Young People's Discourses Research Articles

Changes in young people's discourses about leaving home in Spain after the economic crisis.

The increasing complexity of young adults' leaving-home trajectories, combined with the effects of the economic recession, has led to an upturn in academic interest in this question. Nevertheless, the impact of the economic recession on young adults' housing imaginary has yet to be extensively addressed. This article analyses the way social discourses on leaving home evolved before and after the economic downturn. Using a diachronic, qualitative design to compare discussion groups from 2007 and 2014 in Spain, a relevant change can be observed: flexible patterns of leaving home appear that were previously rejected or only mentioned by upper-middle class young. Our findings highlight the way that expectations, values and norms about leaving home have altered, opening the debate about how Spanish young people will approach this transition in the future, but also how they did in the past.

Moving through, interacting with, and caring for the city. Children's and young people's everyday experiences in smart cities

In recent years, smart city programmes have focused on innovation and technology to transform cities into resource-efficient, liveable, and inclusive places. Children's and young people's positions in smart cities are unstable and, depending on a project's agenda, ever-shifting – at the centre of a bottom-up movement, on the fringes of top-down planned programmes. This article revolves around the everyday experiences of children and young people and explores how they encounter life in a smart city district. It draws on observations from a qualitative case study with children and young people in a Viennese neighbourhood where an EU smart city lighthouse project was implemented from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on ethnographic research with children and young people in a school, an afterschool centre, and an open child and youth care programme in a city park, I develop three dimensions of encounters: how children and young people move through, interact with, and take care of the city. My findings show that many children and young people perceive crises with the same urgency as smart city programmes and are equally interested in technological innovation, environmental protection, and social inclusion. They demonstrate responsibility and care about socio-ecological challenges and approaches to solutions. However, young people's discourses and practices also show that urban life cannot be limited to certain issues, nor do young people's urban lives end at structural or administrative boundaries. Participants also emphasise that focusing on human beings alone does not lead to sustainable urban development, and they express frustration with measures that bypass the reality of their lives and divert much-needed attention away from pressing issues.

Beyond millennials v baby boomers: Using kindness to assess generationalism across four age cohorts in Australia

Today’s young people (youth and young adults) are routinely understood in generational terms, constructed as narcissistic and selfish in comparison with their predecessors. Despite announcements of a weakening commitment to values of kindness and generosity, there is little empirical research that examines these trends. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes shows that young people are more likely to be kind but are less likely to think most Australians are kind. This article investigates this tension using focus groups with Australians of different ages (corresponding to major generational groupings) and drawing on the sociology of generations. To differentiate between generation, period and age/life-cycle effects requires longitudinal methods. However, these qualitative data suggest that a ‘generationalist’ discourse of young people as narcissistic is powerful in Australia and that young people are both internalising and challenging this framing. They appear to be responding to common experiences of growing up with the social and economic uncertainties of an ‘until-further-notice’ world and express strong support for values of kindness and openness to difference.

Proximal or peripheral: temporality and spatiality in young people's discourses on gender violence in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article explores how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how violence, gender, space and time are co-constructed in this discourse. We found that young people display an ambivalent attitude to violence, reinforcing several contradictory discourses of violence. Young people adopt various understandings that place violence differently in time (ongoing vs. past) and space (distant/absent vs. close/present). They discursively construct the school as a non-violent space while considering digital spaces to be violent. Yet, they still find that violence occurs at different places and times at school. These ‘discursive manoeuvres’ highlight how views on violence that territorialises and re-territorialises places as being ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ is part of the gendered spatial regulation of young people's lives. By specifically analysing time and space in young people's discourse on violence, this article contributes to research on their perspectives on gendered violence.

Young people and the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of ‘enterprise’: stories from a ‘Rust Belt’ city

ABSTRACTIn the ‘Rust Belt’ city of Geelong in Victoria, Australia, discourses of young people’s enterprise and innovation provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing material and symbolic consequences of industrial decline, job losses, and the growing insecurity of employment and income. GT Magazine is a weekly, large circulation magazine in Geelong with a significant focus on the activities and aspirations of enterprising young people. In this paper, we examine, by utilising techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, the particular ways in which young people’s innovation and enterprise are framed and enacted in GT Magazine. Our analysis reveals that ‘youth’ and ‘enterprise’ are, in GT Magazine, given an embodied form that is powerfully marked by aestheticised, normalised enactments of gender, class and race. In doing this work, we make productive contributions to three key themes in contemporary youth studies: new work orders and the youthful self as enterprise; the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of affective labour in these new work orders; and the emerging spatial turn to examine young people's embodied, place-based experiences of employment and enterprise. We seek to make problematic the sense that solutions to multiple disruptions and crises in capitalism and the environment are to be found in young people’s enterprise. Particularly when that enterprise is given form in ways that are aestheticised, gendered, classed, individualised and responsibilised.

From pursuit to progress: critical reflections on concepts of young people and crime in Australia

ABSTRACTIn September 2018, the bodies of two Aboriginal boys were pulled from the Swan River in Perth, Australia. Trisjack Simpson, 17, and Chris Drage, 16, had run to the river as police pursued them on foot. They had been seen jumping fences. Their story is emblematic of how youth and crime are constructed in relation to each other; in particular, how certain young bodies come to be known as criminal – or, as more criminal than others. In this ‘Contemporary Comment’, the story of the boys provides a focus for critically interrogating the ways we conceive juvenile crime in Australia. It argues that mainstream discourses of young people and crime are often based on, and further entrench, a colonial ideology; and that radical reform of practices is both possible and needed.

Media, legal and young people’s discourses around sexting

The term sexting has come to be associated with media, political and public concern over young people’s involvement in the sending and/or receiving of nude or semi-nude images and/or videos of one another. Public discourses around sexting have framed the practice as problematic, reflecting long-held – and often very real – anxieties over young people and their sexuality. Of particular focus in relation to sexting have been the risks and harms associated with the practice and current or potential legal responses. Missing from much of this public discourse, however, have been the voices of young people themselves. In order to bring young people’s voices into the discourse, this article draws on research conducted with young people, as well as extensive legal and media analysis of sexting by young people. It contrasts these popular and legal discourses around sexting with the discourses of young people themselves, exploring the ways in which they understand and perceive sexting and how these perceptions converge with and diverge from dominant discourses. In this way, the article demonstrates the fundamental discord between such discourses, indicating the need to rethink legal responses to sexting between young people.

‘Do you want to do some arm wrestling?’: children's strategies when experiencing domestic violence and the meaning of age

AbstractThe aim of this study is, by analysing children's and young people's discourses, to investigate their strategies in response to domestic violence episodes, in relation to their age. The empirical data come from individual interviews with children and young people (ages 8–20 years) who had experienced domestic violence and lived at refuges for abused women. The thematic analysis shows that the children describe a wide range of strategies before, during and after a violent episode, that all children act regardless of age and that strategies vary according not only to age but also to situation and context. The theoretical framework used is the sociology of childhood, and the analysis engages with theoretical concepts of age, agency and positioning.

Young people's perspectives on conflict, reconciliation and reunification in Cyprus

The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of young people on conflict, reconciliation and reunification in Cyprus. The paper is based on focus group discussions with 20 Turkish Cypriot and 20 Greek Cypriot young people, aged between 14 and 16, drawn from two schools located in the divided capital city of Nicosia. While young people's discourses revealed underlying deep-seated hostilities in attitudes between the two groups, there was some evidence of cautious optimism. The paper explores what lessons can be learned from ascertaining young people's viewpoints and how these opinions need to be taken seriously in order to further our understanding of young people's experiences of divided societies.

Orientations to English in post-apartheid schooling

As Voloshinov has famously argued, ‘the word is the most sensitive index of social changes, and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth’ (Voloshinov, 1986: 19). Scrutiny of young people's discourses on language together with their language practices offers us a window into a society in transition, such as present-day South Africa. This article examines the language ideologies and language practices of Black youth attending previously White, now desegregated, suburban schools in South African cities, important spaces for the production of an expanding Black middle class (Soudien, 2004). Due to their resourcing during apartheid (both financial and human) previously White schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquisition and maintenance of a prestige variety of South African English. This article looks at how mainly African girls (15–16 years) position themselves in relation to English, drawing on data collected using ethnographic approaches in four desegregated schools in South African cities: three in Johannesburg, Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Western Cape. The discussion focuses on two significant themes: English and the [re]production of race; and the place of English in young people's linguistic repertoires. My aim is to show how African youth in desegregated schools orient themselves to English and what their language ideologies and language practices might tell us about macro social processes, including the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. Schooling, as Bourdieu points out, is one of the most important sites for social reproduction and is thus also one of the key sites, ‘which imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 650). However, co-present with processes of reproduction are practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses. Suburban desegregated schools are thus productive sites for the re-making of cultural practices (including language) and identities.

“Delinquent behaviour as a kind of body politics” against adult regulations — Young people's discourses in Hong Kong

Usually, discourses of young people, particularly for the voices of ‘youth-at-disadvantage’, are silenced no matter in the social construction of their experiences or in the social investigation of their behaviour. Without their voices, a discourse of individual deficits is usually constructed to talk about their delinquent behaviour. However, in the discourses of young people, they considered their problem behaviour as a kind of ‘body politics’ to work against adult regulations. Moreover, obvious gender differences were revealed. While female adolescents constructed their problem behaviour as a tool to rebel against the harsh parental control on their leisure time activities, their male counterparts referred it as an escape to avoid heavy conflicts with parents on their school-to-work situations. In the discourses of young people, what they could do in the face of the adult society was only to rebel or escape with their bodies. Thus, in view of young people's discourse construction of their experiences, gender specific and family based interventions are recommended to work with ‘youth-at-disadvantage’ in outreaching social work service in Hong Kong.

Reconceptualizing the possible narratives of adolescence

This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic essentialism (Spivak 1996), this paper offers four descriptions of existing paradigms, including biomedical (Erikson 1980), psychological (e.g. Piaget 1973), critical (e.g. Giroux & MacLaren 1982), and postmodern (e.g. Kenway & Bullen 2001). While some of these paradigms have been more distinct in particular cultural, historical, and political contexts, they have overlapped, informing each other as they continue to inform our understandings of young people. Each paradigm carries unique consequences for the role of the learner, the teacher, and the curriculum. This paper explores contemporary manifestations of these paradigms. From this investigation, a potential new space for conceptualising young people is offered. This new space, underpinned by understandings of subjectivity (Grosz 1994), assumes sense of self to be both pivotal in generative learning and closely linked to the context and its dynamics. We aver that such a view of young people and educational settings is necessary at this time of focused attention to the middle years of schooling. In so doing, we explore the potential of classroom life and pre-service teacher education constructed within this new discourse of young people.