Young People Construct Research Articles

Gender fluidity and “other left-wing superstitions”: problem representations in the inquiry report on the NSW Parental Rights Bill

ABSTRACT Policies and other governance initiatives that attempt to limit or prohibit gender diversity inside (and outside of) schools are increasing in frequency. One core discourse that has been deployed to restrict curricular engagements and school policies around gender and sexuality diversity in schools is that of “parental rights”, which seeks to position any discussions of these matters as requiring consent of parents. This paper reviews an inquiry report into proposed legislation that sought to enshrine “parental rights” in education and prohibit the teaching of “gender fluidity” in schools in New South Wales, Australia. Produced in 2021, the inquiry report included inputs from advocacy groups, citizens, and lobbyists alongside substantial contributions from politicians, representing multiple constructions of gender, identity, young people, and schooling. Using Bacchi and Goodwin’s “What is the problem represented to be” framework, this paper analyses the conceptual logic and prominent discourses within the Report. Three key problem constructions dominated: “gender fluidity”, unsafe schools and radical teachers. We argue that the Report engaged in a moral panic of gender diversity as contagious, teachable, and dangerous. The logic of the Report depended upon the imagined but often cited crisis of teacher quality and a subscription to antiquated discourses that frame children as innocent, asexual, and cisgender. Findings demonstrate that the Report silenced the perspectives and experiences of transgender and gender diverse children and adults. Ultimately, the Report reproduced and amplified transphobic discourses that proliferate in international publics that seek to limit and admonish gender diversity and gender diverse young people.

“There’s No Way of Growing”: Subjective Dimensions of Precarity Among Young Spanish Adults

AbstractThis article analyses the subjective dimension of the experience of precarity among young Spanish adults, a group particularly affected by the 2008 crisis and the austerity policies that followed. Based on qualitative research, we analyse how precarity affects the ideas that young people construct of themselves and their situation. The results show their assumption of the normative aspects of the idea of transition to adulthood and their feeling of inadequacy with their own present. In interpreting their situation, two opposing discourses are revealed: one involving self-blame and the other pointing to social and structural factors as the cause of their malaise. Finally, the young people make some positive re-readings of their circumstances, which involve subjective work to cope with their situation of vulnerability and which is based on valuing the expressive aspects of work and a lifestyle that is more flexible and less standardised than that of past generations.

Making sense of politics: how affective dispositions and everyday experiences connect young people with the political

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the cognitive, affective and socially situated processes through which young people make sense of politics. We ask (1) how young people construct understandings of political issues, and (2) when these understandings facilitate their orientation to and connection with political issues. To answer these questions, we conducted 4 × 4 focus groups with groups of 15–30-year-old Dutch people, each time focusing on a, then current, political issue: the Syrian Civil War, the (so-called) US Muslim travel ban, the 2017 Dutch general election, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Our analysis of the group discussions shows that young people make sense of and become emotionally involved in political issues through: (a) feelings of indignation that link a political issue with one’s personal values, (b) media-facilitated affective orientations towards political actors that function as representations of a political issue, and (c) the connection of a political issue with meaningful social contexts and experiences. Our findings add to extant scholarly work on political learning by shedding light on the affective, situated and social processes through which political understandings and orientations are formed in young people.

Research on Narrative Strategies in Korean Variety Shows and Youth Self-identification: A Case Study of 'Biong Biong Planet Game Room'

Korean variety shows, with their distinctive entertainment style and gamification, have become a widely disseminated part of Korean pop culture, creating a unique cultural landscape. "Biong Biong Planet Game Room," a variety show produced in South Korea in 2022, combines travel reality shows with competitive games, enriching the emotional expression of variety shows through the construction of multiple spaces. This paper, based on the analysis of the narrative strategies of "Biong Biong Planet Game Room," explores the narrative paths of the show. It also examines how contemporary youths seek self-identification within such shows and project their self-awareness into them. Through this analysis, the paper identifies three ways in which young people construct their self-identity: resonating with the narrative subjects, immersing in the narrative space, and being attracted and engaged by the diverse and intertwined narrative structures. This research also provides insights into the development path for Chinese variety shows.

‘They’re Much Too young’: The Entanglement of Porn, Pleasure and Age in Sex Education

ABSTRACT Most debates around the place of porn in the classroom focus on abstaining from porn through sex education. Any inclusion of pleasure often entails lengthy consideration of discourses of pornification and sexualization more broadly. In this study, I aimed to elicit young people’s and teachers’ views, concerns and suggestions about the place of porn, and pleasure more broadly, in sex education. I present a thematic content analysis of small friendship group interviews with 106 young people aged 12–16, who self-identified as boys or girls, and semi-structured interviews with six teachers in New Zealand. I argue that by politicizing age, we continue to view young people as an at risk population. In doing so, we miss the nuance of young people’s engagements with porn and pleasure, which denies scope to understand the role of porn in young people’s lives. This is a missed opportunity to interrogate and understand porn as a resource through which young people construct and express their sexual subjectivities and social roles.

Uncovering young people's situational construction of sexual consent.

Aim: To investigate how young Danes construct sexual consent generally, but also specifically in relation to heavy alcohol intoxication. Methods: Drawing on 30 qualitative in-depth interviews with young people, aged 19-25 years, and adopting a critical discursive psychological framework, we explored the interpretative repertoires that the participants made use of to construct sexual consent and the subject positions those repertoires enabled. Results: The participants made use of three interpretative repertoires that we named as follows: (1) sexual consent as an agreement between rational individuals; (2) sexual consent as a heteronormative practice; and (3) intoxicated sexual consent. Discussion: Young people draw on different repertoires when discussing sexual consent in general, sexual consent in relation to gendered practices and expectations, and sexual consent in relation to heavy alcohol intoxication. Conclusion: It is vital to keep the situational nature of young people's constructions of sexual consent in mind if we wish to understand and eventually reduce the number of non-consensual sexual experiences.

The influence of the media on shaping the moral image of students

Relevance. The issue of student moral values is a significant problem for both the discipline of sociology and society. The existence of values supports social cohesion, ensures appropriate behavior, and creates a common ethos through media in today's world. The shaping of youth morality through the media is linked to the development of culture in different ways while forming a fundamental part of the set of principles, values, beliefs, and rules of society.Purpose. The research aims to analyze the factors of the impact of media tools on the behavior of students in the society of the Republic of Kazakhstan.Methodology. To achieve the research objectives, the following methods were used: descriptive, interview, and comparative.Results. The results of the research determined that the relationship between media environment and youth audience behavior goes beyond the analysis and intervention of individual behavior, conditioning an inclusive and interdisciplinary framework for explaining and predicting social effects. The media influence the educational phenomenon and the socialization process because they are part of the processes of group interaction and the identity construction of young people. Television, social media, and the internet have an important influence on student behavior, but questions remain as to the conditions under which this influence is manifested. The ability of the media to influence the cultural practices and behavior of young students is enhanced by the structure and control of the information sources that produce media content. This is reinforced in postmodern contexts using state and corporate communication forms that disseminate information. Information sources act as systems with expedient cultural practices, where the roles and actions of participants are fixed and predictable.Conclusions. The result is an interconnected system of economic, social, and interpersonal circumstances that can influence student behavior and perspectives. The practical significance lies in the use of the research findings by academics, as well as specialists in journalism, media, and pedagogy.

“Bois of Isolation”: queering place, gender binaries and the ‘self’ through selfies in pandemic lockdown

ABSTRACT What happens to queer and gender-non-conforming community, bodily expression and identity when many queer spaces are closed and communities move to online spaces? In this article, we critically reflect on our collaborative project bois of isolation (boi) – a platform within Instagram for people to share selfies of the spaces and processes through which they queer gender binaries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask to what extent online social media spaces can disrupt normative, binarized gender identity and provide ways of reimagining the selfie. Operating within digital capitalism, selfies often serve to circulate and reproduce dominant ‘desirable’ subjectivities in ‘gender appropriate’ places. However, we argue through interventions like boi young people carve out small spaces of dissent and respite in/from social media platforms and create forms of community during lockdown. By queering the visual representations of binarized gender and questioning the neoliberal individualized ‘self’ in ‘selfies’, young people construct communal aesthetic spaces in which gender plurality and fluidity are expressed and celebrated.

Constructing the Life Skills Education Experiences of Maldivian Adolescents: Exploring Personal Narratives of Transition, Challenge, and Becoming

Life skills have been shown to help young people cope with challenges and facilitate their transition into adulthood. Few studies have explored life skills programs from the lived experiences of youth themselves. Using a retrospective narrative analysis approach, this study uses social construction and social learning theories to investigate how young people construct their experiences of life skills education in the context of their embedded social environments, including their relationships with family, school, and peers. The study incorporates a series of in-depth, face-to-face, and social media-based interviews with two young adults from the Maldives who had very different experiences in life skills programs. Capturing the participants’ subjective experiences of life skills over time, and in the context of their transition to adulthood, allowed us to make situated connections between program experiences and the participants’ everyday lives. The findings point to the importance of program duration and directly link program content to adolescents’ real-world experiences including critical life incidents, the need to provide more structure in the delivery of programs, and the importance of ensuring that program experiences align with relevant skills and competencies. Potential implications for life skills education programs are outlined.

Balance, self-efficacy and collective individualism: Young people’s ideal eater types

Background: In health education, there is a risk of giving overly prescriptive recommendations, potentially activating conflicting in-group norms that reduce message receptiveness. For example, the notion of ‘unhealthy youth’ is a stereotype which suggests that young people are expected to make unhealthy choices. If such in-group norms are activated as part of health education, the will to emulate healthy out-group behaviour may decrease. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore how young people construct different types of eaters in relation to health recommendations. Method: Group interviews were conducted with 31 students aged 10–16 years (from school grades 5 and 8) in northern Sweden and data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: The analysis yielded eight ideal eater types: healthy-but-not-too-healthy; obsessively healthy; devil-may-care; destabilised; contextual; powerless; intuitive; and discontented eaters. Participants’ preferred types did not overly regulate their eating, bute intuitively ate what they liked and/or needed in a balanced way. They were also receptive to social and contextual cues without being completely guided by them. Conclusion: Even in the current era of individualism, food retains its social meanings, and young people’s views of healthy eating are shaped by valued social groups. We therefore recommend the promotion of shared individualism as part of health education, where the expression of individual taste is encouraged alongside adherence to group norms. It is also crucial to highlight how healthy and unhealthy foods can coexist as part of a balanced diet.

Young people’s voices on emotions: a narrative inquiry

This article presents an innovative narrative inquiry study carried out in a primary school in Aotearoa New Zealand with three young people who provide insights into how they perceive, construct, give meaning to, and make sense of their own emotions. The analysis from this primary research draws on Foucauldian scholarship to examine how the narratives that young people construct about their feelings are shaped by dominant psy-discourses on emotions. We argue that through these discourses, certain voices of authority, knowledge, and ways of seeing are privileged in schools—while others are silenced—in order to label young people as emotionally or mentally “unwell” and in need of expert assistance. In doing so, we suggest that critical interdisciplinary work by health, psychology, counselling, and education professionals in schools can create spaces to explore inter-professional dialogue and reflexivity, as well as to challenge orthodox approaches to young people’s emotional lives.

Art and citizenship: Practices and discourses of young artivists in Portugal

ABSTRACT The literature on youth and political participation has been increasingly paying attention to more alternative and non-institutional forms of engagement by that cohort. The growing detachment from the sphere of institutional participation is the other face of these trends which have been intensifying and are behind some authors' descriptions of young people as apathic and apolitical. In reality, young people think and act politically in fields where the private and public spheres mix, and which involve entertainment, leisure, and sociability. Outside the normative political sphere, based on an adult-centric world vision, young people construct new forms of intervention that spring from questioning the world, the exercise of power, and different forms of inequality. The artistic and creative practices have functioned as crucial devices for young people to secure a space in the public sphere. In this article we employ the term artivism to reflect on how they articulate this combination of art and civic intervention. It is based on a project developed in Portugal involving in-depth interviews with young people between 14 and 35 years who are involved in multiple causes. The analysis of their discourses allowed us to develop a typology of functions that are attributed to artivism.

Language brokering as acts of care: experiences of young migrants born in Poland and Romania living in Sweden

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyse how young migrants born in Poland and Romania, living in Sweden, construct their experiences of language brokering as acts of care within family relationships. The empirical data is based on narratives and visual material produced during interviews with 18 young people who moved to Sweden as children to join one or both parents migrating for work as part of the intra-EU mobility since 2004. The article adds new knowledge to the research on language brokering by focusing on its relational dimensions and designating it as one of the many other caring activities circulating between family members. The young people in the study act as language brokers by translating, interpreting, doing the writing and speaking as well as taking on an advocating and educational role for parents. By switching between languages in their ordinary conversations with siblings and parents they also engage in mutual multilingual learning. Their role as language brokers is analysed as part of the changing care dynamics between children and parents after reunification in Sweden. The young people construct their experiences in relation to feelings of love and obligation and their understanding of what is age appropriate to do. Their experiences of language brokering change over time and depend on other family members' bilingual competences and a supportive environment. According to our results, practicing language brokering may contribute to strengthening children's capacities as citizens and their feelings of being seen as important and valued in the family and society.

The Role of Social Media in the Creation of Young People’s Consumer Identities

This article explores how young people construct and express their consumer identities via their consumption styles on social media. The importance of commercial content on social media, such as the postings of social media influencers and advertisers, has been increasing during the past years. Framed by theories on social identity, social comparison and consumer socialization, we analysed focus group discussions with 15 to 19-year-old teenagers in Finland ( N = 35). The results reveal that the participants had a clear understanding of their consumer identities: what kind of consumers they were and what they did not want to be. The consumption styles: luxury brand-oriented, trendy second-hand and sustainable, were heavily affected by social media, particularly by commercial social media influencers. Although our sample of young people was rather small, the results were consistent with other studies, and provided deeper understanding of the important role of commercial social media in young people’s consumption styles. Thereby, the research brings social media more tightly into the process of young consumers’ identity formation. For today’s young people, consumer identity is a major part of social identity which is greatly affected by social media. This is should be acknowledged by commercial actors, educators and consumer policy makers.

Eliminating Stereotypes: Villages as Desirable Spaces for Partying among Spanish Youth☆

AbstractMost of the research on rural youth has focused on the material conditions that cause their migration to cities, but it has not tended to address sociocultural dimensions, such as those concerning leisure and what might condition the processes of migration among young people. The aim of this study is to contrast the discourse and representations that young people have regarding leisure with the festive practices that they carry out in Spanish villages. The fieldwork consisted of 13 discussion groups and 38 in‐depth interviews (N = 118), with participants aged between 15 and 24 years. The results show that: (1) young people construct their idea of partying through dominant, dichotomous and unequal rural–urban representations, demonstrating the presence of traditional stereotypes around rurality; (2) the village becomes desirable as a place for partying at specific times of the year, such as local festivals; (3) the practices of rural youth call into question this normative imaginary, as is also shown by their adaptation, belonging and agency in the construction and management of leisure. Getting rid of stereotypes about rurality and creating positive thinking about the leisure possibilities in villages can lead young people to see it as a space for opportunities and personal development.

Digital youth in Qatar: Negotiating culture and national identity through social media networks

The expanding digital media environment in Qatar is arguably affecting the construction of young people’s identities and the various expressions of who they are. The multiplicity of online digital spaces allows the youth nowadays to easily commute between multiple platforms and consume a multitude of media content in a manner not possible at any point before them. Through the implementation of ten focus group discussions among a sample of Qatari youths between 19 and 35 years of age, as well as 27 semi-structured in-depth interviews with social media activists, media experts, academics and policymakers in Qatar, this article attempts to analyse the complex media consumption environment that the Qatari youth engage with as well as the impact of that consumption on the formation of their identity. It looks at the extent to which their choices of various media genres on social media platforms allow them to negotiate and develop their own hybridized cultural identity. This study also considers how the Qatari youth capitalize on online spaces to reconstruct and represent their own personas and consolidate their thoughts and perceptions about the world around them. The findings show great affinity to social media networks. Online spaces such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp appear as key sources of news, information gathering, communication and entertainment. The study also reveals a significant impact of the content of social media networks along with opinion leaders like role models and influencers in prompting the consumption behaviour, opinion-making and personal choices in terms of fashion and style among the Qatari youth.

Спорт как сфера конструирования жизненных стратегий молодежи в российском обществе

The article is devoted to the analysis of sport as a sphere of constructing the youth’s life strategies. The following interrelated issues are considered: the function of sport in modern society; the role of sport in socialization and integration of young people; general trends in the development of sports in Russia; conditions for the construction of young people’s life strategies in Russian sport. The researcher has defined the stages of life strategies typical of all the athletes: at the beginning of sports activities, interest and value perception of sports is developed; in the training period there is an increase in the number of competitions and intensification of the training process; in the professional period, the sports career is flourishing; in the post-professional period, the sports career ends with a professional reorientation.

“Keep Your Wheels Off the Furniture”: The Marginalization of Street Skateboarding in the City of Melbourne’s “Skate Melbourne Plan”

The City of Melbourne’s Skate Melbourne Plan purports to be skateboarder-centered, focusing on developing skate spaces for skateboarders. Drawing on research analyzing street skateboarders’ production of space and the importance of public spaces to street skateboarding, we examine how the Skate Melbourne Plan recognizes and supports street skateboarders’ capacity to skate in city environments. We suggest that rather than developing street skateboarding in the Melbourne Central Business District (CBD), the Skate Melbourne Plan reproduces negative constructions of young people who engage in street skateboarding as deviant and delinquent, by marginalizing and delegitimizing street skateboarding in public spaces.

Los expedientes del Tribunal de Menores como fuentes para el estudio histórico de las cotidianeidades infantiles y juveniles (La Plata, 1938-1942)

This article proposes to reflect on the difficulties involved in the historical analysis of the judicial records of the first Juvenile Court that functioned in Argentina, as well as to highlight its potential for understanding everyday life in past scenarios. To do so, it focuses on the judicial processes faced by boys accused of committing crimes in the city of La Plata between 1938 and 1942. From these purposes, it warns that these documents illuminate the way in which the judicial agents evaluated the behaviors and moralities of boys, girls, young people and their families, as well as the tactics of those who were configured as denouncers and denounced. In the same way, it assures that a reading against the grain of the files offers clues to analyze the construction of young people from popular sectors as a social problem through the prism of their daily practices, their identities and their conflictive coexistence in neighborhood spaces.

Fictive Kinship, Participation and Belief

Abstract Belonging is connected to young people’s wellbeing, and understanding how youth workers perceive belonging can assist youth work practice. Belonging in youth work is promoted through fictive kinship, in the context of Christian faith-based youth work practice, it is also connected to how young people construct belief. This research was conducted as an instrumental case study to explore Christian faith-based youth workers’ biographies, experiences and perceptions of belonging, and relationship to their youth work practice. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that participants connected belonging to fictive kinship notions of ‘family’, and as a result sought to create a sense of family-like kinship relationships in their practice. Christian faith-based youth workers (cfbyw) also connected kinship and a sense of belonging to participation, including having a role, a voice, and a right to be part of a community, which can be seen in the setting as pointing to the potential presence of belonging. This article contributes to a conceptual understanding of faith-based work with young people and the implications for youth work practice through investigating the place of belonging in Christian faith-based youth work, its relationship to belief and the role of fictive kinship in youth work.