Recognition as a framework for ethical participatory research: developing a methodology with looked after young people

This paper reflects on a project which involved the authors working in partnership with a working group of looked after children and young people established by a small unitary local authority to develop a pledge defining what support, services and care looked after children can expect from them. The authors aimed to develop an approach which ensured that the young people’s voices were heard and also that the well-being of those involved as participants remained at the centre of the process throughout. We argue that Honneth’s theory of recognition, which identifies three forms of recognition as important to ensure that human beings feel assured of their dignity or integrity – in brief love, rights and solidarity – offers a useful framework for achieving this. The main principles which emerged were: (i) building the research around the young people’s existing relationships, (ii) respecting the group’s decisions and (iii) honouring the views expressed.     

Social capital and aspirations for educational attainment: a cross-national comparison of Australia and Germany

With the emergence of ‘knowledge economies’ across the industrialised world, transitions from school to work have generally become more complex and uncertain. Nonetheless, such developments vary between countries, as young people form aspirations which align with their individual preferences, academic abilities and the economic, cultural and social capital to which they have access. Previous research emphasises the positive influence social capital received from parents and school networks has on young people's developing aspirations. Meanwhile, the social capital young people generate for themselves through ‘out-of-school’ activities is often construed as either irrelevant or problematic. In this paper, we examine the relationship between this latter dimension of social capital and the educational aspirations of young people in Australia (aged 14/15; n = 3586) and Germany (aged 14/15; n = 2517). Both countries have distinct institutional settings with varied school-to-work transition regimes. Our results show that youth-derived social capital, generated through participation in out-of school extra-curricular activities, mediates the association between parental background and educational aspirations in both countries. We suggest that, by exposing young people to broader sets of values, skills and resources not accessible within the family and the school context, such involvement may be important for promoting educational aspirations and attainment.     

Bodywork and bodily capital among youth using fitness gyms

In this article, we explore what had become a predominant focus on the body and on shaping and refining the body through frequent, intensive workout and strict, controlled diets among a group of young people engaged in strength training in fitness gyms in Denmark. Theoretically and analytically, we draw inspiration from French sociologist Loïc Wacquant’s ethnographic study of professional boxers in Chicago around 1990. First, we use the concept of bodywork to explore and understand the meaning of the young people’s exercise and diet practices. We argue that the young people’s bodywork can be understood as the building up of bodily capital. Second, we aim to explore the social implications of this bodywork. We explore how and in what ways the young people’s bodily capital can be converted into other resources, or forms of capital, that are essentially social: social relations and sense of connectedness; knowledge, expertise and future plans; and recognition, self-worth and identity.     

A revised approach to racism in youth multiculture: the significance of schoolyard conversations about sex,dating and desire

Anxieties about social cohesion in multicultural societies have prompted scrutiny of how young people negotiate culturally diverse spaces. A key perspective of the literature at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture is that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a culturally diverse high school in Melbourne, Australia, I suggest that this binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within multicultural youth sociality. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between forms of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. To do this, I draw on young people’s conversations about sex, dating and desire as an entry point for new theorising about racism. Race and ethnicity were cornerstones of students’ frequent discussions about sexual ‘tastes’ and activity, discourses that have racist histories and effects. However, students did not understand their social world in such terms. These students’ social practices offer a situated illustration of how racism can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.     

The paradox of academic determinism and adolescent romance in Hong Kong

How do adolescents negotiate romance in an environment that is hostile to it? Why do they seek out and practice romantic engagements despite negative sanctions? This paper addresses these questions by examining how Hong Kong Chinese adolescents narrate and practice romance in the context of academic determinism – the discourse that academic success is the most important determinant of young people’s futures. I discuss how academic determinism shapes their narratives, ideals and practices of romance. I also analyse the paradox of academic determinism – how it simultaneously de-legitimises adolescent romance and fuels young people’s desire for it. By focusing on transactions between young people and their environments, this paper makes a unique contribution towards theorising how young people negotiate and practice romance in the context of academic pressure, adult surveillance and control.     

‘All in all it is just a judgement call’: issues surrounding sexual consent in young people’s heterosexual encounters

In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how – within consensual sexual activities – young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.     

Rethinking mediated political engagement: social media ambivalence and disconnective practices of politically active youths in Hong Kong

Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people’s political engagement, most notably by providing a conducive platform for political expression. There has been comparatively little attention, however, to the possible pitfalls for young people when they engage in politics on social media. In this study, we seek to redress the overemphasis on the strengths and connectivity of social media by attending to how young people negotiate their drawbacks and disconnectivity. Through in-depth interviews with young participants of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we examine the choices and motives regarding mediated (non-)participation among a group of politically active youths. Our findings revealed that these young people’s social media ambivalence emerged from the major participatory experience. Despite their active and open informational sharing and political expression on social media alongside their in-person participation during the eventful protest, many young participants became wary of such expressive use owing to their perceptions of de-energization, disconnectedness, and disembodiment. Instead of completely withdrawing from political activities on social media, these politically inclined and technologically savvy youths embraced “disconnective practices” – passive engagement (lurking), selective expression (moderation and exposure-limitation), and offline participation (embodied collective action) – to avoid the overwhelming, fractious, and inauthentic conditions of mediated participation.     

(Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black?

The language of young people is often viewed very negatively by some sections of the mainstream media and by some social commentators in the UK. While this is nothing new – older generations routinely despair of how the youth of today are ruining the language – what is different now is the added element of ethnicity, whereby young people of various ethnicities are perceived as using some kind of ‘ghetto grammar’ or ‘Jafaican’ which carry often explicit connotations of ‘sounding black’. This paper challenges the mainstream view by firstly introducing the linguistic take on this emerging Multicultural Urban British English, and then exploring the views of young people themselves on how they use language by taking qualitative data from a linguistic ethnography project involving 14–16-year-olds in a non-mainstream urban educational setting. The young people provide insights into their language that are in complete opposition to the views so often expressed in the media, and which instead suggest that linguistic features that were previously strongly associated with specific ethnicities are being used in new and innovative ways. Refreshingly, it would appear that for many young people ethnicity is simply not a consideration, at least in relation to language.     

Young people’s perceptions of power and influence as a basis for understanding contemporary citizenship

Persistent simplistic binary discourses of young people’s citizenship portray them either as civically deficit and disengaged citizens or the creators of new democratic modes and approaches. This paper draws on field research with two groups of young people in Australia to better recognise the nuance of young people’s experiences of citizenship, power and influence. The study investigated the extent to which different groups of young people believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the current barriers to their influence; and what would enable them to have greater influence. Our analysis in this paper draws on Lukes’ concepts of power [2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and Arvanitakis’ framework of citizenship engagement and empowerment [in Arvanitakis, J., and E. Sidoti. 2011. “The Politics of Change: Where to for Young People and Politics.” In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?, edited by L. Walsh and R. Black, 11–20. Melbourne: ACER Press], but also builds on an emerging scholarship concerned with the geographic dimensions of young people’s citizenship engagement and action, as well as with the affective, relational and temporal dimensions of this engagement and action. Our findings suggest that power works in different ways to both constrain and liberate young people as citizens – sometimes at the same time. The paper concludes with an argument for the continuing need to understand young people’s lived and located experiences of engagement, power and influence in more nuanced and sophisticated ways. This includes reframing the discussion about young people’s experiences in terms of the nature of their democratic engagement and action rather than simply their citizenship.     

From “bringing-in” to “going-out”: transnationalizing China’s Internet capital through state policies

The exponential growth in China’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector has attracted increasing academic interest. Mainstream accounts have focused on issues of access and control, and critical scholars have examined the dynamic shaping forces. Building on the framework of political economy, this study adopts a historical approach to the Internet as a complex site of power interactions. The study examines the historical process by which China has opened its ICT industry to transnational capital. In tracing the policy changes related to this move, this study examines the historical stages that have been critical in the transnationalization of China’s Internet: the initial opening of China’s ICT sector; the introduction of financial capital; and the recent “going-out” initiatives. In doing so, the study addresses a gap in the current scholarship regarding the history of bridging China’s Internet to transnational capital, particularly the regulatory context. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the dialectical role of the Chinese state, which has been more constituting than containing in transnationalizing China’s Internet.     

‘I guess it’s kind of elitist’: the formation and mobilisation of cultural,social and physical capital in youth sport volunteering

Policy and research portray sport volunteering as a means by which young people can develop skills and perform active citizenship. This paper draws on qualitative research with participants in a UK sport volunteering programme to critically examine young people’s volunteering journeys and how these are shaped by their formation and mobilisation of capital. The results show how programme structures and practices, such as selection criteria, privilege young people with higher levels of cultural and physical capital, and afford these youth additional opportunities to accumulate and mobilise cultural and social capital. The paper argues for a more critical understanding of youth sport volunteering; one that recognises that sport volunteering can reserve the practice of active citizenship for privileged youth.     

Change and continuity in youth transitions in Eastern Europe: Lessons for Western sociology*

This paper argues that the evidence from research among young people in post‐communist countries vindicates and should consolidate confidence in the Western sociology of youth's conventional transitions paradigm which seeks links between social origins, routes and destinations. Contrary to claims about postmodern fluidity, individualisation, and a blurring of traditional structural boundaries, the expected links between origins, routes and destinations have persisted throughout the transformation of the former communist countries. The relevant evidence also confirms the primacy of education‐to‐work and family/housing life stage transitions. Other aspects of young people's lives – their uses of leisure, levels and patterns of social and political participation, and socio‐political attitudes, for example – become meaningful and explicable only when set in the context of the routes that individuals’ lives have taken, and the stages that they have reached, vis‐à‐vis their school‐to‐work and family and housing transitions. The paper proceeds to argue that the exceptionally thorough changes that are still in process in East‐Central Europe and the former USSR reveal with exceptional clarity the processes whereby young people's life chances are structured in ways that are not of the individuals’ own making. It has been, and it remains, possible to observe how young adults learn from their own youth life stage transition experiences and, where applicable, use the assets that they acquire or retain, to advantage their own children thereby structuring the opportunities that confront all members of subsequent cohorts of young people. Finally, it is argued that the sociological approach being advocated is uniquely able to use the evidence from young people as a window through which to identify the impact of the ongoing macro‐changes in former communist countries among different socio‐demographic groups in the wider populations.     

In good company: risk, security and choice in young people's drug decisions

This article draws on original empirical research with young people to question the degree to which ‘individualisation of risk’, as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens, adequately explains the risks young people bear and take. It draws on alternative understandings and critiques of ‘risk’ not to refute the notion of the reflexive individual upon which ‘individualisation of risk’ is based but to re‐read that reflexivity in a more hermeneutic way. It explores specific risk‐laden moments – young people's drug use decisions – in their natural social and cultural context of the friendship group. Studying these decisions in context, it suggests, reveals the meaning of ‘risk’ to be not given, but constructed through group discussion, disagreement and consensus and decisions taken to be rooted in emotional relations of trust, mutual accountability and common security. The article concludes that ‘the individualisation of risk’ fails to take adequate account of the significance of intersubjectivity in risk‐decisions. It argues also that addressing the theoretical overemphasis on the individual bearer of risk requires not only further empirical testing of the theory but appropriate methodological reflection.     

Young people's orientations to the future: navigating the present and imagining the future

This article discusses the findings of the Imagine Sheppey project (2013–2014) which studied how young people are ‘oriented’ towards the future. The aim and approach of the project were to explore future imaginaries in a participatory, experimental, and performative way. Working with young people in a series of arts-based workshops, we intervened in different environments to alter the space as an experience of change – temporal, material, and symbolic. We documented this process visually and made use of the images produced as the basis for elicitation in focus groups with a wider group of young people. In this article we discuss young people's future orientations through the themes of reach, resources, shape, and value. In so doing, we reflect on the paths that our young respondents traced to connect their presents to what is next, what we call their modes of present–future navigation. We explore the qualities and characteristics of their stances within a wider reflection about how young people approach, imagine, and account for the future.     

Exploring youths' perceptions of the hidden practice of youth work in increasing social capital with young people considered NEET in Scotland

This small-scale research explores the generation of social capital in young people growing up in one urban area and one rural area in Scotland via community-led youth work projects that aim to re-engage young people categorised as NEET (Not in Employment Education or Training). By looking at their varied and complex biographies, it considers young people's experiences and perceptions of their communities and their transitions from education to the workplace. Using social capital as a theoretical lens, we examined the impact that youth work can have not just on these important transitions but also upon the young people themselves. By visiting two different sites of engagement we were able to explore whether the type of initiative (media or sports) or place (urban or rural) had an impact on the generation of capital for young people. The youth work practice in both areas acted as a glue between the young people and their communities, creating opportunities where the two could be bound together and relationships created. This occurred in both sites regardless of the area or type of initiative and confirmed in this study that youth work acts as a site of capital building.     

Status and distrust: The relevance of inequality and betrayal aversion

Trust involves a willingness to accept vulnerability, comprised of the risk of being worse off than by not trusting, the risk of being worse off than the trusted party (disadvantageous inequality), and the risk of being betrayed by the trusted party. We examine how people’s status, focusing on sex, race, age and religion, affects their willingness to accept these three risks. We experimentally measure people’s willingness to accept risk in a decision problem, a risky dictator game, and a trust game, and compare responses across games. Groups typically considered having lower status in the US – women, minorities, young adults and non-Protestants – are averse to disadvantageous inequality while higher status groups – men, Caucasians, middle-aged people and Protestants – dislike being betrayed.     

Inequality and 21-year-olds' negotiation of uncertain transitions to employment: a Bourdieusian approach

Faced with uncertainty, how do young people navigate the transition from school to work? Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus to the ‘fields’ of education and employment, I argue that past experience, family background and unequal access to economic, social and symbolic forms of capital differentiate their transitions. Drawing on the tenth wave of the Australian longitudinal Life Chances Study, we found that all of the twenty-five 21-year-olds interviewed expressed uncertainty when discussing their futures. However, those from high-income backgrounds with access to strong social, economic and cultural resources were better able to manage the risks arising from uncertainty than their counterparts from low-income backgrounds. The following article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people's experiences at age 21 through the application of Bourdieu's conceptual framework. The interviewees’ habitus and cultivation of varying forms of capital tend towards social reproduction, yet also reveal opportunities for those considered ‘disadvantaged’ to mobilise their cultural resources. Bourdieu's model of the field, and its component conceptual tools, provide an explanatory frame to make sense of the seemingly incoherent paths that young people trace between education and employment.     

‘They’ve Always Been There for Me’: Grandparental Involvement and Child Well‐Being

With diversifying families, increased life expectancy, growing numbers of dual‐worker households and higher rates of family breakdown, grandparents are now playing an increasing role in their grandchildren’s lives. Despite growing importance there has been little empirical research exploring how grandparental involvement impacts on young people’s well‐being. This national study, which includes a survey of 1596 children (aged 11–16) and in‐depth interviews with 40 young people, aimed to address this deficit. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that grandparental involvement is significantly associated with child well‐being – results that are reinforced by qualitative evidence. Findings suggest grandparents may be under‐recognised in the policy agenda.     

Race,Gender, and the Invisible Hand of Social Capital

To better understand persistent race and gender inequality in the labor market, this article discusses the informal processes by which social connections provide individuals with access to information, influence, and status that help to further people’s careers. Because social networks are segregated by race and gender, access to these social capital resources tends to be greater for white men than for minorities and women. To illustrate this point, research on the invisible hand of social capital is presented. In short, high-level job openings are commonly filled with non-searchers – people who are not looking for new jobs – thanks to their receipt of unsolicited job leads. Recent studies find that this process operates more effectively for white men than for minorities and women, demonstrating how the invisible hand of social capital helps to perpetuate race and gender inequality. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings and directions for future research.