative study explored the relationship between drug use and risk for HIV transmission among middle-class young people in Guatemala City. It used the PEER methodology, whereby the interviewers were themselves drug users, and each recruited three friends as informants. The 21 peer interviewers recruited a total of 62 informants who participated in three interviews each. The informants viewed drug use favorably: as the social lubricant that facilitates interactions with friends and provides new, pleasurable experiences, free from the conventions of a conservative society. Drug use was limited almost exclusively to noninjection drugs: cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, lysergic acid diethylamide, and mushrooms. Informants feared pregnancy, detection of their drug use, overdosing, and becoming addicted but did not perceive any risk of HIV. With the recent escalation of drug trafficking in Guatemala, it is important to build the evidence base on drug use in this population and its potential implications for HIV transmission.

Listening to excluded young people's experiences of e-safety and risk

This article reports on excluded young people's experiences with and management of e-safety and risk. It has importance in exploring these concerns given that excluded young people's voices are very often absent in education and technology research and yet they are potentially more at risk when using Information and Communication Technologies than middle-class young people for whom the risks may be lower. The findings are drawn from an analysis of the in-depth qualitative interviews carried out with 13 permanently and temporarily excluded young people between the ages of 12–15 in a Pupil Referral Unit in South East England. The accounts given by this group of young people suggest that the strategies they deploy to manage their safety online are underdeveloped and inadequate. This points in turn to a need for further interventions to foster and develop these young people's strategies to avoid online risk as part of more general initiatives to develop digital literacy.

Constructions of the working-class ‘Other’ among urban, white, middle-class youth: ‘chavs’, subculture and the valuing of education

In the context of a ‘death’ of class in popular and policy discourse, this paper argues that social class is still a major force at work in young people's lives, particularly in the context of schooling. We argue that young people's subcultural groups are classed, in the way in which they are constructed in discourse. Drawing on a data set of 68 interviews with white, middle-class young people in three different cities in England, we argue that class can be seen and felt in young people's constructions of the ‘chav’, where white, working-class young people's ways of being and doing in the context of schooling, stand in stark contrast to the normative middle-class subject, and become pathologized.

Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era

The Mexican middle class has generally been neglected in academic literature. Dennis Gilbert’s Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era is an important addition to the few focused studies available on the Latin American middle class, for instance, Brian Owensby’s study of the Brazilian middle class during the Vargas era, Intimate Ironies; Soledad Loaeza’s Clases medias y política en México: La querella escolar; or Larissa Lomnitz and Ana Melnick’s Chile’s Middle Class: A Struggle for Survival in the Face of Neoliberalism. These studies find a necessary complement in Gilbert’s book on the Mexican experience after the economic crises of 1982 and 1994. Using interviews with middle-class Mexicans living in the city of Cuernavaca, Gilbert achieves insightful conclusions on this sector’s influential role behind the profound political and economic transformations of the country during the last 20 years, the period known as the neoliberal era.According to Gilbert’s analysis of data from electoral polls, most middle-class Mexicans voted for political change in 2000, favoring Vicente Fox, the PAN (National Action Party) candidate. Six years later, they reaffirmed their electoral preference for the center-right PAN as they voted for Luis Felipe Calderón. For Gilbert, rather than expressing an ideological trend, these outcomes demonstrated the middle-class’s goals of maintaining economic and political stability. According to Gilbert, after the 1994 financial crisis, the ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) could no longer guarantee economic stability, and the PAN appeared as the new viable alternative for the disappointed Mexican middle class.Despite persistent income inequalities in the country, Gilbert finds that instead of decreasing during the neoliberal era, the middle class in fact expanded. Newer cars, larger houses, and more household appliances have become available for this social sector, evidencing relative economic stability for its members. Better education has also been available for middle-class young people, corresponding to the importance given by this sector to creating cultural and social capital.Education is one of the most important values for the Latin American middle class. Gilbert’s work on the Mexican middle class suggests that this sector values education above anything else. Even in the aftermath of the 1982 economic crisis, amid the implementation of the neoliberal model in the country, middle-class Mexicans limited expenses in different areas, but never in their children’s education. According to Gilbert, paying private school tuitions turned out to be a matter of middle-class survival and preservation of their standard of living.Gilbert’s analysis of the Mexican middle class is based on family households where the head falls into one of the upper white-collar categories and income exceeds 150 percent of the median household income in the country. While using this particular unit offers the advantage of grouping people sharing family income and general cultural traits, it neglects the importance of the educational status of single people, which is particularly important in defining the middle-class condition in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America. Many professionals and recent graduates live by themselves and are part of a middle class that is becoming typical of large urban areas such as Mexico City. This means that around 20 percent of middle-class households are not considered in Gilbert’s study (p. 114). This situation might not have a major effect on studying the family-oriented Cuernavaca middle class, but it would have a strong impact if we were to approach the complexities of the Mexican middle class in larger cities.Why was Cuernavaca’s middle class chosen for Gilbert’s study? He explains that Cuernavaca’s inhabitants come from different parts of Mexico and that this city congregates an important number of middle-class representatives, partly as a result of its proximity to Mexico City. Yet Gilbert recognizes that the families participating in his study “cannot be considered a statistically representative sample of middle-class Cuernavaca or middle-class Mexico” (p. 109). For example, a focus on the intellectual/academic/artistic and highly politicized middle-class group is practically absent from Gilbert’s sample of Cuernavaca. Informal merchants are not a part of the sample either. Because Mexico is a predominantly urban country, where most middle-class people live in big cities such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Querétaro, it would make sense to perform research on one of these large urban areas whose middle-class compositions show tremendous complexity and heterogeneity.Gilbert’s book offers a smart approach to the correlation between social class and recent political-economic issues that are becoming ever more important in Mexico. It is also a strong invitation to keep exploring and discussing the importance of this social sector in Mexican history.