Middle-class Youth Research Articles

Desiring Family Ties: Marriage, Class, and Care in the Life Stories of Young, Lower-Class Newlyweds in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Recent trends in marriage include delaying marriage, the rise of singlehood, and romantic or companionate marriage. In studying these developments, including in Indonesia, anthropologists have largely focused on urban, educated, middle class youth, where ideals of romantic love and couple-focused fulfilment are evident. To broaden this perspective, this article focuses on the experiences of young, lower-class, low-income newlyweds. Drawing on diverse ethnographic life stories from Indonesia (metropolitan Java, rural West Sumatra, and coastal Papua), we show that marital ideas and practices stressed broader family expectations and social legitimacy, social and economic forms of care, and interdependence with extended kin. They did not generally express middle class romantic and companionate notions of love or marriage. These accounts highlight the salience of everyday material, social and economic aspects of care in marriage that have received less consideration recently due to the anthropological interest in romance, intimacy, and care as loving attention.

Introducing 'Brother-Love': If 'No-Homo' Were Invented in the Victorian Era

Working off of information surrounding nineteenth century intimate male friendships provided by E. Anthony Rotundo’s 1989 article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Norther United States, 1800-1900,” as well as ideas of female intimacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Julian Carter’s 2005 article “On Mother-Love: History, Queer Theory, and Nonlesbian Identity,” the concept of “brother-love” encompasses important components of intimate male friendships during the Victorian period. Hidden physical and emotional intimacy were vital to these intimate friendships, in ways differing from Carter’s “mother-love” as explored in this project. Anna Clark’s concept of “Twilight Moments” (2005) will help explain “brotherlove” as it is compared to Carter’s “mother-love.” “Brother-love” is a response to contemporary terms and concepts queer scholars use when focusing on historical moments, and it provides an alternative frame of reference for intimate and romantic male friendships while extracting contemporary influence of same-sex relations.

Middle-class youth fleeing Nigeria: rethinking African survival migration through the Japa phenomenon

ABSTRACT Migration for survival is commonly associated with refugees and asylum seekers who flee persecution, wars, and natural calamities. Yet, in Nigeria, university-educated, gainfully employed middle-class youth insist that leaving is a matter of survival and not a choice. This distinction is signalled by japa, a recently popularised term for ‘to run’ or ‘to flee’. Young Nigerians view migration as an escape from intolerable domestic conditions – prolonged university strikes, overturned development progress, and unprecedented currency inflation. In practice, japa follows formal procedures but favours quick departures. But by framing migration as fleeing, youth emphasise their refusal to cope. Foremost, they emphasise urgent respite over rationalised projects of social reproduction or status maintenance. Scholars, however, tend to overlook emotional or existential motives for voluntary migration and essentialise survival drives to forced migration. Drawing on 21 interviews with Nigerian youths, this paper shows a need to rethink survival migration, particularly how we value destinations compared to departures, conflate urgent desires with immediate exits, and privilege social functions over individual sentiments. By analysing youth’s interpretations of what survival means, we enrich our understanding of African migration beyond the binary of elite strategies for social reproduction or fateful journeys of forced migration.

A Pint-Sized Public Sphere: Compensatory Colonialism in Literature by Elite Children During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

AbstractDuring the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thousands of middle-class youths published their own amateur newspapers. These periodicals were printed using the so-called toy (or “novelty”) press, a portable tabletop device that helped democratize word processing. Children often used their presses to compose miniature novels and short stories. They then shared their prose with a national community of fellow juvenile writers collectively known as “Amateurdom.” Adolescent fiction explored an array of subjects, but the frontier, territorial expansion, and empire in the West became some of its particular fixations. All that imperial storytelling, however, possessed a rich subtext. Boys and girls, reacting to late-nineteenth-century changes in the lived experience of childhood, used their printing presses to challenge various constraints imposed upon them. But in so doing, they both perpetuated and reinforced a pernicious culture of settler colonialism that celebrated the subjugation of American Indians. Ultimately, the amateur publications of children remind us that fiction is not exclusively an adult enterprise. The creative output of young people provides important insight into an underexplored realm of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s literary world.

Paradoxes of Patrimony: Family Planning, Youth Volunteering, and Becoming "Big" in Uganda

Abstract: This article examines the experiences and motivations of young volunteers engaged in the development domain of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Uganda. While promoting various family-planning projects, volunteers deftly navigated human-rights discourses of international donors, norms of religious leaders, and development narratives of national policymakers as they attempted to advance their own life projects. Through the creation of new narratives and their agency, the volunteers translated, reformed, and re-presented Global North development discourse as part of a situated theorization on development problems. Simultaneously these educated, middle-class youth embraced the discursively vague field of family planning as the likeliest avenue for social mobility by becoming "big" within national and local patrimonial and patriarchal systems. Although such family-planning programs do seem to allow some volunteers to achieve their goals, they paradoxically reproduce the patriarchal systems that gender-equality NGOs aim to dismantle.

중산층 청소년의 성문화에 관한 연구

중산층 청소년의 성문화에 관한 연구

Heavy episodic drinking in adolescence and alcohol-related problems in adulthood: A developmental approach to alcohol use across the life course.

Heavy episodic drinking (HED) is a major public health concern, and youth who engage in HED are at increased risk for alcohol-related problems that continue into adulthood. Importantly, there is heterogeneity in the onset and course of adolescent HED, as youth exhibit different trajectories of initiation and progression into heavy drinking. Much of what is known about the etiology of adolescent HED and alcohol-related problems that persist into adulthood comes from studies of predominantly White, middle-class youth. Because alcohol use and related problems vary by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, it is unclear whether previous findings are relevant for understanding developmental antecedents and distal consequences of adolescent HED for minoritized individuals. In the current study, we utilize a developmental psychopathology perspective to fill this gap in the literature. Using a racially and economically diverse cohort followed from adolescence well into adulthood, we apply group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) to identify patterns of involvement in HED from age 14 to 17 years. We then investigate developmental antecedents of GBTM class membership, and alcohol-related distal outcomes in adulthood (∼ age 31 years) associated with GBTM class membership. Results highlight the importance of adolescent alcohol use in predicting future alcohol use in adulthood.

ICT Adoption on Cultural Preservation Amongst Indian Youth in Selangor, Malaysia

This paper presents the significant role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on cultural preservation among Indian Youth in Selangor, Malaysia. A middle-class youth group aged 18 to 35 years old participated in the study in Subang Jaya, Selangor. In-depth interviews, which were used as a qualitative data collection method, helped the researchers in developing a comprehensive understanding of how ICT is used to preserve culture. Usage of multiple and variety of ICT devices in daily life gave the space and opportunity to know about culture. However, some informants feel that socialization and parents imparting knowledge about culture still play an important role. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute to the existing literature on how ICT can play a role in preserving culture in the future and among the coming younger generation who will be leaving life in a world surrounded by ICT. Despite being a minority in Malaysia, the Indian community should be given equal rights and access to ICT to carry out their daily functions, including developing their cultural capital and cultural preservation

Who Is Afraid of Techno-Fiction? The Emergence of Online Science Fiction in the Age of Informatization

Abstract An important and distinctive characteristic of the emergence of South Korean science fiction for an adult readership is its flourishing in digital space, predominantly written by the new generation of middle-class, techno-savvy youth beginning in the late 1980s. This article, which terms these science fiction texts from the late 1980s through the 1990s “techno-fiction,” begins by examining how contemporary literary critics viewed both science fiction and the practice of digital writing as concerning symptoms of “postmodernity” that threatened older aesthetic axioms of the literary field. For these critics, techno-fiction signified the empirical facts not only that increasing numbers of texts were being produced via the mediation of computer technology but, even more concerning, that the larger, politico-economic transformation of informatization was radically restructuring the cultural landscape and everyday cultural practices. Building on these critics’ calls to pay attention to the rising middle-class habitus and related cultural techniques to better understand the state of literature and culture in the age of information, and set against the backdrop of state-initiated and neoliberal processes of informatization, this article closely examines how these middle-class youth grew up to become key players in the production and consumption of techno-fiction.

Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to this mobilization, yet it still falls into the dichotomous discourse of “positive/negative energy”. Moving beyond this discourse, the article provides three cases of emergent cultural practices among urban middle-class youth to explore to what extent can these practices, characterized by knowledge and fluidity, exceed the logic of the state and the market.

Central Asian Jadids’ Efforts to Serve the Nation by Bringing Enlightenment to the Country

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw fundamental changes in Central Asia’s cultural and social life. During that time, Jadidism emerged as a progressive movement throughout the emergence of new bourgeois relations, resulting in a cultural, spiritual, and moral upsurge in Central Asian society. The Jadids – educated middle-class youth – recognized the importance of studying secular sciences to keep up with Western achievements, provide a boost in development, and close the existing gap with European achievements. Today a discussion about the Jadids’ efforts for a secular society and their perspectives on the role and place of Islam in modern society is more important and relevant than ever since the Jadids worked to restore Central Asian religious traditions while introducing new ideas to the country. The paper examines how the Jadids’ ideas might be related to the changes taking place in Uzbekistan today. Uzbekistan is currently attempting to establish a new society within the framework of modern Islam, by the Islamic concept of dynamic thinking that is constantly adapting to the course of events and history.

Changing Food Habits of Urban Middle-Class Youth in India: ‘Ordering In’

The liberalisation of the Indian economy facilitated significant changes in the eating habits of urban middle-class Indians since the 1990s. While there have been studies on food and Indian society before liberalisation, on ‘street food’ and the impact of restaurants and practices of eating out after liberalisation in India, the rising phenomenon of ‘ordering in’ has remained relatively under-researched. This article examines the impact of online food delivery service providers on the food habits of urban middle-class youth in India. It finds that the combined effects of demonetisation and the related push towards digitalisation strengthened online food delivery services in the market. Subsequently, ordering in has become a regular part of the eating culture of urban middle-class youth, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study offers new insights into remarkable recent changes in the psycho-social and socio-economic structures of Indian society, affecting both consumers and service providers.

Understanding the New Islamic Populism: Al-Mukmin Ngruki Islamic Boarding School

The emergence of mobilised mass movements, demanding prosperity and the elimination of injustice, has emerged in various parts of the world, without exception in the Middle East and Indonesia. This movement was dominated by educated middle-class youth, sparked the term ummah, and then formed unique solidarity to protest against the government of his country. A new concept is needed by paying attention to the novelty of these characteristics, considering the old populism concept is not relevant enough to explain it. This paper seeks to raise the concept of New Islamic Populism to answer this deficiency. Furthermore, the Al-Mukmin Ngruki Islamic Boarding School (PPIM), the Islamic boarding school often associated with terrorism, is used as the object of research to show the evolution of populism. This study uses qualitative methods and data collection techniques in the form of interviews and literature studies. This study foundthat both santri and ustaz PPIM have aspirations and characteristics, asshown by the New Islamic Populism movement.

The Dice Are Loaded: Schools’ Social Class Composition and Athletic Contests

Research shows that social class differences in high school sports participation are large and growing. However, focusing on sports participation may obfuscate large social class differences in sports performance among participants. The authors develop theoretical predictions on the basis of exclusion (middle-class youth perform sports better) and inclusion (working-class youth perform sports better). To test these predictions, the authors analyze the relationship between high schools’ social class composition and success in high school athletics using data on more than 200,000 contests in school fixed-effects models. The findings indicate that predominantly middle-class schools beat economically integrated and predominantly working-class schools by large margins, supporting exclusivity perspectives. Also, predominantly working-class schools win as much as economically integrated schools, providing evidence of inclusion, but inclusion is much weaker than exclusion. The authors conclude that sports performance among youth is highly stratified by social class.

Social professional portrait of the middle class: regional aspect (Case Study: the City of Omsk-Russia)

The study analyzes the regional features of the social-professional characteristics of the middle class and the migration attitudes of the middle-class youth (for example, in the city of Omsk). The empirical basis of the study is the data of a sociological survey conducted at the Department of Sociology of Dostoevsky Omsk State University in 2021.The collected data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). It is concluded that the position of the middle class and factors of migration relations are associated with the social-economic conditions for the development of creative environment in the city.

Cool Christianity: The Fashion-Celebrity-Megachurch Industrial Complex

In this article, I analyze the ways in which fashion, megachurches, and celebrity and youth cultures coalesce in the 21st century, giving rise to the phenomenon of “Cool Christianity.” I contend that this repackaged Christianity, directed at the middle-class Millennials and Generation Z, is created not only by megachurches in a bid to attract new generations, as it is usually argued. It is also produced by celebrities, the fashion industry, and young Christian entrepreneurs. I argue that this assemblage of different elements generates a “Fashion-Celebrity-Megachurch industrial complex” that makes Christianity attractive to middle-class youth who do not find a home in more conservative churches that reject youth cultures. I show that this industrial complex creates an “aesthetic formation” that bonds and binds particularly young people as they transition into adulthood. I also demonstrate that because Cool Christianity is a relatively new aesthetic style, it becomes highly visible and needs to be negotiated with older styles of Christianity. This paper draws on six years of multi-sited fieldwork with the Australian megachurch Hillsong in Australia and Brazil, and monitoring and analyzing media reports on this church, its many social media accounts, and how followers interacted with them.

The Paradoxes of “Vernacularised” Liberalism in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT In response to “indigenous” justifications of illiberalism (e.g., “Asian values”) and the cronyism of electoral authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, some pro-democracy activists constructed a “vernacularised” liberal discourse that framed demands for human rights and “good governance” in religious-communalist terms. This countered charges that activists were overly Westernised and supported their calls for ethical rule. Yet, after authoritarian rule gave way to democratic transition, liberals often turned against elected governments or were reluctant to challenge extremists who targeted ethno-religious minorities. In analysing these paradoxes, this article uses a contextualist rather than a stipulative, benchmarking approach that ignores contradictions in Western liberalism. Anti-majoritarianism in the Philippines and Thailand was driven by the fear that corrupt populists threatened religious-communalist values, with liberals ultimately turning against democracy. Another paradox is that in Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar liberals first used culturalist arguments to justify upholding civil liberties, but later became reluctant to criticise exclusivist forms of ethno-nationalism that endangered human rights. In the face of democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia, liberalism is being reconfigured, for instance through resistance by a middle-class youth movement against military-monarchical rule in Thailand, through multi-ethnic resistance to the 2021 coup in Myanmar, and by traditionalist Islamic groups in Indonesia.

Adolescents’ and emerging adults’ reminisces about emotions in the context of disclosing, concealing, and lying to parents

AbstractThe present study examined early and middle adolescents’ and emerging adults’ emotions associated with salient experiences of disclosure, concealment, and lying to parents about their routine activities. US middle class youth (n = 131; Ms = 12.74, 15.81, 20.40 years, respectively) recalled a time they disclosed, concealed, and lied to parents; using directed questions, participants were asked to recall their emotions when the events happened and in thinking about the events now. Youth reported more relief but also more distress and anxiety when reminiscing about the time they disclosed than they reported at present, whereas they reported more happiness at present than when they disclosed. Youth reported more undifferentiated negative emotions and more guilt—but unexpectedly, also less shame—when reminiscing about the time they concealed and lied than they reported at present; emerging adults reported more guilt than did early and middle adolescents, but only when reflecting on their past experience and not when considering their guilt about that experience now. Middle adolescent females recalled more anxiety and distress when they lied than did either same‐age males or older females. Findings shed light on the role of emotions in disclosure, concealment and lying and their implications for self, identity, and moral development.

Representasi Anak Muda Gaul dan Saleh dalam Gerakan Hijrah: Analisis Semiotika Roland Barthes atas Konten Akun Instagram Pesan Trend Pemuda (@pesan_trend)

The stagnation of da'wah among young people is mostly caused by the use of symbols that are not in line with or even contrary to the aspirations of young people. The da'wah offered by the Hijrah Youth Shift Movement is a da'wah that uses symbols of young people as a medium for their da'wah. This article tries to explain how the Hijrah Youth Shift Movement represents the value of young people who are slang and pious. Through Rolland Barthes' semiotic approach, the author tries to examine these symbols which are presented in the da'wah content uploaded to the Instagram @message_trend account. In denotation, posts from the Instagram @message_trend account display activities such as cleaning, archery, camping, tahajud prayer in green open spaces. In connotation, the Instagram account @pesan_trend tries to show a model of young Muslim people who love the environment, are physically and spiritually healthy. Mythically or ideologically, @pesan_trend, which was initiated by UHA and Shift Pemuda Hijrah, is showing the social class of middle-class Muslim youth, which so far has been identified with indie culture, which is active in green spaces. On the other hand, this also shows the ideology of Shift which is leaning towards the tarbiyah movement.

Understanding Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh

Challenges from Islamist militants have been an integral part of Bangladesh’s political landscape since the 1980s. Islamist militancy has passed through different phases of silent and active forms, drawing inspiration from conflicts in Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. A vast literature has dealt with Islamist militancy in Bangladesh, but very few works have shed light on who the Bangladeshi Islamist militants are and how they radicalize youths, whom they target for their secret mission of killings, and finally why youths choose to be radicalized, especially with the arrival of Islamic State and Al Qaeda in Bangladesh in 2013. The author conducted nearly 50 in-depth interviews with experts in Bangladesh and reviewed newspaper reports to answer these questions. This paper argues that middle-class youths with urban and secular backgrounds are increasingly being radicalized through cyber space, and diverse groups of people are targeted to carry out killings owing to their perceived ideological divergence. The idea of an apocalyptic Caliphate, a feeling of victimization, a disillusionment with the state and society, and personal distresses are all found to act as catalysts for Islamist radicalization in Bangladesh.