From products to publics? The potential of participatory design for research on youth,safety and well-being

This paper considers how ‘participation’ features as a key concept in contemporary approaches to research, policy and interventions to promote young people's experiences of safety and well-being in digital society. In particular, it examines the potential of participatory design (PD) methodology as a way of expressing, surfacing and supporting engagement with youth perspectives in research and design projects. In doing so, we explore how the language, materials and processes of a PD approach can help reconfigure the aims of research beyond the production of ‘products’ towards fostering ‘youth-inclusive publics’. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastucturing’ and ‘attachments’ [Le Dantec, C. A., and C. DiSalvo. 2013. “Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design.” Social Studies of Science 43 (2): 241–264. doi:10.1177/0306312712471581], the paper reflects on an Australian research project to develop online campaigns to promote youth safety and well-being in digital society. From our analysis emerged three commitments of PD with young people that help articulate, make visible and unpack ‘attachments’ to concepts of youth, technology and well-being and provide new opportunities for engagement with youth experience in research and intervention design. We find that these commitments – the embodiment of context; the enactment of creativity and the emergence of connectivity – offer novel insights on youth participation in complex research projects. Moreover, foregrounding these commitments through PD can build shared vocabularies, artefacts and processes of engagement with young people in research projects focused on youth safety and well-being.     

Young People Transitioning from Out-of-home Care in Victoria: Strengthening Support Services for Dual Clients of Child Protection and Youth Justice

Abstract

A significant proportion of young people leaving out-of-home care make their transition to independence via the youth justice system, exposing them to further risks and reducing their likelihood of full social and economic engagement in mainstream society. This article presents the initial findings of a research project based on a partnership between Monash University and seven nongovernment child and youth welfare agencies in Victoria, Australia. Seventy-seven key stakeholders participated in interviews and focus groups with a view to identifying practices and policies that could reduce the over-representation of young people leaving out-of-home care in the youth justice system. Factors that contributed to offending included varied responses by the child protection and youth justice systems, limited utility of leaving care plans, and the availability of a range of preventative and diversionary programs. The findings point to a need for more formalised interagency collaboration, and intensification of the interventions and supports offered both in custodial settings and post discharge from custody or care.     

How different are their experiences and outcomes? Comparing aged out and other child welfare involved youth

This paper adds to the growing body of research examining the experiences of youth aging out of the child welfare system. Through a comparison of youth aging out with two other groups of child welfare-involved youth—those whose families received child welfare services but were never placed out of home and those who were in out-of-home placement but did not age out—it presents a profile of their care careers and other system involvement (e.g., mental health, justice system). Analyses indicate that young people aging out of care have experienced significant amounts of time in out-of-home placement, a great deal of placement instability, and high levels of other system involvement. In general, their involvement is more extensive than that of the two comparison groups. However, the justice system involvement of youth who experienced out-of-home placement but did not age out is just as high as that of youth who have aged out. This finding highlights the importance of devoting resources not only to youth aging out of care but also to similarly-aged young people with prior child welfare involvement.     

Rethinking youth voice and institutional power: Reflections from inside a service learning partnership in a California juvenile hall

This article shares the dilemmas that emerge from a community service project that engages students in a systematic critique of the juvenile justice system from the inside. It explores how competing images of youth (as dangerous thugs, vulnerable children and kids who have made bad choices) coexist uneasily within the juvenile justice system and significantly shape and constrain this community service learning project. They influence how volunteers understand their experiences and relationships with students inside, and they shape how young people in the system speak about their own lives, the inequalities they see around them, and the juvenile justice system itself. By exploring these dynamics this article aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of youth voice.     

‘Befriend them but not be their friend’: Negotiations of youth practice in a digital age

ABSTRACT

‘You’ve gotta befriend them but not be their friend’ is how one youth worker thoughtfully described the secret to successful youth practice. This paper draws on experiences of youth workers in the United Kingdom to consider how the growth of digital technologies comes to be negotiated and articulated in professional practice. Situating these experiences alongside young people’s accounts, this article highlights a distinction between young people’s relationship with the digital and adult perceptions of youth and technology. The aim of this paper is to consider what factors contribute towards this divide and where adult perceptions come from, if not from the experiences of young people themselves. The article then goes on to discuss the potential consequences of the presence of technology and discourses surrounding the digital for youth worker’s engagements with young people in professional practice. Overall, this article argues for the enduring relevance of youth workers and physical youth centres in a digital age and joins several scholars in critiquing the chronic under-investment in youth workers and provision in the UK and beyond.     

‘Cruel and unusual punishment’: an inter-jurisdictional study of the criminalisation of young people with complex support needs

Although several criminologists and social scientists have drawn attention to the high rates of mental and cognitive disability amongst populations of young people embroiled in youth justice systems, less attention has been paid to the ways in which young people with disability are disproportionately exposed to processes of criminalisation and how the same processes serve to further disable them. In this paper, we aim to make a contribution towards filling this gap by drawing upon qualitative findings from the Comparative Youth Penality Project – an empirical inter-jurisdictional study of youth justice and penality in England and Wales and in four Australian states. We build on, integrate and extend theoretical perspectives from critical disability studies and from critical criminology to examine the presence of, and responses to, socio-economically disadvantaged young people with multiple disabilities (complex support needs) in youth justice systems in our selected jurisdictions. Four key findings emerge from our research pertaining to: (i) the criminalisation of disability and disadvantage; (ii) the management of children and young people with disabilities by youth justice agencies; (iii) the significance of early and holistic responses for children and young people with complex support needs; and (iv) the inadequate nature of community based support.     

Entering Youth Justice: Comparing the Views of Human Services and Criminology Students

Abstract

The present paper explores how undergraduate students who are relatively new to the field of youth justice conceptualise their possible future work roles. The research compared the views of students who were commencing two undergraduate courses (subjects) concerned with working with young people. One course was taken by human services students and the other was taken by criminology students. Findings indicated that there were significant differences between these two groups in terms of their views about crime causation, as well as how they see the roles of youth justice workers. Students entered their respective programs and youth courses with differing professional orientations. The findings raise some intriguing questions at a time when universities and employers look to the potential benefits of “double degrees” and “joint degrees” that span supposedly complementary professional areas. However, contrasting beliefs about “troubled and troublesome” young people may resist easy accommodation within the same program of professional preparation.     

Integrating youth participation and ecosocial work: New possibilities to advance environmental and social justice

ABSTRACT

This article reveals possibilities to expand the role of youth within ecosocial work practice. The Where I Stand Youth Summit held in Chicago, Illinois, provided a safe space for young people to reflect upon their understanding of, and roles within, social and environmental justice movements. Drawing upon critical youth empowerment theory and participant observation, we note that youth shared experiences of oppression across unique social identities, while displaying authentic communication, acceptance, and desire for solidarity. Re-defining what knowledge matters, along with intention and self-restoration, also emerged as critical to building young people’s agency and power to effect social change.     

Child maltreatment and criminal convictions in youth: The role of gender,ethnicity and placement experiences in an Australian population

A number of previous studies have shown that out-of-home care (OHC) placement experiences can influence the pathway from maltreatment to offending, and that these pathways may differ depending on gender and ethnic backgrounds. Even though Australian welfare and justice systems are unique in terms of the over-representation of Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) young people, there have been few Australian longitudinal studies that explore the role of placement experiences in examinations of the maltreatment-offending association. The present study uses linked child protection and youth justice data for 17,671 young people and aims to provide insight into the way ethnicity, as well as gender, moderates the association between maltreatment, placement in OHC and youth convictions. The data were analyzed using logistic regression and the findings varied systematically depending on the type of conviction examined. There was some strong evidence that gender, ethnicity and placement factors moderated the relationship between maltreatment and convictions in general, and for violent convictions more specifically. Interaction effects revealed that placement experiences were more consequential for female than for male youth, but less consequential for Indigenous than for non-Indigenous youth. A one-size-fits-all approach to understanding, treating and preventing the consequences of child maltreatment could not be considered the most appropriate best practice given the gender- and ethnic-specific pathways found in this study.     

Perspectives of Youth in Care in Serbia

In the context of evaluating child protection reform in Serbia, we explored the concept of positive youth development as well as how they experienced and understood the experience of placement. We sought to understand how youth perceive their strengths, the role of the care system, their views on how life experiences affect their strengths and how they see their future. Our position is that the way in which children see their situation is equally valuable as any other point of view, and that their doubts, questions and views should be learned in the research process. We used the methodology of semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with 16 young people in care aged 13–18 years. Results indicate their limited involvement in the process of making decisions related to their life and future. There is a strong need for meaningful involvement of children and young people in order to ensure their positive development.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.     

Desiring Self‐Determination in Research and Beyond: Parental Consent Requirements and Situated Ethics for Migrant Young People Living amid Changing Family Dynamics

How are procedural research ethics complicit in homogenising and paternalising young people? Through a youth‐centred ethnographic study completed in Canada, I illustrate how migrant young people's complex experiences of family separation, responsibility, and autonomy sit in relation to parental consent requirements for research. By complicating notions of childhood and critically discussing capacity to consent, I elucidate how procedural ethics can negate diversity among young people and perpetuate the structural barriers some face in determining their lives. More flexible ethical procedures and responses could reduce barriers and better accommodate young people's inclusion by recognising their specific circumstances, desires and competencies through heightened contextual awareness.     

Inequality,continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time.     

Identity,boundary and schooling: perspectives on the experiences and perceptions of refugee children 1

In assuming ethnic/national identity as problematic, we examine its dynamic aspects in the context of refugee children and their educational experiences. While the starting point of our analysis is a deconstruction of ethnic/national identity in conventional terms of language, religion, education etc., the emerging focus is the notion of boundary. On the one hand, we look at the relevance of fluid boundaries for identity formation, while on the other hand, the experience of crossing boundaries will also be examined, particularly in the case of forced migration and displacement. Boundaries are conceptualised in the context of a continuum in which the experiences of refugee children range across school, home, locality and country. To illustrate the central arguments two case studies will be highlighted: a child refugee from Kosovo, the older of two brothers arriving in the UK about four years ago, who now attends a north London primary school; and several young minors, mainly from Kosovo, who attend a youth club in south London. Preliminary observations of the child, together with subsequent small group discussions and semi‐structured interviews, serve to identify how the child relates to the various spaces in the school. The analysis of his drawings forms the main part of the argument. In the case of the youth club users, observations and conversations show how these young people construct their individual and social identities by accessing global resources in response to local interests.     

Identity,boundary and schooling: perspectives on the experiences and perceptions of refugee children 1

In assuming ethnic/national identity as problematic, we examine its dynamic aspects in the context of refugee children and their educational experiences. While the starting point of our analysis is a deconstruction of ethnic/national identity in conventional terms of language, religion, education etc., the emerging focus is the notion of boundary. On the one hand, we look at the relevance of fluid boundaries for identity formation, while on the other hand, the experience of crossing boundaries will also be examined, particularly in the case of forced migration and displacement. Boundaries are conceptualised in the context of a continuum in which the experiences of refugee children range across school, home, locality and country. To illustrate the central arguments two case studies will be highlighted: a child refugee from Kosovo, the older of two brothers arriving in the UK about four years ago, who now attends a north London primary school; and several young minors, mainly from Kosovo, who attend a youth club in south London. Preliminary observations of the child, together with subsequent small group discussions and semi‐structured interviews, serve to identify how the child relates to the various spaces in the school. The analysis of his drawings forms the main part of the argument. In the case of the youth club users, observations and conversations show how these young people construct their individual and social identities by accessing global resources in response to local interests.     

Balancing Justice and Welfare Needs in Family Group Conferences for Children with Harmful Sexual Behavior: The HSB-FGC Framework

In England and Wales, family group conferences (FGCs) are most often found either in the field of youth justice or in the field of child protection, and consequently often have priorities in line with either one of the two systems. On the one hand, FGCs are a restorative justice tool to address offending behavior and hold young perpetrators to account, while giving victims the possibility of contributing to the justice process. On the other hand, FGCs address safeguarding concerns and are used to plan for child safety and protection. In cases where a young person has sexually harmed another young person, that is, has perpetrated harmful sexual behavior (HSB), all young people involved will have both justice and welfare needs. FGCs are emerging as promising mechanisms in such cases, not only because of their ability to deal with both sets of needs for both young people but also because of their potential to address more holistic needs. However, HSB cases are often complex and sensitive, and are not without risk. Drawing on their experiences in research and practice, the authors explore how the holistic needs of both the harmed and harming individual can be balanced within a risk managed HSB-FGC framework.     

“A Bad Combination”: Lived Experiences of Youth Involved in the Foster Care and Juvenile Justice Systems

Youth with involvement in foster care and the juvenile justice system, often called dual-status youth, are at increased risk for negative outcomes as they transition into adulthood, including homelessness, and involvement in the adult criminal justice system. Increase of interest in the phenomenon of youth dual involvement within the last decade, reveals focus on challenges associated with the dual-status population, the importance of multi-system collaboration, and foster care factors contributing to juvenile delinquency. This study aims to build on the current literature, through exploration of how dually-involved youth make sense of their experiences in the juvenile justice and foster care systems; and what youth believe are their unique challenges of being in two systems? This phenomenological study engaged ten individuals in Houston, Texas, between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, and previously involved in the juvenile justice and foster care systems. Research subjects participated in-depth, semi-structured, and audio-recorded interviews, disclosing their experiences in two systems. Interviews were transcribed and entered in the qualitative analytical program, Atlas.ti, where common themes of participant responses were extracted. Accounts from participants highlighted three key experiences: (1) experiences of and leading to dual involvement, (2) traumatic experiences, and (3) absence of normalcy. Study results are categorized based on their pathways to dual-involvement. This current study offers rich insights into how dually-involved youth make sense of their experiences in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Implications for enhanced service provision among child welfare and juvenile justice professionals are offered.

     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

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’.