Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies (Studies in Childhood and Youth) [1st ed. 2021] 303075118X, 9783030751180

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STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies Anita Harris Hernan Cuervo Johanna Wyn

Studies in Childhood and Youth Series Editors Afua Twum-Danso Imoh University of Bristol Bristol, UK Nigel Patrick Thomas University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Nicosia, Cyprus Penny Curtis University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14474

Anita Harris • Hernan Cuervo Johanna Wyn

Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies

Anita Harris Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

Hernan Cuervo University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Johanna Wyn University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-030-75118-0    ISBN 978-3-030-75119-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The thinking about belonging in youth studies that we present in this book draws on a range of research projects by the authors. These projects would not have been possible without the willing participation of young people, and for this, we express our deepest gratitude. Much of this research has been funded by the Australian Research Council: DP170100180, Understanding the Effects of Transnational Mobility on Youth Transitions (2017–2023); DP110101249, The Civic Life of Young Muslim Australians (2011–2015); FT100100163, Young People and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City (2011–2016); DP0557382, Youth Civic Participation and Social Connection in Post-Industrial Society (2005–2008); DP160101611, Learning to Make it Work (2016–2020); LP150100291, Defining the Status of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Young People (2015–2018); DP1094132, Young People Negotiating Risk and Opportunity (2010–2014); DP0557902, Pathways Then and Now (2005–2009); DP0209462, Flexible Career Patterns (2002–2004); A79803304, Vocational Integration of Post-Compulsory Education and Training (1998–2000). We are grateful to colleagues in the Youth Research Centre and the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship & Globalisation for the collegiality and intellectual environment that have supported our work on this book. Our thanks also go to Laura Gobey who so ably assisted with the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to thank our children and grandchildren: Jules Harris-Ure and Louie Harris-Ure; Anna Cuervo; and James Willis, Matilda Weyhe and Thomas Willis. v

About the Book

This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth studies. The concept of belonging has emerged as a recurring theme in the youth studies literature, offering new alignments across previously divergent approaches. But its pervasiveness in the field has led to the criticism that ‘belonging’ is simultaneously ‘everything and nothing’, and requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. This book does this work. The book is organised around the question ‘what does the concept of belonging do?’. Taking a global perspective, it provides the reader with an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses this concept. Chapters address its historical and theoretical underpinnings, and its prevalence in youth policy and research, with a focus on transitions, participation, citizenship, and mobility. Readers will gain a much-needed perspective on why belonging has emerged as a key concept to understand young lives today, and its benefits and shortcomings.

Praise For Thinking About Belonging In Youth Studies “This book is a game changer for youth studies. Offering a new and long overdue take on the turn to belonging in youth policy and research, it interrogates ideas about young people and relationality and how these are deployed particularly in settler-colonial nations. It opens up exciting new spaces for understanding how young people consider and enact connectedness in difficult times. This is an important must-read analysis from a team of leading youth studies scholars.” —Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori Education, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand “This is a fascinating, rigorous and wide-ranging exploration of the concept of ‘belonging’ with respect to young people’s lives. It brings together scholarship from across the globe to consider how ideas about belonging impact on our understandings of transitions and participation, citizenship and mobilities. It is an important and authoritative new text for youth researchers, written by three key scholars in the field.” —Rachel Brooks, Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK “This groundbreaking book is a must read for anyone interested in Youth Studies. Written by three world leading scholars it not only offers new insights into the recent ‘turn’ towards belonging, drawing upon a historical and a global analysis, but also introduces new ways of conceptualising young people’s lives today. One of its unique and pleasing features is its engagement with indigenous ideas and alternative world views illustrating the important contribution they can and do make to these debates.” —Alan France, Professor of Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand

“In this thoughtful and original book, acclaimed youth studies researchers Johanna Wyn, Anita Harris and Hernan Cuervo turn a critical eye on the idea of belonging. They demonstrate how belonging, as a concept, as practice and as ways of being, can be used to illuminate the complexities of young people’s lives. It is indispensable reading for anyone wanting to understand how young people study, work and play in families, schools, communities and nation-states in late modernity.” —Judith Bessant, Professor, Schools of Global, Urban & Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia “Thinking about Belonging is an incisive interrogation of ‘belonging’ as an idea and as a framing device. The book shows that, as productive as ‘belonging’ has been across youth studies–on transitions, policy and citizenship–it is poorly theorised, used to ‘mean everything and nothing’. It offers a genealogy of uses of belonging and a systematic unpacking of its limitations and possibilities. The book illustrates insightfully that in a mobile, global world, we need a relational and dynamic understanding of the many faces of belonging.” —Greg Noble, Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia “This innovative book thoroughly and critically addresses a compelling question circulating among youth researches today: do we really need the concept of belonging to understand young people’s new life experiences? And why? As the volume highlights, using empirical examples, for young people the notion of belonging is intertwined with that of becoming. The authors unveil the reasons for this, offering a critical and expert view on the potential and limits of the concept.” —Carmen Leccardi, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Contents

1 The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies  1 2 Historical Underpinnings 17 3 Conceptual Threads 45 4 Policy Frames 71 5 Transitions and Participation107 6 Citizenship131 7 Mobilities169 8 Researching Belonging in Youth Studies201 Index233

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About the Authors

Anita Harris  is a Research Professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. She is a sociologist specialising in youth citizenship in changing times, with a focus on cultural diversity, mobility and gender. Her books include Future Girl and Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism. Hernan Cuervo  is Deputy Director of the Youth Research Centre and an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. His research interests focus on youth transitions, social inequality, rurality and theory of justice in education. His latest book is Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South. Johanna Wyn  is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Youth Research Centre, the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.

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CHAPTER 1

The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies

This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth research and in youth social policy and seeks to provide a critical analysis of the work that the concept of belonging does in youth studies. The idea for the book began with our collective observation that belonging has become an increasingly popular way to talk about young people’s lives in research and policy. But why has belonging become popular, and what does it really mean? What is its intellectual history in youth studies, youth research, and youth sociology? How is it theorised today and how is this conceptual framework elaborated and then applied? What are its analytical capabilities and its methodological affordances? How has it been produced, used and deployed in policy and research to enable and constrain ways of thinking about and acting on young people? While the concept of belonging has been widely accepted and utilised in recent youth research and youth policy, it has yet to be subjected to a critical analysis. Our project in this book is to do this work, and in so doing, to advance understanding of the different ways in which belonging is utilised, to consider its foundations and interrogate its conceptual apparatus, and to draw out its potential to transcend some of the shortcomings of previous approaches in a considered fashion. In short, we ask what does this concept do in and for youth studies? To answer this question, we explore the socio-historical context in which belonging has been employed in youth sociology. We recognise that, while © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_1

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it is increasingly referred to in research and policy, its meaning remains elusive. Belonging has a taken-for-granted quality, and even when it is the object of inquiry it is often left undefined. As Wright (2015, p. 391) suggests, ‘belonging itself is often considered self-explanatory’. And Noble (2020, p. xvii) notes that ‘“belonging” is a word that is frequently used but rarely with conceptual clarity… It is both theoretically and empirically underdeveloped’. However, some theorists have given this concept close analytical treatment and have undertaken important definitional work that brings its key elements to light. Their insights guide the way we explore this concept throughout the book, even while we are primarily interested in what it does (often by operating as an ambiguous and elusive notion) rather than in determining how it should be defined. Recognising that the multiple registers of the concept of belonging is in some ways its strength, and the ways in which its meanings are dependent on context, we resist the temptation to reify belonging through set definitions. Yuval-Davis (2006, 2011), one of the most prominent theorists of belonging, argues that belonging is made up of the three elements of social location, identification and emotional attachment, and ethics and political values. For her, it is a series of processes and practices that manifest through these elements, and thus is not a fixed condition or status. Anthias (2006, p. 21) also usefully provides a definition of belonging not so much as an abstract state but by outlining the practices or processes that indicate what it means to belong. She argues that ‘to belong is to be accepted as part of a community, to feel safe within it and to have a stake in the future of such a community of membership. To belong is to share values, networks and practices’. Habib and Ward (2020, p.  1) similarly state that ‘At its core, belonging is about connection, membership, attachment and a sense of security’. Wright (2015, p. 393) further considers that ‘belonging is not only created by people in places, or more-than-humans in places, but actively co-constitutes people and things and processes and places’; that is, these entities come together to co-create their meanings in relational ways through belonging processes. For most theorists, belonging operates at the levels of the personal and the political. For example, Yuval-­Davis (2011) differentiates between the sense of feeling ‘at home’ and the larger politics of belonging through which questions of citizenship and the civic and political community are settled. Antonsich (2010, p. 5) similarly notes that belonging refers to both the intimate sentiment of place-­attachment and a ‘discursive resource’ for the enforcement of

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social inclusion. While belonging is ‘multi-scalar’, the dimensions of the subjective and the political are intertwined. Belonging is thus about membership, rights and duties, forms of identification with groups or other people and with places, and the emotional and social bonds that come of feelings of being part of a larger whole. It is about both the subjective and affective experience of connection and the social, structural processes of recognition, inclusion and exclusion. It is sometimes approached as a status or a category, but increasingly theorised as a process, a form of labour, an array of practices and capacities (Noble, 2020). Belonging also implies a form of ontological security, but there is a sense in which this has become more precarious, more ‘at risk’ in late modern times, especially for youth, as long traditions of life course patterns and taken for granted processes of transition cease to be the norm, and possibilities for identification and connection both multiply and become more fragmented. Belonging has emerged as a recurring theme in the youth studies literature, offering new alignments across previously divergent approaches, such as political economy, youth cultures, transitions, generations and social and political ecology. The question of the relationship between individuals and communities, nations, families, places and many other dimensions of life such as gender, race and class, central to the social sciences, has taken on renewed interest in the broad youth studies field. This shift is reflected in the use of more complex research approaches that can more effectively capture the different nuances of young people’s experiences at a local level, while also accounting for the global and institutional processes and structures that shape young people’s lives. They are often underpinned by a concern with the question of how young people belong, and seek to explore and analyse the complex relationships between people; between people and institutions; places; and the flows of information and ideas that shape the place of young people. As Noble (2020, p. xvii) has argued, there is a sense of the heightened relevance and importance of questions of youth belonging in current times: In an increasingly globalised world, an array of forces has intensified the anxious politics of belonging. Escalating flows of people, the technological mediation of social relations, separation of work and home, the growth in high density living, ecological crises which disconnect us from the environment and the spread of populist fears of the stranger: these are some of the ways in which we have less and less to do with those with whom we share

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social space. These forces are often keenly felt by young people, not just because they are interwoven with transitions in the life course but also because young people are intimately connected to both the challenges and opportunities of social, economic, technological and environmental change.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has only sharpened these concerns and further centred the value of a critical framework of relationality. It has brought to light the civic, social and economic bonds that tie societies together as well as the structural faultlines that crises lay bare; the critical role of digital communications and media for participation and relationships; the importance of belonging to family, household, community, neighbourhood, social and political networks and capacity for place-­ making when human movement is constrained and the world must ‘shelter in place’; the direct effects of government, policy and politics on who is deemed to belong to a society and have their lives valued and rights upheld; the interconnectedness of human and non-human life; our fundamental dependency on one another in a globalised world; and the open question of what kinds of futures there will be for young people to belong to. Belonging has many registers, political, economic, social, cultural and spatial; and the concept can act as a gauge for social change amidst complex social times; including new learning and working expectations for youth, increasing migratory processes, expanding forms of social activism and movements for rights and sovereignty, and global flows of different forms of capital. How young people are connected to their worlds has taken on new significance in a context of global social changes that mean young people are increasingly excluded from employment and housing yet also increasingly required to participate in education and comply with policies that dictate engagement in education, training or work. Interest in belonging is also heightened by young people’s unprecedented mobility within and across nations, and their engagement in information, media and communications technologies that place them in the centre of new cultural and communication flows and connections. In this context, issues of how youth establish social, civic and place-based relationships and can participate as active members of a globalised world have become increasingly pressing. A body of important scholarly work on belonging has been produced in the field of youth studies, indicating the momentum and interest around this topic for youth researchers globally. Much youth studies scholarship

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draws from broader sociological work that addresses contemporary concerns about belonging. For example, Savage et  al. (2005), Yuval-Davis (2011), May (2013), and Wright (2015) explicitly take stock of the concept of belonging in relation to key concepts such as mobility, choice, citizenship, and the self. Many of the youth studies works that are engaged with these ideas have a related focus on social identity. For example, the edited collections Identities, Youth and Belonging: International Perspectives (Habib & Ward, 2019) and Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging (Habib & Ward, 2020) bring together essays that draw on the concept of belonging to explore the situation of young people in different countries and use this concept specifically to interpret place- and space-­ based youth identities. Swartz and Arnot’s collection (2013) focuses on the role of schools in creating belonging by providing international examples in the construction of youth citizenship and identities, and Tilleczek (2011) also explores the development of youth identities through the concept of belonging (see also Huppatz et  al., 2016; and Halse, 2019, for another important edited collection on youth, education and belonging). There is also a significant body of recent work that investigates young people’s belonging with a focus on ethnic, religious and cultural identity, national inclusion and migration (see for example Abu El-Haj, 2015; Eliassi, 2013; Fangen et  al., 2012; Miller-Idriss, 2009; Tanu, 2017; Ziemer, 2011). Other work that has addressed youth and belonging with an emphasis on the political nature of the concept, including citizenship and belonging as ‘boundary work’ focuses specifically on Muslim youth in the diaspora, identity, Islamophobia and racism. For example, Mansouri and Percival Wood (2008), Muna (2018) and Mustafa (2015) all address the issue of how young Muslims belong in contemporary Western societies. These works take a migration/ethnic studies perspective and explore belonging through the prism of cultural identity resolution and social identity construction and the challenges of national inclusion. Other important publications have addressed the issue of belonging through youth cultures or new thinking about youth transitions. For example, Bennett and Robards’ edited book (2014) focuses on how digital technologies and media generate new social networks through culture, in particular through music. More recently Robards and Lincoln (2020) have analysed the meaning and use of social network sites for young people in the UK and Australia, showing how their lives are mediated through these platforms. Some chapters in Woodman and Bennett’s collection (2015) address the tensions between youth transitions and cultures through a

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belonging perspective. Work by Wyn and Woodman has centred the idea of youth as belonging to a social generation (Woodman & Wyn, 2015). More recently, the question of how young people are positioned in society in generational belonging terms has been taken up from the perspective of political economy. For example, Bessant et al. (2017) provide a provocative analysis of the situation for the current generation of young people, arguing that it is time for a new ‘intergenerational contract’ to be built – one that recognises that under post-neoliberalism, the relationship between work and resources is being transformed. This approach directly confronts the question of where and how young people belong in new times. Similarly, Furlong et al. (2018) in Young people in the Labour Market: Past and Present argue that long-term structural change to the labour market requires new, more flexible policy responses, as the ‘new normal’ for young people becomes liminal employment. These books engage with the question of youth belonging from the perspective of economic security. In some ways, our book is a response to this growing literature that uses the concept of belonging to explore the situation and lives of young people today. The framework of belonging appears to address many of the current issues confronting both youth and youth studies in an interconnected fashion, sometimes promising to cut across limiting empirical and conceptual foci, and providing a core organising concept for engaging with complex and interrelated aspects of young people’s lives today. Indeed, in our own individual and collaborative work (Cuervo & Wyn, 2012, 2017; Cuervo et  al., 2015; Harris, 2016; Raffaetà et  al., 2016; Wyn, 2013, 2015) we have found ourselves drawn to this idea, utilising it as a way into empirical investigation as well as unpacking it as a metaphor. The question ‘where and how do young people belong?’ certainly feels like an intellectually expansive and politically compelling starting point for youth studies today. ‘Belonging’ has helped to overcome some of the more rigid and categorical approaches to youth (such as ‘transitions’ or ‘self-concept’) and opened onto productive ways of thinking about the relational dimensions of youth experience in complex times, and young people’s connections to place, people, material spaces and objects. And yet we have been aware of some of its limitations. We have found ourselves wondering about the easy take up of this term, and especially a tendency for it to be used uncritically or rather normatively; for it to be treated as a self-evident idea (and a good state to be in) rather than deeply theorised. The more belonging pops up, the less it seems to be scrutinised. Indeed, one of our avenues of inquiry is the possibly universalising

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tendency of the belonging trope which may conceal and de-politicise other pressing issues for youth. Its pervasiveness in the field has led to the criticism that ‘belonging’ is simultaneously ‘everything and nothing’ and requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. This book does this work. Accordingly, here we do not seek to add to the large body of empirical work that already exists about youth and belonging, but rather address the need for a critical conceptual and theoretical interrogation of the concept of belonging as it is increasingly being used in both academic research and policy. We focus on belonging as a conceptual tool, exploring its provenance in the development of youth studies as well as the wide range of theoretical traditions with which this concept is aligned. We remain interested in the questions of where and how young people might belong, but this book explicitly does not follow the tradition of exploring experiences of belonging on a site by site or country by country basis, or by categorical youth identities. Rather, we take as the starting point the different conceptual affordances of the idea of belonging, and draw on examples from many different contexts to provide analysis of what the concept of belonging is doing for youth research and for youth policy in terms of framing research and delivery of initiatives for young people. We do so as Australian researchers, undertaking youth studies in the specific context of a multicultural settler-colonial state described by Connell (2007, p.  72) as ‘a small European community parked on the edge of Asia’: a nation that is small (in population) but large (in land mass), rich, peripheral and deindustrialised, home to the peoples of the oldest living culture in the world, exceptionally culturally diverse but affiliated with the Empire and the West, geographically outside of but dependent on metropolitan power and international capitalism, and riven by racial anxieties (see also Harris & Idriss, 2021). From this perspective, we are especially interested in the meanings of belonging frames in the construction of youth research and policy in settler-colonial nation-making, the mobilisation of these approaches in the study and management of migrant and mobile youth, youth belonging in the regional context, and reflection on the importation, application and generation of Northern (and especially British) theory, concepts and approaches in youth belonging research and policy. Therefore, some of our discussion necessarily centres the Australian example: this is critical in terms of our own positionality but also promotes a youth studies approach that moves beyond the field’s tendency towards dis-located tropes and often unnamed reference points and encourages other youth studies scholars to reflect on their intellectual

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foundations and consider the politics of knowledge making about youth in their contexts. At the same time, we engage scholarship in and beyond Australia, the UK, and more broadly from and beyond the ‘WENA’ hegemon of Western Europe and North America that has claimed the centre of youth studies (Cooper et al., 2019). Our scope is not intended to be comprehensive or representative, but rather to show how the frame of belonging has shaped broader trends in youth research and policy around some key issues and agendas, with different local manifestations, as both a productive and problematic response to globally-relevant and globally-felt circumstances in which young people live and by which they are stratified. The aim therefore is not so much to show how young people in different places or circumstances belong, but to investigate the increasing popularity of a belonging approach in youth research, to bring to light the work that the concept of belonging does to construct an agenda for youth studies and policy, to understand the history and politics of the concept, and to critically interrogate this framework (including the work it does to both productively and problematically construct particular kinds of youth identities and issues in the first place).

Organisation of the Chapters Following this first chapter that has outlined our framework for thinking about belonging in youth studies, we move to two chapters that explore the intellectual origins and context for the turn to belonging in youth research and policy. Chapter 2 offers an analysis of the historical background to this use, and Chap. 3 is a close consideration of the conceptual strands that employ belonging in very different ways. Chapter 4 then focuses on the adoption of a belonging register in youth policy. The following three chapters address key domains where a belonging approach has been taken up in a substantive sense across scholarship and policy: transitions regimes and participation; citizenship; and place and mobility. The book concludes with a chapter offering a discussion of the implications of a belonging frame for researching youth, bringing together questions of epistemology and methodology. All chapters conclude by answering the question ‘what do concepts of belonging do?’ in the areas under consideration in those chapters. Chapter 2, called Historical Underpinnings, traces a genealogical analysis of youth studies within key three timeframes: post-World War 2

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anxieties about youth; the challenges of post-industrial youth in the 1960s and 1970s; and the question of youth transitions and cultures that dominated youth sociology from the 1980s. This analysis shows the centrality of emerging anxieties about the nature of young people’s belonging to society that are consistently invoked in periods of social change. These concerns are reflected in youth studies through the use of frameworks that reflect wider concerns and preoccupations with nationhood, the future, economies and social control. This chapter explores the historical underpinnings of interest in the ways in which young people belong, discussing the development of ideas about belonging from the early work on youth cultures of the Chicago School in the United States in the 1950s to the Birmingham School in the 1970s, the interest in youth subcultures and in youth transitions through education and work in the 1980s and 1990s, and the focus on place and mobility introduced by social geographers, rural youth sociologists and migration scholars in the 2000s. Whereas early youth studies focused on the question of social order, focusing on how marginalised and deviant young people made their lives meaningful, contemporary youth studies has turned this on its head, to explore the question of how new globalising processes are transforming the experience of youth. Following from the historical perspective, Chap. 3, titled Conceptual Threads, focuses on contemporary interest in the concept of belonging, analysing a range of concepts of belonging that inform youth studies in the present. Given its breadth and widespread use, both explicitly and implicitly in youth studies, this chapter develops our argument that it is timely to conduct a critical and rigorous analysis of what the concept of belonging does, because there is the real risk that belonging simply becomes a trope. It acknowledges that the metaphor of belonging is integral to a range of conceptual approaches and is understood and used in a plethora of ways in youth studies. It is an agile conceptual formation that can cover everything from young people’s personal capacities to create social bonds to the political conditions of their membership in a nation. Belonging is also at the centre of youth relationships with key institutions (e.g. different education systems, work, family) that shape their everyday experiences. The chapter opens with a consideration of the influence of Yuval-Davis’ conceptualisations of the concept of belonging, given that her work is widely referenced and, in many ways, pivotal to thinking about belonging as a tool for analysis. The chapter then focuses on the way in which the concept of belonging has been employed in youth studies to

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understand the everyday, making visible performances of belonging, and the power of everyday encounters and the layering of encounters, both human and more-than-human, to create belonging. This chapter also discusses the close relationship between belonging and identity in youth studies, drawing on studies from many parts of the world. Finally, the chapter draws on the interest in youth studies in approaches that reject the ontology/epistemology and the human/non-human binaries. These approaches, we argue, have opened up the contradictory, complex interrelationships of belonging in new ways. We draw particularly on Indigenous scholarship to illustrate approaches to belonging that fuse the meaning of being, belonging and place. This chapter concludes that despite the more nuanced and complex understandings about belonging that are afforded from new materialist conceptions of belonging, and the insights of Indigenous scholars, its use tends towards the normative, supporting conceptions of mainstream and risk. We next turn to reflect on the ways in which both the historical legacy of assumptions about belonging in youth studies and contemporary uses of the concept of belonging are taken up in policies that impact on young people’s lives, especially those associated with education, employment and wellbeing. Chapter 4, called Policy Frames, also sets the scene for the consideration of the affordances, limitations and challenges of the concept of belonging for youth studies. This chapter examines how policy contributes to shape the ways in which young people construct their lives. It explores how the treatment of belonging in youth policy is in many instances not explicit but implicitly addressed through the policy frameworks of social inclusion, exclusion and integration. It shows how the metaphor of belonging taken up by these policy frameworks can compartmentalise youth into just a single sphere of life (i.e. youth-as-student or youth-as-worker) and can individualise structural problems and solutions. It examines how the framework of social inclusion constructs a conditional belonging in society, underpinned by notions of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism that circumscribe young people’s membership exclusively to participation in education, training and employment. A failure to engage in learning and earning is then framed through a social exclusion approach that serves to individualise un-belonging by positioning youth at the margins as deficient and morally distinct from the rest of society. Focusing on Indigenous youth policy research, predominantly in Australia and New Zealand, it interrogates the way belonging has been employed through a social integration framework that continues to

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normalise the idea that Indigenous youth need to be ‘fixed’. Ultimately, while examining how belonging has been taken up by policy as a normative, categorical and individualised concept, it explores how belonging can still offer useful ways of expanding policy approaches by connecting young people to other relevant spheres of life beyond education and work. In Chap. 5, titled Transitions and Participation, we turn to the ubiquitous concepts of transitions and participation. This chapter draws on youth studies of Indigenous youth, gendered transitions and global transition regimes to analyse the work of different conceptual framings of transition and participation for understanding belonging. It shows how these linked concepts are mobilised to stand for very different approaches to belonging, depending on whether they are underpinned by categorical, normative and universalising assumptions of youth or on relational approaches. Categorical approaches to transition invoke the stages and milestones that mark trajectories from childhood to adulthood, with normative approaches to youth participation as their partner, invoking the practices that are seen to be appropriate for young people’s ‘expression’ or ‘voice’ through these stages. Together, this pairing of concepts covers much of the youth research landscape. The use of relational registers of transition reveals how structural developments, particularly focusing on the weakening nexus between education and work, reinscribe old divisions based on gender, location and race. The chapter draws the work of Indigenous scholars; the two-decades Australian Life Patterns longitudinal study as well as research from the Asia-Pacific region and from Europe to highlight the way in which relational approaches shift the focus to the multiplicity of individual’s subjective identifications through to institutional processes, focusing on the relationships between people, people and things, and researcher and researched. Chapter 6, Citizenship, considers the ways in which the framework of belonging has been drawn on in new conceptualisations of youth civic and political identity and participation. It looks at the move from legalistic and technical to more maximal theorisations of citizenship that focus on the belonging-inflected notions of participation and membership. It addresses the interest in boundary-making and political and social inclusion in the youth citizenship agenda in an age of migration, and tensions between a focus on the nation on the one hand, and local, global and digital spaces of young people’s civic and political lives on the other. In doing so it explores the way belonging has been employed to theorise youth transnational solidarities, multiple domains of political and civic agency, and

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emergent communities of membership and responsibility in conditions of mass migration, extensive youth mobility and the ongoing politics of colonisation (for example, belonging conceptualised variously through notions of urban, cultural, digital, and/or Indigenous sovereign citizenships). It evaluates the affordances that a belonging approach brings to youth citizenship studies in terms of regard for relational and multi-scalar dimensions of participation and recognition against ongoing attention to legal and formal structures of inclusion and rights. Chapter 7, called Mobilities, explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which the concept of belonging is utilised to understand young people’s mobilities and place making. It interrogates how a belonging frame has been applied to youth mobilities in contemporary youth studies through an analysis of the multiplicity of mobilities at different spatial scales that are produced as a result of social and economic transformations and political conflicts and cultural developments. Against this background, it questions individualised approaches to transnational transitions that neglect the relevance of a relational approach, and problematises the notion of spatial reflexivity with its tendency to reify mobility at the expense of place making. The concept of belonging is employed to interrogate the imperative of rural youth migration and how young people from autochthonous, migrant and refugee backgrounds navigate different cultures, including in digital spaces, while they forge new communities. Flows and fixities in mega-metropolitan places in the Global South are evaluated through a belonging frame to unearth the persistent production of inequalities that impact on young people’s everyday (im)mobilities. It interrogates the risk in youth studies to essentialise and individualise belonging as a ‘good’ thing, and considers the implications when we normalise it, moralise it, construct it as a normative expectation – just as with the transitions approach – where those who do not achieve it are misrecognised, deemed to be at-risk, stuck and unbelonging. Chapter 8, Researching Belonging in Youth Studies discusses how a critical approach to youth belonging produces a number of conceptual and methodological challenges and affordances for youth research. It explores some of the key methodological, epistemological and conceptual aspects of belonging research, evaluating claims that belonging as an approach can helpfully attune research to relationality, can address tendencies to reproduce limiting issues, tropes and categories for youth research, and can closely explore the structure/agency nexus in young people’s lives. It weighs these perspectives against counter claims that it can individualise,

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regulate, depoliticise and generalise youth experience, and lead to research tools and approaches narrowly focused on youth agency, voice and identity in ways that are disconnected from social and political systems. It also considers specific methods in belonging research to investigate the ways the turn to belonging has animated debates about empirical techniques and concludes with a reflection on the value of the question of belonging as a driver for youth research. Belonging has multiple registers and can elude simple definition. This is common of complex, slippery, abstract concepts such as justice, or freedom. This is because their meanings are tightly associated with the socio-­ historical context in which they are used and the subjective ideas, beliefs, practice and uptake of individuals and social group within these contexts. Particularly pertinent for our discussion is exploring how definitions of abstract concepts can generate a norm (out of the idea of belonging for youth), which eventually constructs a norm for how (and where) youth should belong. Thus while we have opened this chapter with a consideration of meanings of belonging as the concept is commonly used, this book is not designed to tell readers the best way to define belonging, but instead offers a series of explorations and reflections for youth researchers to draw on to clarify and critically consider their position. Rather than proposing a better or most accurate definition of belonging, we are more concerned here with interrupting the persistent reification of this concept and are interested instead in exploring how and why it has become popular, how it has been constituted and taken up in youth studies research and youth policy, and with what effects. Our aim is not so much to promote a single definition of belonging, but to investigate what different definitions, ideas and uses of belonging allow youth research and policy to do, in the changing socio-historical context of youth research. Our overall aim in this book is to consider the historical and conceptual foundations and applications of belonging in youth studies and trace its development and use as an agenda, metaphor, conceptual framework, research approach and policy orientation in transition, participation, citizenship, place, mobility and related domains. Belonging has been a way to regulate, include, exclude, stratify and manage youth, and yet also offers considerable affordances; not least in overcoming categorical, segmented and linear approaches in youth policy and research by opening onto relational thinking. At a time when belonging has become a core concern in (and beyond) youth research and policy, we argue for its considered interrogation. Rather than advocating for its take up or rejection, we explore

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what the concept of belonging does in and for youth studies. We suggest that such an analysis of belonging must precede any work to mobilise a critical framework of relationality, which may be its greatest potentiality.

References Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2015). Unsettled belonging: Educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11. University of Chicago Press. Anthias, F. (2006). Belongings in a globalising and unequal world: Rethinking translocations. In N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, & U. Vieten (Eds.), The situated politics of belonging (pp. 17–31). Sage. Antonsich, M. (2010). Searching for belonging  – An analytical framework. Geography Compass, 4(6), 644–659. Bennett, A., & Robards, B. (Eds.). (2014). Mediated youth cultures: The internet, belonging and new cultural configurations. Palgrave Macmillan. Bessant, J., Farthing, R., & Watts, R. (Eds.). (2017). The precarious generation: A political economy of young people. Routledge. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Allen & Unwin. Cooper, A., Swartz, S., & Mahali, A. (2019). Disentangled, decentred and democratised: Youth studies for the global south. Journal of Youth Studies, 22(1), 29–45. Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2012). Young people making it work: Continuity and change in rural places. Melbourne University Publishing. Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2017). A longitudinal analysis of belonging: Temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural Australia. Young, 25(3), 219–234. Cuervo, H., Barakat, N., & Turnbull, M. (2015). Youth, belonging and transitions: Identifying opportunities and barriers for Indigenous young people in remote communities (Research report 44). Youth Research Centre, The University of Melbourne. Eliassi, B. (2013). Contesting Kurdish identities in Sweden: Quest for belonging among middle eastern youth. Palgrave Macmillan. Fangen, K., Johansson, T., & Hammarén, N. (2012). Young migrants: Exclusion and belonging in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Furlong, A., Goodwin, J., O’Connor, H., Hadfield, S., Hall, S., Lowden, K., & Plugor, R. (2018). Young people in the labour market: Past, present, future. Routledge. Habib, S., & Ward, M.  R. M. (Eds.). (2019). Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Habib, S., & Ward, M. R. M. (Eds.). (2020). Youth, place and theories of belonging. Routledge. Halse, C. (Ed.). (2019). Interrogating belonging for young people in schools. Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, A. (2016). Belonging and the uses of difference: Young people in Australian urban multiculture. Social Identities, 22(4), 359–375. Harris, A., & Idriss, S. (2021). Lifeworlds and cultures of Australian Youth in a globalized world. In G. Knapp & R. Winter (Eds.), Globalization and youth: Developments, analyses and perspectives. Springer. Huppatz, K., Matthews, A., & Hawkins, M. (Eds.). (2016). Identity and belonging. Palgrave Macmillan. Mansouri, F., & Percival Wood, S. (2008). Identity, education and belonging: Arab and Muslim youth in contemporary Australia. Melbourne University Press. May, V. (2013). Connecting self to society: Belonging in a changing world. Palgrave Macmillan. Miller-Idriss, C. (2009). Blood and culture: Youth, right-wing extremism, and national belonging in contemporary Germany. Duke University Press. Muna, A. (2018). Young Muslim America: Faith, community and belonging. Oxford University Press. Mustafa, A. (2015). Identity and political participation among young British Muslims: Believing and belonging. Palgrave Macmillan. Noble, G. (2020). Foreword. Putting belonging to work. In S.  Habib & M. R. M. Ward (Eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging (pp. xvii–xviii). Routledge. Raffaetà, R., Baldassar, L., & Harris, A. (2016). Chinese immigrant youth and identities and belonging in Prato, Italy: Exploring the intersections between migration and youth studies. Identities, 23(4), 422–437. Robards, B., & Lincoln, S. (2020). Growing up on Facebook. Peter Lang Publishing. Savage, M., Bagnall, G., & Longhurst, B. (2005). Globalization and belonging. Sage. Swartz, S., & Arnot, M. (Eds.). (2013). Youth citizenship and the politics of belonging. Routledge. Tanu, D. (2017). Growing up in transit: The politics of belonging at an international school. Berghahn Books. Tilleczek, K. (2011). Approaching youth studies: Being, becoming and belonging. Oxford University Press. Woodman, D., & Bennett, A. (Eds.). (2015). Youth cultures, transitions, and generations: Bridging the gap in youth research. Palgrave Macmillan. Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2015). Youth and generation: Change and inequality in the lives of young people. Sage. Wright, S. (2015). More-than-human, emergent belongings: A weak theory approach. Progress in Human Geography, 39(4), 391–411.

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Wyn, J. (2013). Young adulthood in Australia and New Zealand: Pathways to belonging. In H.  Helve & K.  Evans (Eds.), Youth and work transitions in changing social landscapes (pp. 218–230). The Tufnell Press. Wyn, J. (2015). A critical perspective on young people and belonging. In A. Lange, C.  Steiner, S.  Schutter, & H.  Reiter (Eds.), Handbuch Kindheits- und Jugendsoziologie (pp. 35–48). Springer VS. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. Sage. Ziemer, U. (2011). Ethnic belonging, gender, and youth cultural practices in contemporary Russia. ibidem-Verlag.

CHAPTER 2

Historical Underpinnings

Introduction Although the term belonging has only recently come into regular usage in youth studies, the question of young people’s relationships to and place in cultural, political, economic, social and physical space is a central theme in youth studies. Yet, despite being so central to the analysis of young people’s lives, the concept of belonging has tended to be poorly defined. Exploring the work that concepts of belonging do in youth studies invites us to question how societies and institutions choose to manage their changing relationships with youth. Its use in contemporary youth studies compels us to provide greater conceptual clarity about how the concept of belonging is deployed, how it shapes wider social recognition of young people, and to understand in more depth what these conceptual approaches mean and do for analysis. Tracing the genealogy of belonging in youth studies sets the backdrop for this book. Our interest in exploring the genealogy of youth studies through the lens of belonging reflects a broader contemporary movement in the field to seek ways to go beyond the divisions and binaries that have tended to dominate youth research over the last 20 years or so (France, 2016), in order to realise the potential for youth research to be a ‘powerful vehicle from which we can explore big issues with implications for social science as a whole’ (Furlong 2015, p.  18). The metaphor of belonging is of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_2

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interest because it necessarily attends to the relational dynamics and processes through which individuals and society are interpellated, across time, space and historically. Its use is widespread because the metaphor of belonging is not owned by any particular strand of youth studies. The metaphor of belonging (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014) has synergies with diverse conceptual frameworks from Marx, Weber and Durkheim, to Mannheim, Beck, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Guattari and others, its relational register spanning structuralist thinking, post-structuralism, political economy, settler colonial theory and the new materialism. Belonging refers to young people’s identifications and expressions (culturally and politically); their structural location in families, in educational institutions and political life and as citizens; their generational and geographic location and identification and their positioning within local, national and global economic and policy processes. Young people (as do people in all age groups) constantly go through changes associated with age (social, cultural, biosocial, physiological and psychosocial) at the same time at which the social conditions through which the meaning and experience of age are changing around them. This is tricky for many reasons, including the fact that age-related change is particularly focused on the category ‘youth’ as a receptacle for anxieties about the future of society (and less so on the ‘adulthood’ into which they are perceived to transition). This future is always being imagined in a present that is itself changing. Thus, how young people belong in the present and the future, and what current developments mean for the future are sources of anxiety and concern that are reflected in the range of disciplines that focus on youth. This chapter shows that questions about where and how young people belong are inevitably shaped by both the contemporaneous situation of young people and the conceptual resources that are deployed at the time of writing, a process that also shapes how the history of youth studies is told in the present (to paraphrase Furlong et al., 2011, p. 359). An historical reflection on youth studies reveals that interest in belonging has tended to be heightened at times of perceived dramatic social change, when societal anxieties surface about the future, socially, economically and culturally. An early example is Chesser’s Youth: A book for two generations (1928), which speaks to social anxieties about the health, wellbeing and prosperity of Britain in the aftermath of the First World War. Chesser, a medical practitioner, situates her treatise on youth against the backdrop of Britain’s recovery from the chaos of the war, a recovery that

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she argued required new understandings of what it means to be a young person in very new times. In the aftermath of the Second World War a slew of books on the place of young people in society also appeared, including Reed (1950), in the UK; Connell et al. (1957), in Australia; and Cohen and Short (1958) and Friedenberg (1959), in the US. These books were also responding to concerns about the emergence of a ‘new youth’, following the destruction and loss of the Second World War, and the implementation of mass secondary schooling. Mannheim’s (1952) work on social generations was also developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, in Germany. Using the relatively arbitrary but distinctive time frames of post-World War 2 anxieties about youth, the challenges of post-industrial youth and the question of youth transitions and cultures that dominated youth sociology from the 1980s on, this chapter expands on the above examples to trace a genealogy of youth studies through the lens of belonging. We show that the question of how young people belong is consistently invoked in periods of social change, using a range of conceptual frameworks, reflecting wider concerns and preoccupations with nationhood, the future, economies and social control. Our analysis highlights the centrality of the end of the industrial revolution, with the demise of industrial and manufacturing jobs, and the rise of neoliberalism on a global scale as the key drivers of both cultural and transitions-focused research on youth. The collapse of the youth labour market and the gradual increase in precarious work positioned young people as bearers of the burden of economic and political decisions that have increased inequality and precarity for all ages. These conditions have underpinned analyses of different dimensions of belonging through explorations of social generations, cultural expressions of identification and opposition, institutional and policy regimes, and young people’s management and navigation of these regimes. From the 1980s to the present social changes include youth mobilities in the form of migration and refugees, international education markets, communication technologies, the emergence of universal post-secondary education and its failure to deliver the promise of good work, and the spread of precarious work and new forms and ways of working. These developments have provoked a new wave of reflection in youth studies about how to account for the situation of young people in ways that acknowledge the significance of political, cultural and economic shifts since the 1980s (Bessant et al., 2017; France, 2016; Furlong et al., 2017; Woodman & Wyn, 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has unsettled many

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of these dynamics, creating new anxieties about and risks for young people in ways that are yet to unfold. This chapter draws on these and many other works to add to the endeavour of understanding of young people’s relationship with social change and social processes, through the lens of belonging across time. Many of the ‘threads’ identified in this chapter are developed further in the chapters that follow, shifting from the more historical focus of this chapter to an analysis of contemporary approaches and uses of the concept of belonging. This includes an analysis of how belonging is explored and debated through the frameworks of transitions and participation, policy, citizenship, place-making and mobilities.

A Genealogy of Belonging in Youth Sociology Although a distinctive youth sociology in Western countries only emerged in the early 1950s, its legacy can be found much earlier, in the anxieties about the future at times of widespread social change and dislocation. For example, in the aftermath of the First World War, the massive loss of life, destruction of infrastructure and heightened economic uncertainty inflicted by the war was reflected in concerns about how the young were now connected to their families, communities, institutions such as religion and education, and the nation, and about what new realities for young people might also mean for the future of society. This is illustrated by Chesser’s book Youth: A book for two generations (1928). It was written a decade after World War 1, which Chesser notes, left an aftermath of chaos and: a slackening of moral control and of psychological adjustment. The last war, the ‘Greatest’ the world has ever known in area, numbers, brutalities, and consequences, is responsible for many of the mistakes which everybody must admit are being made by young people in the new quarter of the twentieth century. (Chesser, 1928, p. 1)

She speaks to these and other emerging anxieties about social change and generational conflict, to parents who have survived the war and struggle to come to terms with a situation where ‘old beliefs, conventional manners and morals, are being weighed in the balance and viewed from new angles’ and to a new generation who ‘are unable perhaps to accept the beliefs and ideals of the generations before them, but they are building

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up for themselves a new sense of values, a new perspective’ (Chesser, 1928, pp.  2–3). Interestingly, Chesser foreshadows the heightened concerns about the impact of education on young people that accompanied the emergence of mass secondary education in the 1950s. While she expresses positive views on the value of education for both boys and girls, she says that children ‘replace many of their home standards and values by those of the school’; that ‘most children transfer some of the love formerly focussed on the parents to teachers’; and warns that ‘we give school authorities too much power. There is too little co-operation between parent and schoolmaster in Great Britain’ (Chesser, 1928, p. 24). Written in the style of a handbook of advice for parents, Chesser, who was a medical practitioner, was an advocate for the value of knowledge about psychological as well as physiological processes. While she makes no mention of the seminal work of G. Stanley Hall, it is likely that she was aware of his work. Hall’s two-volume work Adolescence, its Psychology and its relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904) laid out a theory of child development that has been hugely influential in the field of youth studies. Latching on to the dynamic nature of youth, Hall proposed that the period of youth was a mirror of human evolution. Thus, the period of youth was seen by Hall as a distinctive (and universal) phase in the evolution of the human organism, naturally involving a period of conflict (or ‘storm and stress’) with parents and authorities triggered during adolescence by the struggle between the needs of the human organism and the needs of society. Hall’s notion of adolescence as a period of storm and stress naturalises anxieties about young people as becoming adults and becoming citizens, making social change and social context irrelevant. Despite this, Hall’s work was influential in the emerging discipline of adolescent psychology and had a lasting legacy in the field of youth studies (an example is the concept of a ‘emerging adulthood’, popularised by Arnett (2000)). At the same time, in the US the work of a group of sociologists (which came to be known as the Chicago School) was also exploring how young people belonged in the emerging urban metropolis of Chicago. This school produced a wide range of work, epitomised in the 1920s by Thrasher (1927), whose work was widely influential. Whereas Chesser’s work was inspired by Britain’s recovery from the First World War, Thrasher’s work was against the backdrop of unprecedented urban development in the US, of potential and possibility, a landscape that Dimitriadis describes as the frontier of ‘an unprecedented economic and cultural

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revolution’ (2006, p.  338). Thrasher’s study of 1313 gangs in Chicago was a pioneering sociological study of gangs, that sought to understand the emergence of urban gangs in the light of the context in which boys and young men were living, the nature of their urban landscapes and their relationships with family, church and school. Drawing on extensive ethnographic studies, Thrasher also focused on the imaginative investments by the young men in activities that enabled them to actively construct their lives. Thrasher’s studies of Chicago gangs in the 1920s explores the work that young men do to belong, in a context of rapid social change, in which the children of immigrant families often struggled to fit in with new divisions of labour and new associations. As Dimitriadis (2006) points out, the importance of Thrasher’s (1927) book is in the highlighting of: the complex social and community surround of the young boys he studied. He maintained that these young men were enmeshed in what he called the “situation complex,” a web of influences that could not be understood in isolation from, but only in relation to, each other. One could not understand schools, for example, without understanding how they competed with the media, families, church, and gangs for boys’ affections and imaginative energies. Thrasher’s study was highly contextual and relational, foregrounding the agency of young people in constructing their selves and social relations. (Dimitriadis, 2006, p. 338)

Both of these studies share an underlying concern with youth, with belonging and the building of nationhood during a period of significant social change, and each, in different ways, addresses the question of what happens when new institutions (such as education) step in, or when institutions in one sense ‘fail’ young people. In the following sections we trace how these concerns resurface time and again.

Post-WW2 Anxieties About Youth In the 1940s and 1950s a range of studies of youth published in the UK, US, Canada and Australia sought to document and analyse the changing relationship between young people and society, against the devastation wrought by World War 2 and the emergence of new opportunities and changes in the post-war era. These changes include universal secondary education, a period of post-war prosperity for some as industry and manufacturing began to recover, increased migration, and the emergence of

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new forms of older social divisions based on class, gender and race. For example, in 1941–1942 Hollingshead (1949) undertook a community study of the relationship between the social organisation of a small town (Elmtown) in the Middle Western Corn Belt of the USA, and the lives of 735 school-aged young people. Framed as a sociological study of adolescence, the book is an account of how ‘the social system’ of a town ‘organizes and controls the social behaviour of high-school-aged adolescents’ (Hollingshead, 1949, p. 10). This approach was explicitly in juxtaposition to the domination of youth research by other disciplines, commenting that: Physiologists had done extensive work on physical maturation, psychologists had developed a psychology of adolescence, educators had many studies of the growing child, particularly from the view-point of the school; and sociologists, with few exceptions, had ignored the subject. (Hollingshead, 1949, p. 4)

The question of belonging is central to Hollingshead’s book, drawing the conclusion that youth are denied recognition. He argues that in Elmtown in the early 1940s, adolescence is a period of life when a person is not regarded as a child, but in which society ‘does not accord to him full adult status, roles and functions’ (1948, p. 6). He describes how the class structure and neighbourhood subcultures of Elmtown prescribe and control the possibilities and outcomes for young people, reflecting class inequalities. Hollingshead draws on the study to reflect on the classed nature of American society, and the emerging inequalities between families that is being reproduced in Elmtown, concluding that this dynamic is ‘the challenge American society faces in the second half of the twentieth century’ (Hollingshead, 1949, p. 453). Hollingshead’s sentiment about the way in which the period of youth was becoming emptied out of meaning and taken up with institutional processes was echoed by US sociologist Friedenberg (1959), who argued that adolescence is primarily a social process and that ‘traditional adolescence’ was vanishing: swallowed up at the childhood end by the increasing precocity of the young, their turning of high school into an ersatz college or even suburb, their early if somewhat flat maturity as lovers, consumers, committee-men and at the adult end by the prolongation of the period of training for the increasing numbers in graduate school. (1959, p. 9)

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In the UK, these changes were also fuelled by concern about the emergence of unwelcome social changes in post-war Britain. For example, Reed (1950) studied the attitudes and leisure habits of 80,000 Birmingham youth aged 14–20. This study explicitly references the wartime dislocation of family life and the emergence of universal state education, both of which were seen to be a threat to traditional ideas about how young people relate to society. Reed, who was a Methodist minister, was especially concerned about the potential for state-based education to erode religious beliefs and responsibilities amongst the new generation, foreshadowing the sense of moral panic that was later identified (Cohen, 1955). Reed argued that whilst it was: quite erroneous to suppose that there are large numbers of unattached adolescents roaming the streets or going to the cinema every evening or spending their leisure in vicious or antisocial ways … what one does feel about the lives of many of these young people, … is that they are very barren and restricted. (Reed, 1950, p. 131)

The imperative to understand the situation of young people in a time of change was also central to Connell, Francis and Skilbeck’s Growing up in an Australian City (1957). This study of young people in Sydney, Australia in 1951 drew on the work of Hollingshead (1949) and Reed (1950). The authors were interested in ‘the relationship between Australian culture and the educational programme and theories to be found in this country’ (1957, p. xiii); ‘the ways in which an Australian grows up to be an Australian’ (1957, p. xiii), and the implications of these processes for education, as well as for nationhood, against a backdrop of significant social change. In the first place, the authors were acutely aware of Australia’s colonial status, which involved taking a ‘path towards new traditions’ and a ‘repudiation of home influence’ (1957, p. xiii). This was seen by the authors as a pivotal moment in history, because of the risk of over-dependence on the home country (Britain) which might bring ‘strangulation’ to initiative in the colony. The study of Sydney’s youth was initiated in this context as a conscious effort to evaluate the development of Australian urban culture as a guide to future action and to avoid the risk of ‘either spiritual starvation or spiritual misdirection’ for Sydney’s ‘100,000 adolescents (who) have no secure guide as they strive to select appropriate paths to adulthood’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 8).

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In a tone that foreshadows the interest in insecurity and risk that has dominated youth studies since the early 1980s the authors refer to the 1950s as ‘a quicksilver age’ in which ‘it is not possible to point, with security, the direction in which the changes are trending except to say that they are productive of further change’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 207). Focusing on implications for education, Connell et al. argued that one of the most ‘urgent’ developmental tasks of young people was ‘learning to deal with insecurity’ (1957, p. 207). This book makes a significant shift from earlier studies of young people that saw school as a threat to stability, concluding instead that schools have the answer. Connell et al. saw schools as providing youth with the skills of ‘cultural evaluation’ and judgement, which would ‘enable him (sic) to add his mite to the clarification of an urban culture’ that is ‘far from clear’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 210). Growing up in an Australian City (Connell et  al., 1957) carves out a distinctive approach to the question of how young people belong. This study sees youth as the bearers of a post-colonial future, and young people as making active choices that will shape that future. Young people, in this study, belong in the very centre of the colony’s development, guided by a critical educational program that addresses their developmental needs and those of the emerging nation. Yet, there is also a profound statement of ‘unbelonging’ in this approach, which invites further attention. Young Indigenous Australians are, quite simply, an absence. Their absence is consistent with the prevailing ideas of the time, which did not recognise Indigenous people as first nations or citizens, nor account for the relationship between Indigenous Australians and ‘country’ – the land, the waters and all living creatures that centrally constitute the spirituality and sovereignty of Indigenous Australians. Writing about Indigenous Australians from the 1920s onwards was informed by the idea that Indigenous Australians were inherently more primitive than White Australians (Elkin, 1929). The aim of academic writing, drawing on the emerging disciplines of social anthropology and the eugenics movement, was almost unanimous in positioning the future for Australia’s Indigenous people as one of assimilation or annihilation. It is hard to find any writing specifically about young Indigenous people in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s – there is no recognition of their past, and rather than being positioned as the hope for the future, they are positioned as problematic to the future (a position that continues to frame the way that Indigenous youth are seen, as we discuss in Chap. 4 (Policy Frames). Australian cultural anthropologist Elkin (1937) argued that ‘if Aborigines were to attain a fuller participation in the Australian nation’,

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they had to be assisted over ‘the difficult times of transition from the old stone-age to that higher stage of culture to which we desire to lead them’ (Elkin, 1937, as cited in McGregor, 1993, p. 96). Thus, in stark contrast to the writings of authors like Reed and Chesters, who saw the increasing institutionalisation of young people in education as constituting a possible threat to young people’s family and spiritual connections, the removal of Australia’s Indigenous young people from families and their compulsory participation in educational institutions from 1910 onwards, became enshrined in policies that explicitly sought to break young Indigenous people’s connection to their families, to country and to their spiritual beliefs (Brown, 2018). As Moreton-Robinson (2003, p. 30) explains, the situation of young Indigenous peoples: must be theorised in a way which allows for incommensurable difference between the situatedness of the Indigenous people in a colonizing settler society such as Australia and those who have come here. Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are situated in relation to (post)colonization in radically different ways – ways that cannot be made into sameness.

Australian Indigenous people’s belonging rights inhere in custodianship and prior occupation of land that was actively ‘unrecognised’ by the assertion of terra nullius by the colonisers. This unrecognition is signalled today in the description of the colonisers as invaders. As we have shown, ‘unrecognition’ was actively produced in the mid-twentieth century through differentiated imaginaries of youth belonging to social institutions, the nation and the future. Only non-Indigenous or ‘assimilated’ young people were constructed as having a role in Australia’s efforts to make a cultural break with Britain and forge a new ‘post-colonial’ national identity, with no reckoning with the dispossession wrought by colonisation. As we discuss in the following chapter where we explore concepts of belonging in more detail, this uniquely Australian example serves to highlight assumptions about which young people ‘belong’ and how they are embedded within youth studies. In other work at that time however, the risk posed by the age-based identifications and affiliations of belonging that were fostered by universal secondary education emerged as a central issue of concern. In the US for example, drawing on the tradition of the Chicago school, Cohen’s (1955) study of urban gangs, drawing on a functionalist conception of society, focused on the threat to social stability by the failure of some groups of

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working-class young men to absorb the ideals and practices of the new American middle class. Cohen argued that these deviant young men were a product of the disruption of traditional socialisation processes caused by a range of changes, including the reduction of unskilled jobs and the rise of mass secondary education (Cohen & Short, 1958). Like Connell et al. (1957), Cohen’s work also focused on urban areas as the fulcrum of social change, arguing that delinquent subcultures occurred in the cities where an increasingly dispossessed working-class struggled to belong. These ideas were developed further by Coleman (1961) who focused specifically on the ways in which the new mass education sector of secondary school in the US in the 1950s brought with it an era of age-based affiliations, reflected in ‘teen’ fashion and new leisure styles, threatening traditional ways. Coleman’s study highlighted the potential threat of this new situation where, he argued, young people were cut off from adult society through their mass participation in education. Coleman’s focus on the risks of education was developed further by Musgrove (1964) who explored the situation for Australian youth, arguing that mass secondary education was creating a ‘new class’ based on age. The sense of unease about youth in this period was to some extent fostered by the field of developmental psychology. This approach assumed that age meant everything. Drawing on the ideas of G. Stanley Hall (1904), the concept of stages of youthful development was popularised by Piaget (1954) and then Erikson (1965). These authors proposed that the biological processes of development dominated the period of youth (termed ‘adolescence’ to give prominence to the biological process of maturation) focussing on the risks of failure to complete all the developmental tasks of successful maturation into adults. This developmental focus reinforced the idea that youth was an inherently risky stage of life. It proposed the existence of distinct and universal developmental stages that, if not achieved, would compromise healthy, mature adulthood, and it saw youth as being more pre-disposed than any other age group to taking risks. Risk-taking, from this perspective, is essential because of an inherent need to ‘try on’ different identities before ‘settling down’ but at the same time, this period of experimentation has the potential to go wrong and jeopardise healthy development. The focus on universal normative processes of development and the non-normative (or deviant) behaviour that fails to follow normative patterns, supported a view of youth as inherently risky and in need of professional intervention. The traces of these ideas are clear in much youth research of the 1950s and 1960s. For example,

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Connell et  al. (1957) identified four developmental ‘tasks’ that educational programs should support young Australians to complete and Cohen’s (1955) studies of deviant youth draw explicitly on the notion of normative behaviours and patterns of life. The legacy of these approaches to youth, impacting on the field of youth studies from the 1950s onwards is analysed by Lesko (2001), who demonstrates how the idea of ‘natural youth’ has shaped research and policy. We discuss how the legacy of these normative and universal conceptions of youth can still be found in approaches to youth transitions and participation, which we discuss in Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation). Juxtaposed against this, a relational approach to understanding the distinctive intersections between young people’s biography and social conditions was proposed by German sociologist Mannheim (1952). Using the concept of social generation, his work brought a new dimension to the question of belonging. He sought to understand the impact of economic and social conditions on the sense of ontological security and outlook of young people, giving prominence to young people’s subjective experiences as well as the material conditions that shape their lives. Mannheim’s approach was also focused on the impact of significant social conditions on young people, arguing that widespread conditions and institutional events (such as post-war recovery) which young people share would produce distinctive and enduring attitudes and dispositions in young people, ones that would characterise their generation. Mannheim saw social generation as being closely related to the concept of cohort, distinguishing this from generation as an expression of kinship. He argued that biological age is meaningless in itself; its meaning is given by the mediation of age with social factors. His work on the concept of social generation pioneered a new approach to the question of belonging, focusing on how members of a social generation belong to their times, developing distinctive subjectivities (attitudes, dispositions, aspirations) through their interpellation in the distinctive conditions of their situation. These studies in the mid twentieth century all focus on the question of where and how youth belong in times of social change, taking up different approaches to this dynamic. Connell et al. (1957) for example, focus on the question of emerging nationhood, crystallised by Sydney youth, whom they saw as problem-solvers who, armed with critical skills and judgement, would assert their adulthood in distinctive ways, and in so doing would forge the next stage of Sydney’s development. This work saw white youth as powerful change-makers  – whose capacities to bring about change would optimally be recognised in school curricula.

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Hollingshead’s (1949) study of Elmtown is a reflection on American nationhood, highlighting the impact of emerging class inequalities in the US on young people’s life chances. Hollingshead is less optimistic about young people as change-makers however, concluding instead that there was broad social and institutional capitulation to the idea that arrangements that benefit the upper classes also benefit the common person. He sees the future of youth (and the nation) as needing to be rescued by challenging ‘those elements of the culture which foster and perpetuate the class system over and against the ideals of official America, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’ (Hollingshead, 1949, p.  453). While class is also a central issue in Cohen and Short’s (1958) studies of American youth, they focused in on the antisocial and delinquent affiliations of those who did not ‘belong’. Mannheim’s approach to belonging shifts the focus from seeing ‘new’ youth as a threat to identifying how social change inevitably creates new social subjectivities and social patterns, creating an understanding of how each generation ‘belongs’ to their time, and in so doing, creates new social realities that reach into the future.

Post-Industrial Youth The 1960s and 1970s are often regarded as the period which defined the parallel tracks of youth studies: one focusing on youthful cultural identifications and social change (youth sub-cultures) and the other focusing on transformations from education to work (transitions) (Woodman & Bennett, 2015). However, a closer look at the work being undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s shows that many youth researchers attempted to hold the strands of transition and culture together in order to understand how young people belonged in a context of societal transformations that impacted most directly on young people. The signs of a collapse in the youth labour market were emerging by the early 1970s, resulting from the shift from industry-based economies to post-industrial economies (often touted as ‘knowledge’ or ‘service’ economies). These changes had a significant impact on the life choices of young men from working class families in particular, who would traditionally have sought full-time work after completing a minimum of secondary education, but whose options were becoming foreclosed. The 1960s and 1970s were also a period of change for women, whose participation in the labour market increased significantly during this time. In the US for example, the labour market participation for married women increased from 25% to 46% between 1950 and 1970, and this figure is repeated in most

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Western countries (Goldin, 2005). These trends began to increase pressure on young people to stay at school beyond the minimum leaving age, creating new challenges for both young people and educators. Youth researchers were witnessing three related phenomena: increases in educational participation; the replacement of industrial and manufacturing jobs with service sector jobs and the increase in part-time work for women; and the expansion of leisure and cultural pursuits dedicated to young people. In Australia, Connell et al. (1975) set out to understand the new ways in which young people were situated in this changing social and economic landscape, analysing in detail young people’s friendships, their engagement in education, and their leisure interests. This study drew an equivocal conclusion about how young people belonged. This in-depth study of City Youth (based in Sydney), explores the creation of a ‘new’ youth brought into being by the segregation of young people in educational institutions in which young people had very little say, the curriculum of which all but the most academic found to be lacking in relevance. They argued that the situation of young people in Sydney was no different from those in many countries in which ‘the emergent teenage subdivision, almost a new leisure class of temporarily non-productive activity and conspicuous consumption, follows upon the level of affluence and the sustained demand for highly specialized, diverse human skills typical of industrializing societies’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 3). Foreshadowing the critique of the ‘promise’ of educational participation, expressed by many youth researchers in more recent times (Bessant et  al., 2017; France, 2016; Woodman & Wyn, 2015), these authors argue that: Compulsory school attendance, in effect, has become less an issue in the face of the substantial incentive, ‘the promise’, for those continuing their education. School ‘stayers’ who are ready to tolerate the demands of continued and often competitive schooling, who can accept economic dependency, social subordination and sexual sublimation are persuaded it will more than ‘pay off’ in the future to do so. Postponed satisfactions and suspended rights and status are temporary losses more than compensated for by personal success, social standing, income, power and, some would venture, happiness prized in the dominant success-oriented type of culture. (Connell et al., 1975, pp. 3–4)

The picture painted by this study is of young people out of place  – forced to belong in formal educational institutions that by and large fail to recognise their capabilities and levels of maturity. Connell et  al. (1975) argue that educational institutions, supported by theories of adolescent

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development, tend to withhold recognition of the social maturity of young people. They see young people as a group as being bestowed a similar status to migrants (although acknowledging they were sometimes members of both groups) – ‘belonging to minority groups…both seeking membership of the same club, and although they have the necessary qualifications, they are often inclined to run into difficulties over the initiation rites’ (1975, p. 240). As in the earlier work by Connell et al. (1957), the 1975 study concludes with suggestions for relevant educational provision, responding to the diversity that exists amongst the young population and the unmet ask of tapping ‘the full richness of expressive work of which the teenagers are capable and the range of serious and worthwhile interests that would provide many more pupils with personal satisfaction and fulfillment’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 301). They actively resist the tendency to exaggerate the nature of ‘teenage culture’ saying that despite the appearance of new leisure interests and fashions ‘their identification with a teenage society is actually shallow and transient. Individually they remain in reasonable control of their own destinies and they are quite independently capable of shaping their own lives irrespective of peer group associations’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 14). The influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the UK also sought to understand the complex new dynamics of education, labour markets and youth cultural expressions that were reshaping how young people belonged. Much of the focus of CCCS research was on the social dynamics that drove the fate of working-class young men in a mass education system that was premised on the idea of equal outcomes, but that favoured middle and upper-class students. While their analyses highlighted the emergence of peer-based cultures of resistance (to middle-class educational ideas) in schools, cultures that reinforced existing power relations and inequalities (Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1977), they explicitly moved away from a focus on young people as ‘deviants’ towards understanding young people’s lives in societies characterised by deepening class inequalities. These researchers explored how working-class young men sought to belong by appropriating cultural resources to resist institutional attempts to make them conform, and to celebrate their difference (Willis, 1977). In doing so, they were exploring how some groups of young people were creating subcultural communities as a form of protest against (or resistance to) capitalism, urban development and slum clearance, school, the police and the court system, forming fairly stable groups (such as the Teddy Boys, mods and skinheads), which ‘solved the problem of belonging and identity’ that

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‘manifested a type of symbolic challenge to the class system’ (Woodman & Bennett, 2015, p. 4). Influenced by the CCCS tradition, Hebdige (1979) explored young people’s cultural expressions through music, dance and drug use, positioning young people as consumers and producers and as the instigators of new cultures. Hebdige (1979) argued that through cultural expression and consumption, young people gained a sense of belonging against the backdrop of the reduced relevance of traditional affiliations (especially class-based ones), and educational systems that they found lacking in relevance. His analyses of the new youth cultural influences of the 1970s, such as punk music and skinhead culture as forms of symbolic resistance to mainstream cultures represented a shift to appreciating the importance of young people’s creative and cultural expression, and the ways in which everyday cultural practices enable young people to feel they belong. This work sought to understand young people’s subjective experiences and the ways in which they actively negotiate and contribute to the complex social transformations around them, including their relationship to formal education and the labour market. Over time the interest in youth subcultures became more focused on the visible displays of subcultural affiliation. As Woodman and Bennett (2015) argue, drawing on the more abstract forms of textual and semiotic analysis, the CCCS’s analyses were open to criticism of being blind to wider social divisions (such as gender) and to the multiple and often transient engagements with ‘tribes’ and ‘scenes’. McRobbie and Garber (1977) showed that the focus on publicly visible youth subcultures rendered young women’s subcultural experiences invisible (McRobbie & Garber, 1977)). Their work inspired research into young women’s everyday subcultural practices, shifting the focus from public, street cultures that tended to be dominated by young men to ‘bedroom cultures’ and private spaces within which young women’s gendered identities are negotiated and performed. The role of subcultures in racialisation as well as their productive meanings for non-white youth was also more deeply investigated (Amos & Parmar, 1981; Gilroy, 1987; Jones, 1988). Yet, in some respects, as Woodman and Bennett (2015) argue, the response to criticism of a failure to respect young people’s voices and the ‘messiness’ of their lives, which inspired a more ethnographic approach to youth subcultures, also contributed to widening the split between the transitions and youth cultures strands of youth sociology. As we discuss below, the worsening youth labour market also heightened anxieties about

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how youth was being shaped by the changing relationship between education and work, contributing to a renewed focus on this dynamic to the exclusion of others.

Youth Transitions, Cultures and More In the 1980s youth sociology was seen to diverge, with one strand focusing on transitions through education and into work (and young adulthood) and another on cultural expression. The divergence was in part a response to social and economic changes that wrought greater diversity and precarity, reigniting concerns about how young people belong in the present and the future. As Furlong (2015) explains, young people were at the forefront of processes of deindustrialisation, of the expansion of educational participation into the post-compulsory years and a loosening of traditional class relations. The effects of this, often summed up as ‘individualization’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), were that the onus for belonging was seen as the responsibility of young people themselves, negotiating identities and navigating complex structural and institutional processes over which they had no control, to achieve their goals. This meant reflexively managing their biographical projects, negotiating the changing statuses of youth and adulthood in a context not of their making. Research on youth transitions and cultures has traditionally focused on how different groups of young people in diverse settings negotiate and respond to these circumstances. However, youth researchers have also turned to the side of the equation that is referenced by the term ‘not of their own making’, drawing on a tradition of political economy, to explore governmentality, structural, political and cultural dimensions of young people’s lives (Kelly, 2018). There is a broad consensus that research on youth transitions was strongly influenced by the crisis of crumbling youth labour markets in Western countries, against a backdrop of government policies that would promote universal participation in and completion of secondary education and increase participation in post-compulsory education (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007). Government policies assumed that there was close relationship between educational credentials and employment, and this position was highly influential. As we discuss in Chap. 4 (Policy Frames), this approach positioned young people as human capital and education as a ramp for distributing employment, creating strong policy measures to coerce them into belonging in school and work. Using metaphors such as

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‘pathways’ between education and work, and contrasting undesirable (although often realistic) messy trajectories with desirable ‘smooth transitions’, government policies in Western countries reinforced the idea that the emerging youth crisis of unemployment and under-employment was largely one of a mis-match between educational credentials and new labour markets, a mis-match that was sheeted home to young people for making the wrong choices and to educational institutions for offering the wrong curriculum (Furlong et al., 2017). Reflecting the shift in Western countries in the late 1970s from Keynesian to monetarist policies that gave priority to economic goals (Mizen, 2004), policy frameworks increasingly sought to identify a causal chain linking young people’s characteristics, educational credentials, attitudes and skills with employment outcomes. In this new policy context, research funding was directed to a narrow conception of youth transitions, away from cultural considerations, and many of the funded studies sought to identify ‘patterns of inclusion and exclusion, identifying winners and losers and showing how various bridges and barriers might impact on pathways’ (Furlong, 2015, p. 18). While these were worthy topics, they tended to view young people exclusively through an economic lens, giving priority to their movement through education and into employment, paying less attention to the way in which engagement in education and work are supported by a web of relationships with family, socio-economic status, location and wellbeing, and that historical processes are also reflected in the present. The focus on causal chains also turned the focus onto young people’s deficits and failures, and away from the politics of positioning youth as bearers of precarity in neoliberal economies. This narrow focus on the contemporary pathways and transitions of young people represented a break with earlier youth studies (such as Connell et  al., 1957, 1975; Hollingshead, 1949; Thrasher, 1927) that sought to understand young people’s lives in the context of their families, class relations, the nature of their educational programs, their leisure and peer relationships, and that sought young people’s views on their lives. Once again, youth was positioned as a threat to national interests, unless they conformed to prescribed patterns of transition. The identification of the marginalised and excluded, those at risk and the worthy and unworthy (of social security support) became a new frontier of measurement (France, 2008). The question of belonging, through the lens of transitions was also narrowed, to categorise young people as economic units, who belonged in education and work.

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The evidence of ‘failed’ transitions of young people into work also led to a critical analysis of the failure of the state to recognise young people’s situation. In the face of rising youth unemployment in Canada, Bibby and Posterski’s (1985) study of 3000 young Canadians aged 15–19 invoked ‘the uniqueness of the times’ (1985, p. 175) seeing in the rising unemployment levels for young people the seeds of conflict between young people and older people (foreshadowing later arguments about youth as a class). The authors describe these young people as ‘Canada’s emerging generation. It is coming of age at a period in history of unequalled scientific and technological progress, a period Orwell and Huxley envisioned would be characterised by revolutionary changes in values, relationships and family structures’ (Bibby & Posterski, 1985, p.  175). Like Connell et al. (1975) Bibby and Posterski argued that young people were not given roles that enabled them to really contribute meaningfully to society (1985, p. xvii). Bibby and Posterski conclude somewhat pessimistically that in this climate ‘few young people survive youth without emotional and psychological damage’ (1985, p.  191), highlighting the potentially damaging effects of institutional and societal processes that fail to recognise new ways of belonging by young people. By the early 1990s, social change was also reflected in the youth subcultural strand of youth sociology. The rise in youth unemployment and the increasing precarity of work (Furlong et al., 2017) meant that youth subcultures were more diverse and less clearly related to class-based resistance or affiliation (Redhead, 1993), leading to a shift to ‘post-subcultural’ theory. This shift also responded to criticism of the early work of the CCCS, that it tended to focus on semiotic analysis of text and overlooked the voices of young people (Bennett, 2015, p. 778). Bennett (2015) argues that this shift is exemplified by Muggleton (2000), who argued that style (fashion and music) had become more individualistic, as young people chose the elements of style that reflected their aesthetic taste from an expanding array of consumer items. Bennett suggests that in this context, young people ‘inscribe meanings in ways that codify objects of consumption as purposive resources in the creation of identities – both individual and collective – and the necessary boundary work to maintain distinctions necessary to forms of belonging’ (Bennett, 2015, p. 779). In seeking to understand how young people’s cultural practices are related to shifts in the ‘cultural terrains of contemporary societies’ post-subcultural youth sociologists explored the work that young people do to belong in

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increasingly globalised, fragmented and pluralised societies, in which they are only (officially) recognised as human capital for economic purposes. For example, Nayak’s (2003) study of race, place and globalisation in the North East of England sought to understand new subcultural responses to global change and economic restructuring. He argues that economic and cultural changes are entwined for young people, and explores how ‘Geordies’, ‘Charvers’ and ‘Wannabes’ refigure meanings of ethnicity, race, class and local identities to find places of belonging in the context of global youth cultures and the precarity of postindustrialism. The interrelationship between structural conditions and change and young people’s aspirations and strategies for life was also the focus of analysis drawing on the concept of social generation. Using longitudinal research in Canada and Australia that spanned the early 1990s and 2000s, Andres, Wyn, Woodman and Cuervo (Andres & Wyn, 2010; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Woodman & Wyn, 2015; Wyn & Woodman, 2006), drew on a social generations framework to explore how contemporary conditions have changed how young people are positioned in society, and analyse how young people draw on both cultural and material resources to navigate their situation. As Woodman and Wyn (2015) argue, one of the distinctive features impacting on contemporary youth is the emergence of youth transition regimes, brought into being by normative and institutionally-­ sanctioned trajectories that are governed by government policies and social welfare measures, informed by neoliberal ideologies. Under these regimes, young people are categorised according to institutional transition points and statuses, such as the completion of secondary education or tertiary education and the entry into full-time employment. The idea of youth transition regimes captures the emergence of normative trajectories that transcend local and national boundaries, creating a common generational experience. The Life Patterns longitudinal study of Australian youth has shown how these regimes impact in different ways on young people, such as young people from rural areas (Cuervo & Wyn, 2012) and young women (Wyn et al., 2017), and analyses how young people develop strategies to manage their lives under these conditions, and how inequalities are reinvented and reproduced over time (Andres & Wyn, 2010). Their use of a social generations framework was informed by a desire to move beyond the tendency for transitions approaches to categorise youth, to normalise particular trajectories and to focus on ‘at risk’ youth as the bearers of problematic transitions that were beyond their control. This

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framework was employed to re-vitalise the relational dimension evident in earlier youth studies, focusing on the complex forces that interpellate personal biographies (and trajectories) and structural conditions. Far from being a ‘celebration’ of youth subjectivities (as proponents of a political economy approach have argued), this work attempted to analyse multiple dimensions of belonging: the meanings that young people give to social conditions, how they navigate them in order to ‘belong’ to their generation, and how their belonging is positioned by the politics of late capitalism. At the same time, the critical approach to youth transitions foreshadowed by Bibby and Posterski (1985) was harnessed through the explicit use of theories of political economy. Framing the question of belonging from a political economy perspective draws on the ‘big picture’. As Kelly (2018) comments in his contribution to debate about the political economy of youth, changes in the nature of capitalism command an approach that can account for the globalising nature of capitalism, as it is being reconfigured by ‘the Anthropocene, bio-genetics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things’, changes so significant that they can be described as ‘the Third Industrial Revolution’ (Kelly, 2018, p. 1283). A political economy approach is also espoused by Bessant et al. (2017), Côté (2014), and Sukarieh and Tannock (2016). However, rather than simply ‘chastising’ the state for failing to recognise how young people were being ‘failed’, as Bibby and Posterski did, these authors focus on ‘the youth problem’ as a political strategy by neoliberal governments. Sukarieh and Tannock argue that youth sociology to date has not given enough attention to how ‘individuals and groups come to be constituted as ‘youth’ in the first instance … analysing the continuously changing significance of youth as an identity, social category and ideology, in relation to the broader contexts of local, national and global culture, society, politics and economy’ (2016, p. 1283). In advocating an approach that looks ‘outward’ and away from the idea that youth is a problem to be fixed, Sukarieh and Tannock advocate for analysis of ‘the ways in which ideological claims about youth and young people can be used by elites to produce increased precarity throughout the labour market, creating a social problem that affects workers of all ages and life stages, not just young people themselves’ (2016, p. 1285). They highlight the way in which youth has moved to the centre of global policy and public media debates, linked to the spread of neoliberal forms of capitalism. Advancing a political economic approach, Bessant et al. (2017), drawing on research from France, Spain, the UK, USA and Australia, argue

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that proponents and critics of a political economy approach to the sociology of youth rely on a ‘substantialist’ framing of reality, rather than an aggregation of processes. They argue for a ‘relationist’ account, invoking the work of Bourdieu. This they do by outlining a political economy of generations, which they use to propose the development of an ‘intergenerational contract’ that can ‘promote intergenerational fairness’ (Bessant et al., 2017, pp. 8–9). The explicit use of a relational framework by Bessant et al. (2017) has strong synergies with the question of how young people belong. Their use of a generations framework shifts the ground from categorising youth as a class based on age, as Côté (2014) advocates, to seeing generational relations as a way of illuminating how ‘the neoliberal zeitgeist’ of those born since the 1980s is a response to ‘unique and unsettling combinations of events, political ideas and policy practices’ (Bessant et al., 2017, p. 52). Bessant et al. (2017, p. 42) move the debate away from ‘things’ (such as age or class categories) as a frame of reference to a frame that identifies relations and processes. By understanding how young people ‘belong’ to their generation, following Bessant et al.’s (2017) argument, it is possible to understand how significant events since the 1980s have shaped the lives of young people in uneven ways. This generational ‘belonging’ is nuanced and complex, according to Bessant et al., ranging across the positioning of young people within policy discourses (e.g. as dependent ‘child’ or ‘adolescent’ and within human capital theory, with its broken promises); the increase in inequality amongst young people; the reshaping of identities, sensibilities and aspirations through digital technologies; and in complex responses by young people that include accommodations to neoliberalism as well as opposition to the status quo (Bessant et al., 2017, p. 51). Their take on the concept of generations has a practical tone, proposing the idea of an ‘intergenerational contract’ that would work to create a moral frame for policy formation that would promote a just society and a good life. In a different way, ‘the big picture’ is also the focus for Furlong et al. (2017), seeking to move beyond a focus on (and preoccupation with) the present. Furlong et al. ask ‘how did it come to be that precarious working is the new “normality” for youth and other groups?’ (Furlong et al., 2017, pp.  10–11). Drawing on the concept of sociogenesis (Elias, 2006) as a methodology to analyse the longer-term processes of change and transformation to youth labour markets in the UK, Denmark and Germany, Furlong et al. also emphasise the necessity of a relational analysis, seeking to understand how different elements are interrelated and to see the

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bigger picture of chains of interdependence. They describe the transformations of work across the last century as involving deliberate and premeditated acts by the state (or ‘civilising offensives’ following Elias), to ensure that individuals work in ways deemed to be acceptable. Focusing only on the experience of precarious work in the present can unintentionally give the impression that the present is separate from the past. Introducing a temporal element shows how current forms of employment and employment insecurity are the consequences of long-term processes of transformation. Focusing on labour markets, Furlong et  al. (2017), draw on the concept of liminality to describe the ambiguous social role of young people, acknowledging that young people belong in a marginal way to labour markets, and that their links to labour markets are poorly-defined. They conclude that the insecurities faced by young people today have their roots in the 1970s, linked to the emerging neoliberal project in Western countries. This analysis, like the political economic work of others referred to in this chapter, makes it clear that the ‘issues’ of youth unemployment, under-employment and precarious employment are not new, they are longstanding and are not amenable to short-term fixes. While Furlong et  al. recognise that young people have a range of responses to precarious labour markets, including shifting away from material culture, they suggest that the answer lies in recognising the impossibility of every person gaining a livelihood through paid work and providing all citizens with a living allowance that they would supplement with employment (Furlong et al., 2017, p. 105).

What Did Concepts of Belonging Do in Youth Studies Historically? This historical review of youth sociology reveals the interwoven nature of social change with the recurring question of how young people belong. Historically, concerns about young people’s belonging have been mobilised around notions of nationhood, social change and adolescent development, but the analysis in this chapter shows that although the question of belonging is central, the framing of this question has changed across time, shaping the field of youth studies. Contemporary concerns about this question have moved a long way from questions of nationhood and social control, to acknowledging that the impact of the ‘third industrial revolution’ (Kelly, 2018) requires new conceptual tools to account for youth,

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and to build new policies and political compacts that will do more than simply stop gaps or further vilify non-conforming young people. Our review also shows how the question of how young people belong is highly multifaceted, because it requires acknowledgement of the ways in which governments control and recognise the place of young people, as well as the ways in which young people themselves navigate their circumstances. Focusing on the question of how young people belong, across very different registers, this chapter shows how anxieties about belonging are consistently evoked by the problematic nature of youth as ‘liminal’ citizens, whose place in society is unclear, partial and emerging. Youth studies today is a complex field that reflects the impact of global crises of youth unemployment, new flows of ideas and information using digital communications and a trend for young people to be more mobile than ever  – within and across national boundaries. Until the 1950s, research drew on concepts of belonging from a broad, holistic perspective, galvanising relatively big studies that had the capacity to range across different areas of life (such as Connell et al., 1957) including the broader social and political context. Questions of the future of nationhood were central. From the 1960s through to the 2000s youth studies became an increasingly complex field, seeking to recognise the globalising forces of social change, in which cultures, education and work became increasingly part of global processes and flows. This was evidenced by smaller-scale and short-term studies, which tended to split off into a focus on cultures or transitions, and focussed studies of education, school to work, culture and leisure. While there were exceptions, the field was dominated by research about how young people were creating, participating in and transitioning into a ‘known’ social and political space. By the mid-2000s, it had become apparent that the inequalities that galvanised early youth studies (with a particular focus on class and gender, and to a lesser extent, race) had become less predictable and more varied. Young people were living in contexts that required new forms of engagement with institutions, and new digital technologies offered new ways of relating and communicating. Understanding the situation of young people required an understanding of both the changing nature of structural arrangements and institutional processes and the ways in which these were experienced at a subjective level by young people. This has created an appetite (once again) for more encompassing and holistic research that acknowledges young people’s complex embeddedness in relationships

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that are personal, institutional and political, and that explore the temporal and spatial nature of young people’s belonging. Tracing the genealogy of belonging takes us one step closer to greater conceptual clarity about what the concept of belonging does, can and might do for youth sociology and youth studies. In the next chapter we go into greater depth to interrogate the nature of the different registers of belonging that are evident through an examination of its conceptual underpinnings.

References Amos, V., & Parmar, P. (1981). Resistances and responses: The experiences of black girls in Britain. In A.  McRobbie & T.  McCabe (Eds.), Feminism: An adventure story for girls (pp. 129–152). Routledge. Andres, L., & Wyn, J. (2010). The making of a generation: The children of the 1970s in adulthood. University of Toronto Press. Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through to the twenties. The American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualization: Institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences. Sage. Bennett, A. (2015). Youth and play: Identity, politics and lifestyle. In J. Wyn & H. Cahill (Eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies (pp. 775–788). Springer. Bessant, J., Farthing, R., & Watts, R. (2017). The precarious generation: A political economy of young people. Routledge. Bibby, R. W., & Posterski, D. C. (1985). The emerging generation: An inside look at Canada’s teenagers. Irwin Publishing. Brown, L. (2018). Indigenous young people, disadvantage and the violence of the settler colonial education policy and curriculum. Journal of Sociology, 55(1), 1–18. Chesser, E. S. (1928). Youth: A book for two generations. Methuen & Co. Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Free Press of Glencoe. Cohen, A., & Short, J. (1958). Research in delinquent subcultures. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 20–37. Coleman, J. (1961). The adolescent society: The social life of the teenager and its impact on education. Free Press of Glencoe. Connell, W.  F., Francis, E.  P., & Skilbeck, E.  E. (1957). Growing up in an Australian City: A study of adolescents in Sydney. Australian Council for Educational Research. Connell, W.  F., Stroodband, R.  E., Sinclair, K.  E., Connell, R.  W., & Rogers, K. W. (1975). 12 to 20: Studies of city youth. Hicks, Smith and Sons.

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Côté, J. E. (2014). Towards a new political economy of youth. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(4), 527–543. Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2012). Young people making it work: Continuity and change in rural places. Melbourne University Publishing. Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2014). Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(7), 901–915. Dimitriadis, G. (2006). The situation complex: Revisiting Frederic Thrasher’s the gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Cultural Studies  – Critical Methodologies, 6(3), 335–353. Elias, N. (2006). The collected works of Norbert Elias. University College Dublin Press. Elkin, A.  P. (1929). The practical value of anthropology. Morpeth Review, 1(7), 23–33. Elkin, A.  P. (1937). Native education, with special reference to the Australian Aborigines. Oceania, 7(4), 459–501. Erikson, E. H. (1965). Childhood and society. Penguin Books. France, A. (2008). Risk factor analysis and the youth question. Journal of Youth Studies, 11(1), 1–15. France, A. (2016). Understanding youth in the global economic crisis. Policy Press. Friedenberg, E. Z. (1959). The vanishing adolescent. Dell Publishing, Inc. Furlong, A. (2015). Transitions, cultures and identities: What is youth studies? In D. Woodman & A. Bennett (Eds.), Youth cultures, transitions and generations: Bridging the gap in youth research (pp. 16–27). Palgrave Macmillan. Furlong, A., & Cartmel, F. (2007). Young people and social change: New perspectives. McGraw-Hill Education. Furlong, A., Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2011). Changing times, changing perspectives: Reconciling ‘transition’ and ‘cultural’ perspectives on youth and young adulthood. Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 355–370. Furlong, A., Goodwin, J., O’Connor, H., Hadfield, S., Hall, S., Lowden, K., & Plugor, R. (2017). Young people in the labour market: Past, present, future. Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1987). There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. Hutchinson. Goldin, C. (2005). From the Valley to the Summit: A brief history of the quiet revolution that transformed women’s work. Regional Review, 14(3), 5–12. Hall, G. S. (1904). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relation to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. D. Appleton and Company. Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1976). Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. Routledge. Hollingshead, A. B. (1949). Elmtown’s youth: The impact of social classes on adolescents. Wiley.

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Jones, S. (1988). Black culture, white youth: The reggae tradition from JA to UK. Macmillan. Kelly, P. (2018). Three notes on a political economy of youth. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(10), 1283–1304. Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age!: A cultural construction of adolescence. Routledge. Mannheim, K. (1952). Essays in the sociology of knowledge. Routledge. McGregor, R. (1993). The concept of primitivity in the early writings of A. P. Elkin. Aboriginal History, 17(2), 95–104. McRobbie, A., & Garber, J. (1977). Girls and subcultures. In S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds.), Resistance through ritual: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (pp. 177–188). Routledge. Mizen, P. (2004). The changing state of youth. Palgrave Macmillan. Moreton-Robinson, A. M. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonising society. In S.  Ahmed, C.  Castañeda, A. Fortier, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Uprootings/regrounding: Questions of home and migration (pp. 23–40). Berg Publishing. Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside subculture: The postmodern meaning of style. Berg. Musgrove, F. (1964). Youth and the social order. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nayak, A. (2003). Race, place and globalisation: Youth cultures in a changing world. Berg. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. Basic Books. Redhead, S. (1993). The end of the end-of-the-century party. In S.  Redhead (Ed.), Rave off: Politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture. Avebury. Reed, B. H. (1950). 80,000 adolescents. George Allen & Unwin. Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2016). On the political economy of youth: A comment. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(9), 1281–1289. Thrasher, F. (1927). The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Routledge. Woodman, D., & Bennett, A. (Eds.). (2015). Youth cultures, transitions and generations: Bridging the gap in youth research. Palgrave Macmillan. Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2015). Youth and generation: Change and inequality in the lives of young people. Sage. Wyn, J., & Woodman, D. (2006). Generation, youth and social change in Australia. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(5), 495–514. Wyn, J., Cuervo, H., Crofts, J., & Woodman, D. (2017). Gendered transitions from education to work: The mysterious relationship between the fields of education and work. Journal of Sociology, 53(2), 492–596.

CHAPTER 3

Conceptual Threads

Introduction This chapter discusses contemporary preoccupations with the concept of belonging to explore what concepts of belonging do. While the question of how young people belong has been a driving force in the historical development of youth studies, an explicit focus on belonging is a relatively recent development. We keep in mind that: The focus of contemporary youth research is shaped not only by changes in the experience of youth, but also by the conceptual resources deployed and by the history of past research, or at least the way that this history is told in the present. (Furlong et al., 2011, p. 359)

Consistent with the observation that developments in youth studies were influenced by significant changes in the experience of youth (and of society), it has almost become a trope to characterise the contemporary situation for young people as one of instability, precarity and heightened insecurity. Nonetheless, it is important, even crucial, to acknowledge the changing intersections between societal transformations and the experience of youth. This is core business for youth studies. Contemporary societal transformations include increased levels of population mobility associated with conflict, climate change and urbanisation; the widespread © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_3

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use of digital technologies, enabling new forms of relationship between people, and between people and institutions; the blurring the boundaries of place and time; and a redefinition of economic productivity and social resources, experienced by young people in the form of widespread precarious work, underemployment and unemployment; a redefinition made more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic. As Lähdesmäki et al. (2016) point out in their review of the concept of belonging, the concept tends to be associated with groups seen as vulnerable, disadvantaged or problematic. In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) we show how it is the young who are invariably positioned as a threat to the stability of traditional ways and a problem for the future in times of social change and upheaval. Lähdesmäki et al. conclude that concepts of belonging have become increasingly popular since the 2000s as ‘scholars seek to emphasize the fluid, unfixed, and processual nature of diverse social and spatial attachments’ that characterise contemporary life (Lähdesmäki et al., 2016, p. 234). This point is reiterated by Noble (2020, p. xvii) who comments ‘In an increasingly globalised world, an array of forces has intensified the anxious politics of belonging’ – and young people are at the forefront of this politics. Youth studies confront social realities and processes in which the place of young people is literally and metaphorically fluid and opaque. In this context, struggles to belong take on a heightened relevance in individual and collective contexts. The concept of belonging enables a focus on the labour of these struggles, and the work that people and groups are doing to make their lives. At the same time, it enables a focus on the ways in which institutions and states also struggle to define, constrain and enable forms of belonging. This point is made by Wright who, in exploring what she calls ‘the puzzle that is belonging’ (2015, p. 391), argues that the multiple meanings and uses of the concept of belonging, as well as its contradictions and inconsistencies, can be seen as a strength. It is therefore no surprise that the concept of belonging has taken an increasingly explicit focus in youth studies. As the sections below unfold, they provide a critical analysis of concepts of belonging to underpin the fundamental question posed in this book: what work do concepts of belonging do in youth studies? To understand the key elements of concepts of belonging that have become relevant to the study of young people’s lives, we firstly discuss the foundational work on the concept of belonging of Yuval-Davis. We argue that her work exemplifies the use of its relational register, demonstrating

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how both the micro and macro dimensions of belonging are interrelated; has promoted the ‘everyday’ as a significant element for analysis; and has shown how the concept of belonging can be used to operationalise broader theoretical positions. Next we provide a critical review of three key, interrelated elements in the use of the concept of belonging that are especially prominent in youth studies: a focus on the everyday; the relationship between identity and belonging, and ontologies of belonging. Youth studies reflects a turn to ‘the everyday’; to the micro-practices by individuals, groups and institutions that accrue over time and shape broader societal patterns, a turn for which the concept of belonging is central. Our review also shows how the concept of belonging, which seems at times to be a proxy for the concept of identity, does not simply represent an elision of the concepts of belonging and identity. In practice, concepts of belonging anchor the analysis of identity formation and performance to wider social processes, holding on to the constant intersection between individual biographies and historical location. Finally, we discuss ontologies of belonging, which shift the focus from the everyday to forms of belonging that are anchored in a people’s collective, historical relationship with ancestors and the land through a spiritual connection: ontologies of belonging that transcend the binaries of subject/object, human/non-human.

The Concept of Belonging as Employed by Yuval-Davis We begin with a short review of the influence of Yuval-Davis’ work on concepts of belonging, reflecting the debt that contemporary uses of the concept owe to her work (Yuval-Davis, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2016). Her concept of belonging is multifaceted. Yuval-Davis argues that belonging is composed of three elements: social location, identification and emotional attachment and ethics and political values (Yuval-Davis, 2006). This conception of belonging links the sociology of identity and emotion with the sociology of power, incorporating an ethics of care to conceptualise the self as being anchored in interactions with others. Yuval-Davis argues that these elements are interrelated and cannot be reduced to each other, and that belonging is also about the ways in which ‘social locations and constructions of individual and collective identities and attachments … are assessed and valued by self and others’ (2016, p. 371).

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Yuval-Davis distinguishes between belonging and the politics of belonging. Thus, while her work has had a significant influence on thinking about belonging in general, she has largely been concerned with contestations of belonging as political projects, such as citizenship and the national projects of states and nations, migration, religion, indigeneity and feminism (2016, pp. 371–372). However, as we explore in more detail below, the distinction between belonging as an affective, individual orientation and belonging as a political practice is not clear. Lähdesmäki et al. (2016) conclude that Antonsich (2010) is right to see subjective and political aspects of belonging as intertwined. This is because belonging is socially constituted, in specific historical ways, and the labour expended by individuals to belong is always connected to wider social and political realities. This ambiguity may be why Yuval-Davis’ work, with its basis in a multilayered notion of belonging, has underpinned so much contemporary work. We focus on three ways in which Yuval-Davis’ work has influenced thinking about the concept of belonging employed in youth studies. Firstly, Yuval-Davis’ work has advanced thinking about the concept of belonging as a relational concept; of belonging as a process, dynamic and changing, not a static category. For example: Even in its most stable ‘primordial’ forms, belonging is always a dynamic process, not a reified fixity – the latter is only a naturalized construction of particular hegemonic forms of power relations. Belonging is usually multi-­ layered and – to use geographical jargon – multi-scale (Antonsich, 2010) or multiterritorial (Hannerz, 2002). (Yuval-Davis, 2016, p. 370)

This means that for her, the concept of belonging is fundamentally about practices – specific to place and time. For Yuval-Davis, the politics of belonging enables a focus on key social and political dynamics that are influenced by global processes but that are experienced in particular ways in specific locations and historical moments. The concept of belonging is a way of historically and socially locating broader dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that are theorised at a more general level by both traditional and contemporary social scientists. Her use of the concept of belonging enables her to analyse social and political processes not as monolithic or homogenous processes, but as complex dynamics that can only be understood through analysis of specific (empirical) cases. This insistence on exploring specific instances of social and political processes is key to Yuval-Davis’ use of a wide range of theorists such as

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Foucault (1979), Bourdieu (1990), Freire (1970) and Nussbaum (2001). For example, referring to Bourdieu, she says: Bourdieu’s theory of practice ‘in which there is constant interaction between the individual symbolically structured and socially inculcated dispositions of individual agents which he calls habitus and the social field which is structured by symbolically mediated relations of domination’ offers an ‘empirically sensitive analytical framework for decoding impersonal relations of power’ (Yuval-Davis, 2016, p. 368). Secondly, while engaging with the way in which the politics of belonging is connected to the domains of global and national processes, Yuval-­ Davis has tended to focus on how these are evidenced through everyday practices. This empirical focus on everyday acts and the ways in which power and emotions intersect ‘along intersectional glocal locations’ (2016, p. 378) is reflected in much of the research on belonging. The focus on the everyday further expands our understanding of how belonging is situated, specific to place and time and is multidimensional. Specifically, belonging occurs across many dimensions of life: in social media, families, with friends, workplaces and institutions. Analysing how everyday practices constitute struggles to belong brings into focus the relational dimensions of belonging involving ‘complex circuits of recognition’ (Noble, 2020, p. xvii). As Noble comments ‘this means that belonging can be as oppressive as it is enabling’ – not simply inhabited but contested, ‘paradoxical and ambivalent’ (2020, p. xviii). Thirdly, while it relates to ‘big’ issues of inequality, marginalisation and the politics of countering domination, Yuval-Davis’ use of the concept of belonging enables her to pay attention to the changing and fluid nature of social processes. The concept of belonging makes visible both the everyday acts by individuals and groups and the dynamics of political processes enacted by the state and institutions that constitute boundary maintenance and resistance. Yuval-Davis argues that ‘we cannot homogenize the ways any political project or claimings affect people who are differentially located within the same boundaries of belonging’ (2016, p.  369). Importantly, although Yuval-Davis’ approach to the politics of belonging recognises that belonging can be oppressive and negative – it can be struggled against as well as for – this is not a dimension that youth researchers have tended to take up. As Lähdesmäki et al. (2016, p. 242) point out, the literature reflects ‘a certain normativeness of belonging as a desirable end-­ destination and non-belonging as inherently negative’, which should be

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questioned. We do this work in the chapters on policy frames, transitions and participation, citizenship, and mobility. Yuval-Davis’ work on belonging illustrates its analytical fluidity and responsiveness to contemporary social dynamics. Her many writings show the importance of the concept of belonging as a way of appreciating the nature of specific (historical and geographic) power dynamics, following Foucault, that can tend to be conceptualised somewhat ‘monolithically’ (Yuval-Davis, 2016, p. 368) and the specific ways in which power is both embodied and socially constituted, following Bourdieu. As Yuval-Davis has been at pains to point out, one of the most important affordances of the concept of belonging is that it is focused on specific instances in which the multiple axes and facets of power that are in play for people who are ‘differentially located within the same boundaries of belonging’ (Yuval-­ Davis, 2016, p. 369) can be made visible. This is illustrated by Beck and Levy (2013) who look to the concept of belonging to escape the limitations of a national ontology and to highlight the dialectical relationship between the local and global in people’s experiences of citizenship. They argue that in a context of continuous exposure, perception and interpretation of world risk society, belonging transcends national and international boundaries and is neither a freedom nor a choice. Instead, they argue that belonging is constructed on particular cultural and political bases and the choices they make possible, including new collective identifications. An example of new collective identifications is found in the research on boundary-making and social differentiation in urban spaces which Savage et  al. (2005) explore using the concepts of ‘elective belonging’ and Watt (2009) using ‘selective belonging’. Similarly, Vieten (2006) has analysed the work of boundary maintenance between local residents and migrant/refugee youth seeking asylum in new countries. Indeed, these and other studies make the point of highlighting how belonging continues to be constructed as struggles for social differentiation and identification, which are constitutive of individuals’ and social groups’ sense of ownership and attachment against the moral contentions of those newly arrived. Yuval-Davis’ point that belonging exists across multiple dimensions at the same time is explored by Bell and de-Shalit (2011), who argue that many of the world’s largest cities offer a form of belonging that transcends the nation state. Their argument that large cities foster forms of global connectedness and identification that may at times be in stark contrast to the national boundary-maintaining projects of governments highlights

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the ways in which state-based definitions of belonging can contrast to community experiences. An expanded discussion of this complexity is presented in Chap. 6 (Citizenship). In Yuval-Davis’ work we see how concepts of belonging can give substance to struggles for living by young people, understanding belonging as a political resource for social actors. It enables us to understand how belonging for young people is situationally and discursively produced and what ‘micro and macro conditions make a specific social construct possible and credible’ (Colombo, 2010, p. 458). In the following sections we take a closer look at the ways in which the concept of belonging has advanced thinking in three key interrelated areas related to youth sociology: the everyday, identity and ontologies of belonging.

Belonging and the Everyday While the political dimensions of belonging have tended to be less of a focus in youth studies, other dimensions of belonging have been prominent. These include a focus on belonging as an individual or collective experience, based in everyday practices. The focus on the everyday practices that constitute belonging enables social scientists to explore the resources mobilised to do this; the work that individuals and collectivities do to belong as well as the practices engaged by institutions and the state to shape belonging. When conceptualised in this way, the concept enables the exploration of belonging as a type of labour, involving the formation of capabilities by young people – in the context of the practices of inclusion and exclusion of institutions, including families, schools, tertiary institutions, and governments. For example, drawing on Butler’s concept of performance and performativity (Butler, 1993, 1997), Bell (1999) argues that belonging is essentially an everyday performance, involving relatively ordinary practices (such as texting friends and family; sharing meals) as well as ritualised practices (for example, religious or celebratory performances), that involve both performance and recognition of that performance. In this sense, belonging is constructed through self-conscious and deliberate performances and through unreflexive processes and actions of performativity by individuals in their social networks and physical places. For instance, in her study of formations of belonging for migrants in London and Jerusalem, Fenster (2005) describes how ordinary practices such as walking or

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cooking are part of experiences that construct belonging. She explains how daily walking practices, which were gendered (e.g. taking care of children, shopping), provided participants with feelings of being in place. Other individuals, such as one young adult living in Jerusalem, associated her sense of belonging to ‘food and spices’ that formed part of the ingredients of her ritual of cooking that connected her to her Canadian-Indian heritage. Here constructions of belonging take up Butler’s (1993, 1997) approach revealing the performative aspect of belonging, including the binding power of the enacted practice that constitutes feelings of membership, to challenge contemporary reifications of uprootedness for migrants (see also Fortier, 1999). The idea of belonging as an everyday performance has been adopted in youth studies scholarship to illustrate how young people actively work to find spaces and places of membership and identification. Examples of this include Bengtsson and Ravn’s (2018) study of Danish youth risk-taking activities that are an integral and routinised part of youth everyday life, Feixa et al.’s (2020) description of Latin American young people’s participation in street gangs as a process of social identification to counteract experiences of social exclusion and marginalisation, and Fu’s (2018) study of formations of belonging of Chinese youth internet users through an interrogation of their online identity and citizenship practices. Robards and Lincoln (2020) show how everyday, performative acts of belonging are made visible on Facebook. Their analysis of young people’s engagement with Facebook reveals the complexities of performing family life (for example) on this form of social media. For example, Facebook can be a place to curate performances that keep people connected and informed about important events, such as graduations, birthdays and weddings. Robards and Lincoln’s analysis of belonging performances in families on Facebook reveals the work that goes into decisions about what to post, including a consideration of the impact of ‘context collapse’ (the problem of sharing information that is appropriate for one set of relationships, but not another). This insight into the performative aspect of belonging has the potential to add depth to analyses of young people’s struggles to belong in a range of settings; to provide insights into the significance of everyday practices and places for young people and to contribute to an understanding of the contradictions and multiple layers of belonging for individuals. In particular, the performative dimension highlights the relational nature of belonging: to belong requires recognition.

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For example, Butler (2020) explores the work done by children to achieve recognition of their ‘legitimacy and competence’ in a rural town in Australia that is home to newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, as well as to more established immigrants from Southern Europe and the Pacific. She shows how children (aged 8–13) mobilised the resources available to them to engage in performances of activities and practices that were valued by the locals. These included performances of ‘moral worth’ (working for pocket money) that are recognisable to and valued by rural families; or performances that reveal knowledge of popular culture (toys, movie stars, TV shows). Butler calls these ‘tokens of dignity’ that children who do not belong through longstanding family connections to the rural community can invoke to be recognised. The everyday register of these performances of belonging is epitomised in the following cameo provided by (Butler, 2020, p. 154) in which Akat (a newly arrived immigrant) and a classmate Kayla from a white/Anglo background developed a game in which: ‘You have to bring a boy and a girl together to get married’, Kayla explained as they lined up outside the art classroom, ‘and then they have to break up. There’s a disaster’. Both Kayla and Akat burst out laughing at this description of their gameshow, an infusion of cultural influences with a nod towards American-influenced reality TV, the emotive language of Australia’s news culture and the everyday circumstances of family life in Riverstone.

The focus on everyday practices has underpinned consideration of belonging as a product of relationships between people, place, mobility and temporality. An example is Duff’s (2010) analysis of the role of affect and practice in the production of place. Duff focuses on how affect constitutes place, using concepts of thick and thin places (Casey, 2001) to trace the relationship between affect, place and time. ‘Thick’ places accrue over time through everyday ‘imbrications of affect, habit, and meaning, inviting the self’s “concernful absorption” in place while presenting opportunities for “personal enrichment” and a deepening of affective experience’ (Casey, 2001, pp. 684–685, quoted in Duff, 2010, p. 882). As Duff explains (drawing on Spinoza 1989), the ‘lived and affective experience of place is critical if the notion of place is to retain any sense at all’ (2010, p.  885). He argues that a relational understanding of place including the body/subject brings to the fore the ‘constitutive coingredience’ of place, so that self and place are enveloped (2010, p.  885). In

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other words, this work explores the ways in which everyday encounters that include both human and non-human actors, transform individuals’ affective capacities. This approach further compels researchers to understand the layering of experiences of place over time, because it is this layering through historical connection and/or everyday practices over time that creates the ‘thickness’ that Casey (2001) argues is associated with belonging. Temporality, in a different way, as a key element in the everyday practices of belonging is invoked in Cahill and Leccardi’s (2020) exploration of the work young adults do to make life meaningful – to belong to their generation – in a context of widespread economic and ontological precarity. The latter is exacerbated by their perceptions of a global future characterised by certainty – the certainty of a damaged world, negatively impacted by climate change, by accelerating technological change and the failure of governments to act in the interests of the planet (Chesters et al., 2020). They note that the mismatch between past expectations (based on the lives of previous generations), present realities and unpredictable futures produced feelings of anxiety and powerlessness. For many, being unable to obtain meaningful and stable work, despite investing years in educational qualifications, disrupted their expectations of what adulthood could hold for them. Cahill and Leccardi argue that, in this context, contemporary generations of young adults are engaging in everyday forms of ‘resilience’ that places primacy on the present: The everyday thus becomes the most appropriate ground for innovation by social actors, as well as the existential environment in which a reassuring, protective order can be built through use of the micro routines and the short term cyclicity and that can be fashioned into everyday life. Young adults, as shown in this study, exert resilience through mundane micro-­ practices, which become a form of daily creative social and embodied improvisation (what de Certeau 1984, calls ‘tactics’): drinking alcohol, playing video games, having a laugh, venting with friends, planning for time off, taking half an hour in the sun, blocking a Facebook feed. (Cahill & Leccardi, 2020, p. 83)

Cahill and Leccardi argue that ‘crafting an intelligible life’ is made possible through the conscious shaping of ‘subjectivities inside new temporalities’ (2020, p.  86). Belonging, from this perspective, involves the exercise of considerable existential labour.

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Our brief consideration of the significance of the everyday register of contemporary concepts of belonging will be recognisable to many youth researchers, whose work has contributed to a deeper understanding of young people’s struggles to belong in specific places and times. So too will the consideration of the relationship between belonging and identity, that also constitutes part of the conceptual toolkit for much contemporary youth sociology.

Belonging and Identity Much of the work involved in everyday practices of belonging can be seen through the lens of identity work. When identity is framed through a relational lens (not as a developmental task or category, but as an ongoing process involving practices and recognition), it overlaps considerably with the way in which the concept of belonging is used. This is noted by Lähdesmäki et  al. (2016, p.  241), who point out that conceptions of belonging and of identity share the characterisation of ‘multiple, shifting, simultaneous, temporary (or even momentary), spatial, and located in – or oriented toward – multiple locations that are also approached at times as scalar and temporary.’ The elision of the concepts of identity and belonging is almost a hallmark of contemporary youth studies, partly reflecting the ambiguity of the concept of belonging, but also reflecting its multi-dimensional nature. This complexity is to some extent broached in debates about the usefulness of Yuval-Davis’ (2006) distinction between belonging as social location, identification and emotional attachment and ethics and political values and Antonsich’s (2010) claim that the political and subjective aspects of belonging are intertwined. A closer look at how the concepts of identity and belonging are utilised reveals a complex interrelationship in which both concepts do distinctive work. Specifically, as some of the examples in this discussion show, the concept of belonging enables the concept of identity to be seen as something more than individual – it links individual subjectivities and struggles for meaning and belonging to wider social and political processes of recognition and constraint. Although mobilisations of the concept of belonging focusing on identity are ubiquitous in youth studies (e.g. Habib & Ward, 2019; Tilleczek, 2011), a closer examination shows that the concept of identity is mostly used to provide a deep analysis of the work of subjectivity in which individuals and groups engage. This is illustrated by Cook and Romei’s (2020)

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analysis of the formation of occupation-based identities by young adults. Analysing the experiences of young adults who have ‘stayed in place’ rather than being geographically mobile, they argue that developing a specific, locally-relevant (and recognised) occupational identity is an explicit strategy in which their knowledge of a ‘place’ is seen as a resource to be mobilised. Put simply, young people in their study described the creation of a professional ‘brand’ that locals could recognise and would value. Cook and Romei are at pains to point out that the identity work of the young people they studied should not be seen as limited to their occupations. Here, we see that framing identity work within a belonging approach enables the analysis to link the labour of subjectivity to wider processes. Rather than being elided, the concepts of belonging and identity are more appropriately characterised as ‘partner concepts’, doing slightly different work. The relationship between identity and belonging has what Cook and Romei call ‘significant homology’ with Giddens (1991) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), and is also aligned with Kelly’s (2006, 2016) notion of the entrepreneurial Self, a process of responsibilisation of individuals in a context of neoliberal governance which encourages the project of the self. However, their analysis goes beyond this conceptualisation of the labour of belonging as being simply about the neoliberal project of the self. They argue that although these young people based their strategies on considerations of education and employment opportunities, ‘they were also drawn into dialogue with affective relationships with place’ disrupting ‘the implicit binary distinction between material and immaterial aspects of place’ to interweave material and immaterial factors (Cook & Romei, 2020, p. 100). In this way, the concept of belonging enables the bridging of the subject/object binary to account for human and more-than-human actors, which we explore in more detail in the following section on ontologies of belonging. The relationship between belonging, identity and work is extensively addressed by Farrugia (2021). His study of young workers in a range of Australian regional settings sets out to broaden understandings of young people’s subjectivities (especially in relation to class), by analysing the cultivation of the self as a subject of value to the labour force. His work shows how the identity work that young people do to gain traction in different labour markets is imbued with class relations. His study focuses on the value that young people felt they offered the workforce, showing how young people strive to build work identities ‘of value’, which he calls a

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Post-Fordist work ethic, and how this identity work ‘bleeds’ into other areas of their lives. Farrugia argues that as the traditions and social structures that support identity fragment, work has become vested with the need for personal fulfilment for young people. One of the work subjectivities that Farrugia identifies is the ‘passionate’ worker. This is illustrated by the aspirational views of middle-class young women at age 18, who seek to work in jobs where they feel fulfilled and inspired by the work they do and that allow coherence between their work and non-work lives. These young people were clear that they would accept and hopefully thrive on challenges in the workplace and in personal life, placing a high priority on engagement and enjoyment. These young people, Farrugia argues, were rehearsing a dissolution of the boundaries between work and personal life, seeking to be engaged (passionately) in work that was of wider value. In cultivating this work-life identity, Farrugia notes that these young people accessed a wide range of resources, including education and training, as well as cultural experiences, leisure pursuits and personal connections. Youth scholarship has also focused on the intersection of time and place to examine youth processes of identity formation. For example, using the concepts of nostalgia and memory, Cuervo and Cook (2019) and Colin and Iturrieta Olivares (2020), in Australia and Chile respectively, showed how the past helps to enliven the present to produce rural and urban contemporary youth identities that enable young people to make sense of significant social changes that often contribute to dislocate the self. Other studies have highlighted the production of identities by institutions. For example, Wignall’s (2020) study of young men in The Gambia traces the identities that the YMCA aims to instil in young men, to create desirable, acceptable and respectable ‘whole man’ masculine identities (Wignall, 2020, p.  111). This ethnographic study analyses a program of identity work for young men in the YMCA. For the young men, these programs represented ‘a temporary escape from everyday life, a place to develop their own ambition away from the familial glare and crucially a way of engaging with the increasingly present field of global opportunity’ (Wignall, 2020, p. 119). The concept of belonging in this analysis makes visible the intersections of identity formation within the parameters of the organisation and the wider social, economic and political processes of the young men’s lives. The concept of belonging, which connects individual experiences with social processes, highlights the inherent contradictions ‘that are written into young people’s lives and, in turn, how they are

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written into the spatial, corporate and intimate histories of the YMCA itself as it powers forward into a new era of global prosperity’ (2020, p. 119). The complex ways in which identity and belonging are intertwined is also explored by Thomas et  al. (2020) in their study of belonging for migrant youth in Oslo, Norway. Here too, identity is associated with an individual’s personal affective identification, and belonging with the wider social dynamics within which individuals do identity work. Thomas et al. show how the Norwegian concept of ‘imagined sameness’ fails to recognise multicultural youth as Norwegian. This is illustrated by Juan, a 17-year old male born in Norway to parents from the Dominican Republic, who says: Don’t get me wrong. I love Norway and had plans to represent the country in athletics when this Norwegian woman, a total stranger, came up to me and told me that I would never be accepted as a Norwegian. (Thomas et al., 2020, p. 137)

Similarly, Aisa, an 18 year-old female says: I was born and brought up in Norway. Despite this, Norwegians still say that I am a foreigner (utlending). When I am on holiday in Pakistan, the Pakistanis consider me a foreigner from Norway. I am a bit confused. (Thomas et al., 2020, p. 136)

These examples show how belonging always examines the dynamic between individual identities and wider social processes. This dynamic is examined in depth in this book in Chaps. 6 (Citizenship) and 7 (Mobilities). They also highlight the tendency for the use of the concepts of identity and belonging to frame analyses of social exclusion and inclusion. This is to the forefront in Sattar’s (2020) discussion of the labour engaged in by aspirational young Pakistani men to improve their situation. The concept of identity is used to highlight the individual hopes, dreams and aspirations of the young men, and the practices they employ (learning in ‘communities of practice’ the ways of the dominant classes they wish to belong to). The concept of belonging puts a wider frame around their individual lives, revealing that their strategies fail to result in recognition by dominant groups. Making sense of the failure of the labour they expended to

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be seen as ‘competent’ to deliver employment outcomes for them, Sattar argues, requires a ‘politics of belonging’. In the final section of this chapter we turn from conceptions of belonging that are largely focused on epistemological considerations (what can be known) and largely based on individual experiences, to those that focus on ontological considerations (what exists and what matter does) to explore ontologies of belonging.

Ontologies of Belonging Ontological considerations bring the very nature of being, the relationship between human and more-than-human, and the interrelationship of belonging with time and history to the fore. The focus on everyday practices of belonging in youth sociology has tended to overshadow ontological dimensions of belonging, ‘naturalising’ belonging as consisting of everyday individual or collective performative acts (Yuval-Davis, 2016, p. 370). However, ontological considerations of belonging in youth studies have begun to appear, focusing particularly on the way in which place is implicated in belonging, blurring the subject-object binary (as we mention in referring to Cook and Romei (2020) above). We argue that consideration of ontologies of belonging throws new light on the meaning of belonging for individuals and collectivities, bridging individual and collective experiences of belonging, as well as the binary between human and more-than-human actors. Indeed, Wright (2015) argues that understanding belonging requires both an epistemological and ontological lens. This is, she aruges, because belonging cannot be reduced to one single register because it is constituted by the emotional, personal, political and societal. Wright argues that ‘belongings emerge at the intersections of these trajectories as multiple and complicated, mediated by relations of power as well as personal experience and affiliation’ (2015, p. 400). In this section, we draw firstly on the scholarship of Indigenous scholars to look beyond the limits of naturalised conceptions of belonging. The problem with taken-for-granted claims of belonging in the everyday is described by Moreton-Robinson, an Aboriginal woman of the Goenpul tribe, part of the Quandamooka nation on Stradbroke Island in Queensland, Australia, who says: Migrancy and dispossession indelibly mark configurations of belonging, home and place in the postcolonizing nation-state. In the Australian c­ ontext,

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the sense of belonging, home and place enjoyed by the non  Indigenous subject – colonizer/migrant – is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of our rights under international customary law. It is a sense of belonging derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital; and it mobilizes the legend of the pioneer, ‘the battler’, in its self-legitimization. Against this stands the Indigenous sense of belonging, home and place in its incommensurable difference. (Moreton-­ Robinson, 2003, p. 23)

Moreton-Robinson explains the ‘incommensurable difference’ between belonging for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as involving two dimensions. One is the theft of the land. This theft remains unresolved, because colonisation of Australia was inflicted on Indigenous Australians without a treaty which recognised their relationship with the land. Instead, colonisation occurred on the assumption of Terra Nullius. The other is the ontological nature of belonging for Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians are constituted by country – by their land. It is an inalienable relationship to the land that non-Indigenous Australians do not share. This form of belonging is not about individual affect or identification, it is about a collective relationship to the land. As Moreton-­ Robinson explains: Indigenous people’s sense of belonging is derived from an ontological relationship to country derived from the Dreaming, which provides the precedents for what is believed to have occurred in the beginning in the original form of social living created by ancestral beings (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). During the Dreaming, ancestral beings created the land and life and they are tied to particular tracks of country. Knowledge and beliefs tied to the Dreaming inform the present and future. Within this system of beliefs there is scope for interpretation and change by individuals through dreams and their lived experiences. (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 31)

While the particular relationship that Indigenous Australians have with the land is unique, the centrality of the relationship between Indigeneity and the land holds for many Indigenous peoples. For example, Jones and Hoskins (2015), observe that in Indigenous ontologies, the world is not divided into nature/object or culture/subject. Instead, it takes the form of ‘related sociality’ (Jones & Hoskins, 2015, p. 13). They explain that it is common for Māori to talk about a place as themselves (e.g. ‘I am the river and the river is me’), arguing that this is more than a metaphor.

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Objects and places have an active role in determining events within this ontology, based on an understanding of a human-non-human dynamic, and all objects exist in an equal relationship to others. This relationship was recognised in law in New Zealand in 2017 when the Whanganui River was granted the same legal rights as a human being, as the ancestor of the local Māori people. The failure to recognise belonging as connection to the land and to the lives of ancestors, when it occurs on a systematic scale, leads to a politics of unbelonging that is played out in the everyday. An example of this complex process of belonging/non-belonging is illustrated in research by Brown, a young Indigenous woman who belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia. In an analysis of the impact of Australian settler colonial education policy and curriculum on young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people Brown (2018) argues that the lack of critical engagement with the past, an approach that fails to recognise the nature of belonging for Indigenous young people, impacts on their present and future. One of the ways in which this works, she shows, is through the systematic silencing of young Indigenous people about their history. She illustrates this with a reflection on classroom dynamics by Carla, who says: It’s a really, really touchy subject. It’s hard to bring it up without something racial being said, or a racial discussion happening. If something happened in history and you said, ‘no that’s not right’ and then explained it from an Aboriginal perspective, someone would be like ‘nup, that’s not right’. And then it would turn into a big thing. (Brown, 2018, p. 8)

This example is one of many instances of the normalisation of ‘everyday’ practices of denial of the way in which young Indigenous people belong to a collective history of both connectedness to the land and often violent colonisation. This denial in turn reinforces their ‘unbelonging’ in the present, and obscures meaningful belonging in the future. Brown shows how this dynamic, repeated over and over again for many students across time, shuts down meaningful engagement with schools. As Brown argues, the dynamics of unbelonging accrue in individuals, creating wider patterns of alienation from educational institutions, and locate educational disadvantage within young Aboriginal people themselves. The capacity of the concept of belonging is also used more widely to understand the

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relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations. For example, Gerharz (2014, pp. 553–554) notes in her analysis of Indigenous activism in Bangladesh, ‘the advantage of the belonging concept is that it emphasizes the relational dimensions of inclusion and exclusion’. The work of Indigenous scholars shows how assumptions about belonging are, generally, based in Western citizenship claims of the rights of individuals. In this work, the ontology of belonging enables an appreciation of the risks of conflating citizenship and belonging, something that is often close to the surface in considerations of belonging. While citizenship is, inevitably, based in settler colonial understandings of economic citizens (Moreton-Robinson, 2000, p. 32), the concept of belonging, potentially, enables the recognition of deeper forms of belonging in which involves the ‘inter-substantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land’ for peoples. Ontological considerations of belonging have also begun to surface in youth studies through ‘everyday’ considerations of the fusion of identity, belonging and place. Influenced by the new materialism, with its ontological focus on what exists and what things do, it is becoming increasingly common for youth researchers to show how belonging is forged through time (e.g. Duff, 2010), and how the ‘things’  – both human and non-­ human – that produce that sense of belonging are a discursive resource (Cook & Romei, 2020). New materialist perspectives have brought a ‘turn to matter’ (Fox & Aldred, 2017, p.  3), challenging anthrocentric views of the world, drawing on the insights of theorists such as Braidotti (2013) and Haraway (1997). These perspectives collapse the distinctions between nature–culture and human–non-human, to bring an expanded understanding of belonging in relation to place. In focusing on what things do, new materialist approaches look at associations, capacities and the capabilities to be affected. From this perspective, belonging is an ‘affect’. Belonging is derived from assemblages of human and more-than-­ human entities, creating an expanded understanding of how humans belong in the world (Davies, 2021). New materialist perspectives enable considerations of belonging to expand beyond treating places as simply social and political sites, to understand the relationships between people and their environments. By depicting human and non-human assemblages in non-hierarchical ways that do not automatically grant primacy to human actors, such approaches have the potential to shed new light on the relationship between belonging and place.

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Wright, drawing on insights from geography, provides an expanded discussion of what it might look like to consider belonging as ‘emergent becoming’, seeing ‘belonging as materially performed by messy, complex, human and more-than-human assemblages of things, people, beings, processes and affects’ (2015, p. 402). Her point is that belonging is a complex process of constitution that brings our worlds into being. It is not there to be ‘discovered’ because belonging does not pre-exist our experience. The nature of belonging is instead a ‘congealing’ (Barad, 2008) of practices and affects that make and remake the world in countless, everyday ways. Wright also points out that these practices include institutional practices, policies and regulations that frame, mobilise and constrain belonging. Wright’s focus on the intersections of epistemological and ontological dimensions of belonging also directs attention to the production of ‘non-­ belonging’. She draws on research with families in Mexico by Moreno Figueroa (2008) which reveals how racist and colonial logics generate experiences of non-belonging for young people who read their bodies through the lens of proximity to the ideal white body. This reading of bodies is powerfully described by MacNaughton (2005) based on her study of pre-school children’s identification with dolls that have different coloured ‘skin’. The children in her study reflected Australia’s multicultural composition, but almost always identified with the ‘white’ doll, which they saw as being the most desirable. They saw the ‘white’ doll as being the most like them. MacNaughton reflects that children absorb the everyday racial ‘othering’ that is central to Australia’s multicultural settler-­ colonial conditions. To return to the insights of new materialist approaches, we draw on previous work by Wyn, Cuervo and Cook in which young people develop a sense of belonging in urban areas through everyday interactions, with people and non-human matter, across time (Wyn et al., 2020). Their analysis draws on interviews with participants in the Australian Life Patterns longitudinal study about the places in which they were living. Their responses revealed ways in which belonging is about affects that are built up over time involving assemblages of human and non-human elements. For example, participants in urban areas mentioned the positive ‘feeling’ of the streets, trees and parks, the traffic and the ‘business’ of the streets as crucial elements that gave them a feel of belonging. The ontology of new materialist perspectives also collapses the binary of ‘then’ and ‘now’, enabling us to recognise how one of the affects of belonging is connection with the past (and echoing the work of Indigenous scholars). Examples from the Life Patterns study include Amy, who likes living where she does

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because her grandmother, who died recently, used to live nearby, and she is comforted by the memories of having ‘Sunday roast’ with her grandparents every Sunday (Wyn et al., 2020). This everyday conceptualisation of the ontologies of belonging shows how the work of belonging is always connected to wider conditions. Wyn et  al. (2020) conclude that these practices of belonging to place create a buffer to the ‘hidden injuries’ of structural change and uncertainty in young people’s lives, framing belonging in the wider context of the erosion of conditions of life.

What Do Concepts of Belonging Do in Youth Studies? This review of the concept of belonging provides some insights into its use as a tool for analysing the complex, often messy worlds of young people. The three dimensions on which we focus are not the entire story, but they do illustrate the different affordances of three key dimensions of belonging. We emphasise the debt the use of the concept of belonging owes to the work of Yuval-Davis, who outlines its relational nature, and its expression through specific instances of everyday practices. Her work shows how the concept of belonging operationalises theoretical frameworks, examples of which are Foucault’s theories of the operation of power and Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Yuval-Davis has also established the concept of belonging as multidimensional, operating across individual, affective domains as well as institutional, political domains. Her work has provided the framework for understanding how concepts of belonging can give substance to struggles for living by young people, understanding belonging as a political resource. The concept of belonging has been to the fore of the project of recognising the work that young people do, in small, everyday ways, to make their lives meaningful, in place and time. The everyday dimension of belonging ties the actions and experiences of individuals and groups to specific situations and to the wider institutional, national and global influences on them. The concept of belonging also frames the concept of identity, linking ‘projects of the self’ to wider social, economic, political conditions. Studies of identity work by young people also regularly use the concept of belonging to frame identity as a process that involves non-­ human elements.

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Shifting the focus to ontological dimensions of belonging enables the significance of historical and more-than-human elements to be recognised. This is highlighted in the work of Indigenous scholars whose work calls for a reassessment of the ontological (and normative) assumptions that can underpin conceptions of belonging. Indigenous scholars show how belonging for Indigenous peoples is fundamentally based in inalienable connections to the land, to ancestors and to a spirituality that informs their collective being. New materialist conceptions of belonging, which have synergies with the ontologies of Indigenous scholarship, expand the scope of belonging to consider belonging as an affect of human and non-human assemblages. From this perspective, belonging can be seen as an evolving connection between young people and their environment, a connection that dissolves the binary between past and present, and between humans and non-­ human elements. To complicate these affordances, we also note the caution expressed by Lähdesmäki et al. (2016), and Noble (2020) that concepts of belonging can imbue analysis with a normative framing, which obscures negative or exclusionary practices. A striking example of the exclusionary nature of normative expressions of belonging is recounted in Carla’s description (Brown, 2018) of the systematic way in which her Aboriginal heritage is discounted in classrooms where a white Australian story of belonging is reinforced. It is important to recognise, as Yuval-Davis points out, that the politics of belonging can be oppressive and negative. In this chapter, the work of Indigenous scholars reminds us to question the normative assumption that belonging (for example, in racialised structures of formal education) is desirable and non-belonging is inherently negative (Lähdesmäki et al., 2016). We also note that while the focus on everyday practices of belonging are insightful and generative, they can be at the expense of understanding collective practices (through community-based practices, social media groups, institutions such as unions and political movements such as feminism) where particular claims for belonging are a site of struggle. While the concept of belonging is clearly doing important work to develop insights into young people’s lives, it is important that this concept is used reflectively and critically. Our discussions in the following chapters of this book are an offering in this direction.

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CHAPTER 4

Policy Frames

Introduction In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) we argued that belonging is an old and new idea in youth studies, and we showed how the idea of belonging is visible in the different strands of youth studies. We showed how societal anxieties and priorities are reflected in scholarly work. In this chapter, focusing on youth policy, we deepen this argument to show how the concept of belonging is implicit, often addressed through proxy concepts such as social inclusion, exclusion and integration. The connection between youth policy and youth research is opaque, a characteristic that is exacerbated by the contested nature of social inclusion and exclusion, concepts which are commonly used as umbrella terms to highlight social issues and problems. However, both this chapter and Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) reveal the synergies between contemporary youth studies and policy frameworks of the day. The importance of interrogating youth policy lies in the fact that young people’s lives have traditionally provided a vantage point from which to examine broad societal changes. As new political, economic and social changes occur, their effects are often most visible in the new generation of youth (Shildrick et  al., 2009). This chapter examines how belonging is explored and debated through the framework of youth policy. We do so by focusing on the frameworks of social inclusion, exclusion and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_4

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integration. These frameworks have dominated youth policy and youth policy research in the last few decades. We argue that as with the concept of transitions (see Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation)), these frameworks tend to individualise youth belonging, and un-belonging, by constructing membership to society through engagement with education, training and work. Furthermore, in youth policy, belonging is constructed as relational and conditional to youth self-capitalisation through participation in the institutions of education and work. In so doing, they circumscribe the meaning and experience of youth to learning or earning. This chapter draws heavily on youth policies emanating from Australia and Great Britain. As we interrogate the relationship between Indigenous youth and a social integration framework, we also include substantial policy analysis from New Zealand youth policy scholars. Our approach to youth policy in some ways reflects a traditional influence of Anglo research on youth studies and youth policy debates. We are aware, for example, that discourses encouraging young people to embrace tertiary education and lifelong learning approaches as a necessary investment to participate in increasingly complex labour markets were also circulating in Eastern European societies transitioning from central-planned to market-oriented economies. Therefore, where possible and pertinent we include references or examples of how these three policy frameworks, or variants of them, shaped the experiences of youth in other regions of the world. The chapter begins with a brief section examining youth policy approaches that predate the social inclusion framework. These policy approaches, emerging from Australia and Great Britain, from the post Second World War period focused on the threat that emergent youth subcultural groups posed to the social order and moral standards. We focus on this policy period to demonstrate that views about youth as a problem or a threat to social order is not a new issue in policy research. We continue by examining the social inclusion agenda which tightly connects belonging for young people to participation in education, training and employment. This is followed by an analysis of the social exclusion framework and its emphasis on personalising un-belonging by positioning young people at the seams of society as deficient and morally distinct from the rest of society, and in the need of being monitored through policy technologies to assure they stay ‘on-track’. Our final policy framework is social integration. Here we focus on Indigenous youth policy, and more specifically on the Australian education policy ‘Closing the Gap’. By focusing on this policy initiative and the relation between the Australian state and Aboriginal and

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Torres Strait Islander youth we bring to sharp relief the ways that policy frameworks shape belonging/un-belonging for particular social groups. This policy continues a long tradition of education and youth policies that serve to normalise the idea that Indigenous youth need to be ‘fixed’; while at the same time neglecting their connection to family, culture and land that is central for their sense of belonging. In the final section of this chapter we reaffirm our argument that youth policies deploy the concepts of inclusion and exclusion to construct youth in particular ways and to manage their rights and roles in society. However, we also argue that concepts of belonging may also offer a potentially useful way of expanding policy approaches to recognise the harms of exclusionary policies (and school curricula) and to respect the relationships and resources that are enabling for all young people.

Dangerous Youth In their 1951 study on young people growing up in Sydney, Connell et al. (1957) affirmed that until this point, no one ‘had been particularly interested in analysing and setting down the ways in which an Australian grows up to be an Australian’ (p. xiii). While it is possible that the volume of sociological analysis on young people’s lives in that period does not resemble the burgeoning state of youth studies today, the framing of youth as a problem was already debated and addressed by youth policy and research in the 1950s and before. Concerns about boisterous young men, often labelled as larrikins, lacking ‘respectability and suitable deportment’, and distorting traditional social values and norms were already present in nineteenth century policies in Australia (Rowe, 2009, p. 35). It is, however, in the post-Second World War period where the question of the place and role of youth in society was forcefully brought forward by the state. In this period the government aimed to tackle the ‘youth problem’ with a battery of policies and inquiry reports – such as the Child Welfare Act in 1954, the Report of Juvenile Delinquency Advisory Committee in 1956, and the Youth Organisations Assistance Act in 1956. Amidst an environment of significant organisational and institutional changes in society, these policy documents were concerned with youth (in)ability to accept and follow general social requirements. For example, the Report of Juvenile Delinquency in Victoria stated in its second section, ‘The Importance of the Problem’ (Barry et al., 1956, p. 11), the following:

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Juvenile delinquency has occasioned grave disquiet in the Western democracies for years, and anxiety about its scale and the nature of its manifestations has increased during recent times… Changes in traditional forms of social organization and in the structure of communities and their habits and customs have altered the character of family life of a considerable and increasing section, and there has been a general lessening of respect for authority in its various forms

Here the policy focus is on the potential failure of youth to belong to a social order. Belonging in this instance, at this socio-historical moment of significant social change, is based on citizenship and participation rather than the later focus on human capital. That is, as we discuss in Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings), the emergence of a ‘new youth’ after the devastation of the Second World War, the development of mass secondary education and new cultural expressions embraced by young people construct ‘youth’ as a social category and a problem, and the receptacle for social anxieties about the future of society. As the above quote shows, the concern is with youth disconnection and delinquency, with its potential un-belonging, to social institutions such as education and religion, and the nation, and to their families and communities. Thus, the heightened policy activity of the era responding to a perceived emerging threat to the public order and society’s moral standards from delinquent and wayward youth. Bessant (1991, p.  10) argues that this policy frenzy was fuelled by printed media reports that contributed to public anxiety over the behaviour of certain youth subcultural groups, such as ‘bodgies’, ‘widgies’ and ‘sharpies’ – who, working at ‘the seams of society’, were challenging ‘traditional forms of power and moral standards’ (p. 10). Policy and media responses to this perceived moral crisis called for attention and regulation not only of youth engaging in delinquent behaviour but also of those believed to be in the ‘field of pre-delinquency’. For example, the Report of Juvenile Delinquency affirmed that it was ‘proper to consider not only young persons who have been convicted, and those who could be convicted if they were prosecuted, but additionally, those whose behaviour gives reasonable ground for believing that in the natural course of events they will be guilty of conduct’ (Barry et al., 1956, p. 16). In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings), we also showed how attention to youth as a problem was arising in the post-Second World War period in the United Kingdom (Reed, 1950). In this instance, the emergence of a

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post-war mass secondary-school education sector was viewed as a threat to society’s values and youth responsibilities. This foreshadowed the social sense of moral panic that Cohen theorised in his seminal work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which analysed the overreaction to seaside scuffles between two youth subcultural groups (Mods and Rockers) in the 1960s (Cohen, 1972). Cohen’s framework based on labelling theory of deviance was taken up by other researchers, such as Hall et al.’s (1978) classic study of mugging as a moral panic in the 1970s, in which they showed that mugging epitomised public anxiety over what was perceived as a threat to society from the violent behaviour of young black males rather than a factual problem. Therefore, just as we discuss in Chap. 6 (Citizenship), belonging is built around a notion of formal membership, of citizenship, that is based on rights and duties, on inclusion to institutions that will enable youth to productively participate in society. Belonging, in this instance, also has a moral perspective to issues of citizenship and participation. Government policies in Australia, Great Britain and other Western societies in the 1950s and 1960s had as an objective the preparation of youth to become ‘good’ citizens. The fear from ‘dangerous youth’ is their capacity to disrupt the social order, to un-belong to core social institutions (e.g. family, schooling); rendering them in need of state control to maintain order and compel young people to assume their age, place and status in society. In other words, this period sees the state fully invested in constructing forms of belonging for youth; first through surveillance and later through ‘guidance’. The key to counteract this immanent misbehaviour was to supervise youth and keep them actively engaged through work and youth clubs (Bessant, 1991, p. 23). In other words, the ways young people utilise their free time have always been a concern for governments and other institutions, and youth policy has traditionally been oriented towards building the material and spatial boundaries of where and how young people should belong. Indeed, youth clubs and sports have traditionally been promoted by the state, media commentators and other authorities, what Becker (1963) described as ‘moral entrepreneurs’, as spaces of recreation and leisure to instil in youth a conformity and citizenry that respect societal values and norms (Bessant, 1991; Furlong & Cartmel, 2007). Regulating leisure activities has often served the purpose of shaping and controlling young people’s behaviours, while also channelling youth into the appropriate pathways to adulthood.

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Youth policy research shows that one of the ways the relationship between the state and youth is constructed is with the identification of youth as a problem or at risk in policy. This points to the consequences of moral panics, or the categorisation of some groups of youth that appear to be at-risk, into the establishment of an institutional legacy, with the introduction of new laws and agencies to police youth; and the normative transformation, of what constitutes socially acceptable youth behaviour (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1994). In the next section, we examine the shift in youth policy, and youth policy research, towards the social inclusion agenda with its emphasis on young people’s participation in the spheres of education, training and labour.

The Emergence of the Social Inclusion Framework In the last few decades young people’s registers of belonging in youth policy gradually came to be defined by participation in education and employment. Youth policies took a decisive turn and focused more strictly on the skills young people needed for work. There is a strong legacy of youth studies that has extensively examined this reconfiguration of the meaning and experience of youth and what has underpinned this policy shift (see Andres & Wyn, 2010; Edwards, 2010; Kapferer, 1987; Mizen, 2004; Nairn et al., 2012; Smyth, 2010; te Riele, 2006; Wallace & Cross, 1990). These, and other studies, have documented the shift from what Mizen (2004) described as Keynesian policy approaches to Monetarist policies in the 1980s and 1990s. This shift refers to the transformation of the relation between the state and individuals (youth) through the progressive detachment of the state of its responsibility for social relations, previously enacted through the expansion of secondary school education and youth full-time employment, towards policies that exacerbated the role of market forces, for example through introduction of fees in higher education and deregulation of the labour market, including placing the responsibility for social inclusion on the individual. Critical to the youth policy agenda was the need to contain young people amidst the collapse of the youth labour market and rising unemployment, the decline of the primary and secondary sectors of industry, and a view that economies needed to adapt to global economic and financial competition. An earlier study of this situation by Kapferer (1987) identified the alignment of institutions such as the family, schooling and mass media to the imperatives of the economy in Australia, Great Britain and

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Europe in the 1980s. Kapferer argued that knowledge was commodified as information and data under “the pragmatic relation of schooling and job-getting, and the returns to ‘society’ and the individual from ‘investment on education” (p.  13). During that period, policy documents in Australia, for example, described education as key to the contribution of economic productivity through … teaching attitudes and values expected in the workplace; developing an ability to make independent choices; fostering a capacity for co-operative action; developing intellectual skills which increase understanding of the production process. (Inquiry into Labour Market Programs, 1985, p. 49)

An earlier government Inquiry affirmed ‘the importance of the concept of ‘investment in human capital’ through which it is argued that the levels of knowledge, physical and mental health and adaptiveness of the people in a nation are important components of the nation’s capital resources’ (Keeves Report, 1981, p. 13). Kapferer (1987) affirmed that similar discourses circulated in European and British policy arenas. For example, in Great Britain, education was viewed as key to the construction of a disciplined workforce; where government’s principal aims for all sectors of education are first, to raise standards at all levels of ability, and second, since education is an investment in the nation’s future, to secure the best possible return from the resources which are found for it. (Better Schools, 1985, p. 1)

Kapferer’s (1987) work highlighted the emergence of a (policy) shift in young people’s relationship to society from one based on citizenship and participation to one based on building human capital and engagement in the workforce. Her analysis highlights the policy re-focus on the construction of youth belonging from culture and citizenship ideas to economic and labour participatory imperatives. While Kapferer’s work brought to sharp relief the close link between education and labour, it is a decade later that youth studies and social policy researchers focus on the role of social inclusion discourse in youth and social policy. For example, the work of Mizen (2003) and Levitas (2005), among others, and their analysis of Great Britain’s New Labour policies, highlights how the rhetoric of social inclusion is utilised by the state to establish where and how young people should belong. Mizen (2003, p. 455) astutely argues that New Labour’s

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goal to marry the nation’s ‘competitive efficiency and economic progress with their commitment to social justice’ entailed a closer link between education and training and labour and a ‘restructuring of young people’s relationship to work and the labour market’ that involved ‘a more fundamental process of disengagement’. This process of disengagement referred to the reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and youth, particularly through the reorganisation of the lives of excluded and marginalised youth through involvement in training which established ‘government’s continued erosion of young people’s rights over and claims upon key resources’ (Mizen, 2003, p.  455). A politics of distribution, through taxation, benefit systems and expenditure, was replaced by the discourse of equality of opportunity, by redistributing opportunities to young people through education, training and work. Membership and inclusion in society, the UK government argued, was to be addressed by investing in up-skilling youth labour to grow the ‘national accumulation of stock of human capital’ (Treasury, 2002, p. 2). While the concept of belonging was not explicitly mentioned, it was however addressed through the proxy concept of social inclusion. It is important to note that the language of belonging through these proxy concepts, such as inclusion, brings a moral, personal and communitarian perspective to issues of structural disadvantage. That is, the structural issue of poverty is no longer the policy focus. Poverty, with its moral and relational approach, is replaced by notions of social inclusion, which strips away power and elides a close consideration of what it is that people can be included in and/or excluded from. Belonging, or un-belonging, thus takes an individualistic turn with the introduction of social inclusion policy approaches that presuppose that access to new opportunities for social mobility through the expansion of post-secondary education is open to all. Therefore, at the core of British New Labour policies was a discourse of social inclusion and exclusion rather than poverty. Education and paid work were for the un-belonging, young people in situations of poverty who depended on welfare support. Youth policies were designed to bring about social inclusion, a particular form of belonging. As Mizen (2003, p. 462) puts it, one of the New Labour centrepiece policies, the New Deal for the Young Long-term Unemployed, was designed ‘to move one-­ quarter of a million 18–24 years old experiencing long-term unemployment into work’, epitomising ‘the government’s belief in the ‘inclusive’ value of education and training’. To belong in these new times, young

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people must invest in education for longer periods of time and engage in employment regardless of its nature and conditions.

Social Inclusion and the Reification of Education and Labour in Youth Policy The language of social inclusion in New Labour policies in the UK involved a shift from a politics of distribution towards the idea of equality of opportunity. The latter was underpinned by notions of responsibilisation. Levitas (2005, p. 120) argued that by equating social inclusion with participation in paid employment, the policy focus moved from employment insecurity and lack of work opportunities due to ‘a structural feature of the labour market’ to lack of youth employment participation as ‘a question of individual deficiency’. Success in the construction of belonging through employment is justified as part of an individual’s motivational trait. Belonging through a social inclusion approach thus takes a moral and individualised perspective, in which the individual alone is responsible for finding solutions to problems that are rooted in structural causes. As Levitas (2005) states, inclusion in the labour market ‘had become something that individuals achieve’ (p. 120). Hall (2003) argues that the success of New Labour was in marrying social democracy with neoliberalism by normalising the discourse of personal responsibility amidst the idea that opportunities were provided equally for all. A key element in this neoliberal project is establishing an entrepreneurial view of active citizenship where individuals are responsible for engaging with a flexible, precarious labour market and for insulating themselves from societal risks. The idea of belonging, through educational and labour participation, and epitomised by the emergence and dominance of youth transitions framework (see Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation)), is underpinned by notions of individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism. Notions of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism in youth studies are analysed by Kelly (2006). Drawing on Foucault’s theories of governmentality, he argued that responses to the social risks of industrial modernity are now being imagined through individuals’ development of ‘a particular ethics of the self – a form of personhood we can describe as the entrepreneurial Self, and a form of personhood that sees individuals as being responsible for conducting themselves, in the business of life, as an enterprise, a project, a work in progress’ (p. 18, emphasis in original). Just

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like discourses of social inclusion, this entrepreneurial Self is one that demands youth show considerable autonomy and take responsibility for the ‘mistakes’ in their transitions. A variety of youth scholarship has highlighted the way in which young people work towards constructing their biographies through rational, autonomous and prudent actions, in a process of highly honed reflexivity, to self-monitor and constantly adjust their performances and goals. An example is McLeod and Yates’ (2006) study of middle class girls in Australian schools. Andres and Wyn’s (2010) study of Generation X transition to adulthood in Canada and Australia shows how young middle-­class women readily took up discourses of lifelong learning, promoted through OECD (1996) policy messages of the ‘knowledge society’, that demanded they actively invest in their careers as projects of the self. Focusing on the rhetoric of aspiration propagated by New Labour and the Coalition governments in Great Britain, Allen (2014) distinguished between the opportunities and possibilities available for youth from different class strata to aspire to mobility, inclusion and belonging in the education system and labour market. While for those from middle class backgrounds the rhetoric of aspiration, mobility and inclusion legitimises their capital status, for those from working-class families, this rhetoric might demand a disconnection from their social, emotional and material landscape. Some other research demonstrates the ways racialised young people may craft entrepreneurial selves through forms of strategic hybridity or strategic essentialism or navigate racism inherent in discourses of enterprise and self-making (see Idriss, 2021).  Discourses about the importance of education and employment participation as tools to construct belonging and inclusion were not only circulating in Anglo countries but in other regions of the world. For example, youth scholars researching youth transitions in Eastern European countries, moving from centrally planned to market-oriented societies, identified young people’s increasing investment in post-secondary education as a strategy to secure a place in the new uncertain labour markets (Kovacheva, 2001; Roberts, 2008; Tomanović & Ignjatović, 2006). Here, education and employment participation were also viewed as opportunities for belonging and social inclusion in new capitalist times. The deep reconfiguration of economic, social and political institutions, as well as cultural values and norms, generated new ways of being and participating but also confusion about where one belongs at times of rapid social change. In Southeast Asia, also in the context of important economic and political transformations, including the opportunities offered by a youth bulge, new youth policies were established towards the development of human capital as constituent of youth inclusion and national modernisation

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(Peou, 2017). In this instance, young people’s self-capitalisation was closely linked to the fate of the nation. In South America, youth scholars also identified a trend in youth policies that claimed that the path to belonging and inclusion was through education and employment engagement (Bendit & Miranda, 2016; Corrochano, 2013; Filardo, 2010). However, access to tertiary education and labour opportunities were strongly stratified according to young people’s socio-economic backgrounds. This meant that new opportunities to access tertiary education led to further social stratification rather than inclusion, cohesion and a broader social and economic belonging. In Australia, the need to restructure the national economy and develop a more highly trained and qualified workforce also redefined the agenda for education and youth policy. In previous work, Cuervo and Wyn (2011) reviewed a series of federal and state policies to demonstrate the deep and irreversible change in youth and education policies: from citizenship and participation to a focus on engagement in training and the labour market. Policies such as ‘Young People’s Participation in Post-Compulsory Education and Training’ (Finn, 1991), ‘Putting General Education to Work’ (Mayer, 1992), ‘Learning for the Knowledge Society’ (DETYA, 2000), aimed at increasing youth participation in post-compulsory education and employment. They contributed to establish a normative expectation for young people to engage with education well into their twenties and actively seek engagement in the increasingly precarious and complex labour market. In the last decade, the policy ‘Learning or Earning’ (COAG, 2009a) exemplified the Australian government’s demand of young people to be engaged in education, training or employment until the age of 20. The rationale behind the policy was to better youth ‘life prosperity and wellbeing and to support their productive participation in the Australian labour market’ (p. 6). However, similar to the British social inclusion approach mentioned above, Doherty (2017) explains that this policy initiative aimed to invest in training rather than welfare and presented extending education as the policy lever to the growing labour problems of a precarious and casualised employment market (see Campbell & Burgess, 2018; Chesters & Cuervo, 2019). The problem with the social inclusion approach of this policy, Doherty (2017) argues, is that it asks young people who cannot find appropriate work to engage for longer periods of time in an education and training system which has mostly not helped them with their labour prospects. Other youth researchers have also criticised the social inclusion policy agenda. For example, in considering the ‘Learning or Earning’

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policy and what the term social inclusion can offer to youth studies and the youth sector, Edwards (2010, p. 16) affirms that the term ‘could be a new name for old issues, it does not preclude neoliberal policy responses and it sets up “inclusion” as an uncontested good’. She attributes to ‘Learning or Earning’ a coercive nature and identifies its individualised approach as fostering resilience by demanding young people gain the necessary skills and attributes to achieve success in the labour market or to access to welfare support. The language of inclusion through a promotion of equality of opportunity in education and employment has had significant presence in other Western nations. Looking at the situation of Māori indigenous people in New Zealand, Humpage (2006) argues that notions of equality of opportunity contradicted the needs and rights of Māoris specified in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. She affirms that the inclusion policy approach was unable to account for the ‘specificity of indigenous experience’ and the socio-historical roots of exclusion and marginalisation but rather focus on education and work as tools to better young people and reframed the rights and needs of Māori ‘in terms of equal opportunity, rather than (based on) the Treaty of Waitangi’ (p.  237). Echoing Humpage’s view, Smyth (2010) questions on what terms those young people previously excluded are to be included? Examining the educational opportunities of working class regional and rural students, he contends that social inclusion approaches by the Australian Labor government of 2007–2010 continued to blame individuals for their failure to be ‘aspirational’ and invest in their educational capital. Smyth’s analysis of social inclusion policies resonates with Sellar’s (2013) and Cuervo et  al.’s (2019) critique of the ‘aspirations turn’ in education research, epitomised in the policy document ‘Australian Review of Higher Education’ (Bradley Review, 2008), which presupposes that a gap in educational aspirations between the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups in society is owing to an individual motivational trait and an incapacity to act on self-capitalisation by the latter. Studying the post-­ school pathways of regional students, Cuervo et al. (2019) showed that rather than psychological traits, structural forces played a significant role in the aspiration to continue with studies after school by young people in regional areas. In sum, youth policy research shows that the social inclusion agenda assumes that investment in education will deliver spaces of membership and participation in the labour market and society. Youth policy shifts the

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terms away from structural analysis of socioeconomic stratification and its remediation to softer and more individualised and responsibilising notions that what young people need to do is try to belong and policy’s role is to help support them towards this ‘social inclusion’. It is important to state that education and employment are important spheres of participation for young people. Nonetheless, scholars have extensively described the policy focus on conditionality of welfare measures upon individuals’ investment on increasing their employability; what has been conceptualised as a shift from welfare to a workfare regime (see Peck, 2001). The emergence of a ‘conditional belonging’ in society that is attached to young people’s engagement with earning or learning is implicit in the work of youth policy.

Social Exclusion in Youth Policy and Research In his analysis of the political construction of youth by the New Labour government, Mizen (2004) shows how youth were the focus of policies across the domains of education, labour, and law and order. At the core of this turn to youth in policymaking in Great Britain was the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit, ‘with its mandate to think the unthinkable and develop “joined-up-solutions” to “joined-up-problems”’ (Mizen, 2004, p. 176). Indeed, social exclusion approaches in Great Britain, and other Western nations, shifted the focus from poverty, and income and wealth inequality to other forms of exclusion such as education, labour, housing, and health (see Lister, 2003; Long, 2010; Silver, 2010). The problem, according to Mizen (2004), is that despite high levels of youth policy activity, the Unit’s ultimate concern was the traditional themes of ‘labour discipline and social order’. That is, it focused on the political construction of youth as a social group in need of normative regulation. Levitas (2004) concurs. As mentioned above, familiar views of social exclusion through the lens of material deprivation were replaced by a social inclusion approach focused on education, training and employment participation. Belonging, through these proxy concepts, attributes to youth policy a moral and individualised outlook that comes to replace traditional material understandings of social exclusion. The move to discourses of social inclusion, and exclusion, constructs youth belonging as a personal investment that demands of young people a constant evaluation of their choices and actions. Levitas’ analysis is distinctive because she links the social exclusion approach to a moralistic discourse, saying that ‘social

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exclusion is used as a substitute not for poverty or non-­employment, but for the underclass’ (Levitas, 2004, p. 44). The moral underclass discourse depicts those experiencing social exclusion as ‘morally distinct from the rest of society’ (Levitas, 2004, p. 44). Explanations of poverty and social exclusion, and un-belonging, are linked to cultural traits and based on a lack of values and morality that could be found in wider society. As stated earlier, the integration of those socially excluded is managed through participation in education and training to increase their employability  – efforts, however, that will need to be coupled by the implementation of the right set of values and dispositions for inclusion, as well as the deployment of personal material resources. This moral element to social exclusion is based on cultural and supply-side terms and neglects any wider structural inequalities as a source of explanations of poverty and deprivation. The ‘personalisation’ of social exclusion is not new. The rhetoric of the New Right in the 1980s in Great Britain ascribed a lack of values and the right behaviours to the unemployed. Crisp and Powell (2017) argue that this rhetoric of translating structural unemployment into individualised moral problems continues today in the characterisation of those young people not in employment, education or training (NEET). In Australia, the collapse of the youth full-time labour market and the rise of youth unemployment created the conditions for the rediscovery of the ‘juvenile underclass’ (Bessant, 1995). Through a discourse analysis of media reports, and the language utilised by the left and right, Bessant shows that the juvenile underclass is identified by their behaviours and a culture of poverty that permeates their material and emotional lives. The poor and the excluded also function as ‘the repository of collective fears generated by the respectable, the responsible and the expert’ (Bessant, 1995, p. 45). One of the identified fears informing youth policy is the intergenerational reproduction of a workless, welfare-dependent class. The work of MacDonald resonates with Bessant’s analysis. Over a prolific body of work, MacDonald has highlighted how socially excluded youth have been continually demonised and politically constructed as a dangerous threat to the social order (e.g. MacDonald & Marsh, 2005; MacDonald & Shildrick, 2007). Central to the policy and media construction of a youth underclass, for MacDonald, is the reconfiguration of transitions to adulthood anchored in the rapid precarisation of the labour market and the lack of genuine employment opportunities, as well as the demonisation of excluded youth and their families as ‘welfare scroungers’ and morally lacking the appropriate dispositions and values to achieve social inclusion.

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It is important to add that part of this moral concern is not only that the ‘underclass’ fails to belong, but also that they develop new belongings (or cement old ones) to ‘their own kind’. That is, they disengage from the discourse of aspiration and meritocracy, advanced by social inclusion approaches, and reproduce their own internal bonds to one another that sees them trapped in cycles of poverty and disadvantage which are now seen to be of their own making rather than part of perennial structural inequalities. There is an anxiety that a deeper sense of belonging to neighbourhoods, gangs, and families suffering intergenerational disadvantage will emerge. The policy proxies that promote ‘new’ ways of belonging through participation in education and labour only serve to further reinforce the view that exclusion, falling through the cracks of society, is the result of an individual’s deficit and failure. Contemporary youth research has focused on ‘un-belonging’ by analysing how young people on the margins respond to the youth policy construction of them as socially dangerous and morally problematic. For example, Farthing (2015) examined the rejection by low-income British youth of institutionally individualised policies that demanded a pervasive self-capitalisation in the construction of their biographies, arguing for a recognition of structural inequalities that shape problems of poverty. Youth researchers have also showed how young women who are pregnant or mothering reject policy descriptions of them as unfit mothers and bad citizens, by reasserting themselves as respectable citizens through participation in education and labour (Calver, 2020). Nikunen (2017) and Haikkola (2020) argue that contemporary European Union, Nordic and Finnish youth policies follow a social inclusion agenda that favours societal membership through employment and youth activation programs that disadvantage young people through the axis of class, gender and ability (as well as race,  as many others have argued). In Australia, Watson (2016) shows how a lack of welfare support and the absence of youth policy frameworks abandons young females in a state of homelessness to rely on exchanging sexual intimacy for material and physical support from their male counterparts. Belonging, within an environment of social exclusion, is constructed by these young females experiencing homelessness through individualised approaches rather than structural solutions. te Riele (2006), on what has become a classic study of young people, problematises Australian youth policy approaches that construct certain social groups as ‘at-risk’ by shifting the lens from young people that need ‘fixing’ to the ways schooling fails those youth. Against this backdrop of increasing youth

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exclusion, policy has confirmed its departure from redistributive approaches to tracking and measuring groups of young people at the seams of society to prevent their further social exclusion and un-belonging.

Keeping Youth At-Risk on Track te Riele’s (2006) study brought into sharper relief the obsession of youth and education policy with tracking youth ‘at-risk’ of successfully transitioning to adulthood. This obsession was exacerbated by what was viewed as a de-traditionalisation of youth transitions that generated a strong public and media anxiety about where and how young people belong during their journey through the education system and labour market. This had the effect of developing a strong social policy focus on prevention and assessment to make sure youth were ‘on-track’. Traditional social divisions, combined with new risks and precarities, generated different challenges for youth policies that governments attempted to address by focusing on measurement and prevention. This interest in prevention, however, was not only based on youth transitions. Brown et al. (2013, p. 333), focusing on the Canadian, Australian and British contexts, show how risk was utilised as a ‘tool to advance ideals such as rational choice and individual responsibility’ and justify the decoupling of state responsibility from social relations, which deepened the inequality faced by youth already experiencing lack of access to employment and racial discrimination. Similar analyses of the emergence of discourses of risk and the focus on prevention and measurement in youth policy have been documented in Australia (Kelly, 2003), in Canada (Caron & Soulière, 2013; Roman, 1996), in Southern Europe (Leccardi, 2008; Serrano Pascual & Martín Martín, 2017), in the Nordic European context (Follesø, 2015; Nielsen et al., 2017) and in Latin America (Saraví, 2001). These and other studies focus on young people at-risk in the spheres of education and work, as well as in health, justice, residency and wellbeing. Overall, a discourse of risk, prevention and measurement has sought to ‘colonize the unruly, unknowable future via the practices and activities of expertise’, which argue are better positioned to determine ‘what constitutes desirable futures’ (Kelly, 2003, p. 172). A raft of studies in the late 1990s and 2000s shows the interest of youth studies in how the state keeps track of ‘vulnerable’ and ‘at-risk’ groups of young people. For example, researching in the British context, France (2008) argued that underpinning the new focus on prevention in policy

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was risk factor analysis as a strategy to identify potential sites, practices and conditions of un-belonging to societal norms such as drug addiction, poor mental health, disengagement from education and labour, and involvement in crime. The philosophical underpinning of this approach is the traditional understanding of youth as a problem that needs to be monitored and managed, based on a developmental psychology understanding of youth as a period of storm and stress, and risky experimentation with identity formation. Risk factor analysis is sustained by a positivist approach that views ‘social facts’ as ‘objective and measurable’ and from a premise that for example ‘behaviour is dichotomous, being one thing (criminal) or the other’ (non-criminal) (France, 2008, p. 4). In other words, belonging or un-belonging was tied to behaviouralism and could be objectively measured. Also within the British context, Armstrong (2006) offers a persuasive critique of policies that focus on risk and inclusion as a way of preventing youth from falling into deviant behaviours and pathways. Armstrong stresses that the problem with risk and inclusion approaches is the policy shift from tackling structural problems to regulating problematic youth. In other words, viewing youth as deviant, either through ‘new legal devices such as antisocial behaviour’ and/or ‘through mythologies of urban disorder and chaos’ contributes to mechanisms for controlling where young (deviant) people can belong (Armstrong, 2006, p. 275). Both researchers correctly point out that in this policy period a cultural politics of risk, with its pseudo-scientific approach, further marginalised those that already do not belong to the prescriptive normative standards of social inclusion. In their analysis of childhood and youth policies in the UK from 1996 to 2009, Turnbull and Spence (2011, p. 940) affirmed that the concept of risk became ubiquitous and a useful tool for policy ‘to ascribe particular groups and individuals as different’ or to blame them for social problems. Thus, the notion of ‘youth as problem’ is overshadowed by ‘youth as risk’, but in which young people are viewed as ‘perpetrators and victims’, ‘at-­ risk’ and ‘risky’; and which offers justification for measures that aim to intervene in young people’s lives. To return to Kelly (2003), his argument that while youth have always been a demographic group traditionally understood as in need of the state’s attention, the current situation is of an ‘increasingly generalized and institutionalized sense of anxiety and mistrust in relation to the capacities of today’s young people to make the transition to adulthood’ (2003, p. 166) is worth noting, as is his point that pathologising these young people signifies ‘a means of exercising sovereignty over dangerous individuals’

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(2003, p. 176). One form of exercising sovereignty over youth is through categorisation. Youth researchers have warned about the policy categorisation of ‘youth at-risk’ as the construction of a false binary between a socially excluded problematic minority and the ‘normal’ socially included majority (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014; te Riele, 2006). This categorisation is in many instances developed around social divisions, such as class, ethnicity or race, which contributes to the shaping of how and who governments label as deviant, problematic and at-risk of belonging. In a similar vein, Cuervo and Wyn (2014) assert that the strong uptake by youth policy of the metaphor of transition has led to the social categorisation of youth in a binary way – as being ‘on track’ or ‘at-risk’. This is epitomised by the social categorisation of youth not in employment, education or training (NEET). The concept of NEET has been used as an explanatory model to problematise how ‘global social forces such as globalisation and neoliberalisation shape young people’s lives in different contexts’ (Holte et al., 2019, p. 256). In Japan, however, youth researchers have called attention to the problematic homogenisation of youth-as-­ NEET, because the measures do not distinguish between those who have private resources and choose not to work and study, and those young people who are unemployed not  by choice (Inui, 2005). Similar to te Riele (2006), these scholars argue for the recognition of the institutional violence perpetrated towards young people. This point is also made in research on Scottish youth by Furlong (2006), who criticises the construction of NEET as a policy category because it, firstly, neglects the heterogeneity of youth; secondly, there is a lack of agreed definition on the category and concept that hinders effective policy action; and thirdly, there is an over-emphasis on NEET which can make researchers and policy-makers neglect vulnerable youth in short-­ term and insecure employment positions. These studies all contribute to an emerging consensus that in youth policy, the idea of belonging is informed by a narrow approach. It reduces youth experiences to educational and labour contribution to society. Categorising youth belonging through participation in education, employment and training also homogenises young people’s interests, needs, resources and practices. It washes out the heterogeneous backgrounds and experiences of youth, including those unable to study or work due to being in caring positions, disabled or long-term sick, and thus reducing them to the policy category of at-risk, of un-belonging. Further this categorisation places the emphasis

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solely on youth-as-transition, by entrenching normative markers of progress and neglecting the relevance of social relations in youth lives. These relatively mechanistic assumptions about the relationship between education and work for young people are challenged by recent research on the way in which young people actively participate in projects of self-realisation in relation to work. Farrugia (2021) shows how, in a post-Fordist work environment, young people draw on formal education as well as other life spheres to develop worker-identities, and that the nature of these identities differs across industries and work sectors. The implication of his work is that youth policies aimed at addressing the increasing dissolution of the nexus between education and work need to acknowledge this new complex environment and the work that young people do themselves to ‘belong’ to workplaces.

Indigenous Youth Policy and Social Integration Our analysis above of social inclusion and exclusion highlights how these policy frameworks individualise young people’s relationships to society through coercive initiatives focused on participation in education and training for skills and employability. Both frameworks could be argued to have a relational approach in so far as they are based on who belongs and who does not belong in society – on who is an insider and who is an outsider. However, as we discuss above, social inclusion and exclusion are contested concepts that are used to signify or reflect social issues that need addressing. In his theorisation of the concept of social inclusion for example, Silver (2010, p. 194) argues that the term through its association with paid employment has come to be identified with a framework of social integration that emphasises ‘social order and legitimacy of the status quo’. In this case, social integration is understood as social control and the disciplining of ‘at-risk’ groups through normative and moral assumptions of what means to be a good citizen and, thus, a member of society. Silver (2010) affirms that within a cultural sphere, integration entails ‘assimilation’; that is, the idea that some social groups would assimilate into a mainstream or host culture. This, he acknowledges, is deeply problematic as it demands that some members of society renounce their culture to adopt the ‘host’ one and it presumes the erasure of Indigenous cultures. Social cohesion is a similar concept to social inclusion, one that is commonly tied to community participation, which includes a moral view of what an ideal community or good citizen means.

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In Chap. 6 (Citizenship), we focus extensively on how youth studies scholarship has theorised and researched belonging within multiculturalism and citizenship debates. In this section, we want to focus on a less-­ researched area in youth studies: the place of Indigenous young people in youth policy studies and the idea of belonging. In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) we discuss the absence of Indigenous youth in youth studies scholarship, and yet their overrepresentation in policy focused on dispossessing, regulating and assimilating Indigenous people. Policies addressing the rights of Indigenous and First Nations people in Anglo-­ speaking settler-colonial countries (e.g. Australia, U.S., Canada and New Zealand) have a long tradition dating to at least a century ago (Patrick & Moodie, 2016). Much of this activity in policy reform has had to do with addressing inequities in health, education, and labour. Patrick and Moodie (2016) identify different policy moves in the history of the relationship between the state and Indigenous people in Australia. They document the move from ‘protection’ policies in the nineteenth century – designed to control Aboriginal people’s lives – to ‘assimilation’ policies in the first part of the twentieth century – that promote the adoption of White Australian cultural, economic and social practices; to the past five decades with the ‘integrationist’ era based on recognition of Aboriginal rights and the ‘self-­ determination’ policy era based on Aboriginal people’s capacity and right to ‘manage their own lives in culturally relevant ways’ (p. 168). Patrick and Moodie classify the contemporary policy era as one of ‘normalisation’. Drawing on Sullivan’s (2011) and Altman and Fogarty’s (2010) work, they argue that Indigenous autonomy is curtailed by neoliberal policies that shift the relationship between the state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people from self-determination to accountability and tracking with the aim to ensure that all social groups are performing at similar levels in education, labour, housing and health indicators. In this ‘normalisation’ policy era the aim is to reduce Indigenous disadvantage by equalising their education, health, labour and housing indicators to that of non-Indigenous Australians. The set of policies developed to achieve this aim coalesced around the policy initiative ‘Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage’ (COAG, 2009b). This ‘gap-talk’ in relation to race can also be found in policy discourse analysis in New Zealand (Bedford et  al., 2010), the UK (Gillborn, 2008) and the United States (Rios, 2012). In Australia, Sullivan (2011) argues that this goal to achieve parity of living conditions for Aboriginal people results in a dilemma, because conforming culturally, socially and economically to the ‘mainstream’ fails to

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recognise the way in which the present, and the imagined future, is based in history, and in distinctive relationships to country (see also Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads)). The policy initiative ‘Closing the Gap’, which aims to redress historical injustices (see Rudolph, 2016), has been underpinned by three education policies by the Commonwealth government (Patrick & Moodie, 2016) – each of them aiming to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students. The first declaration, the Hobart Declaration (MCEETYA, 1989, p. 2), addresses the need to ‘understand and respect the cultural heritage’ of ‘Aboriginal and ethnic groups’. This declaration has been criticised by Indigenous research scholars for conflating recognition of the cultural status of Aboriginal people, its First Nation people, with those of migrant ethnic groups. They argue that the problem of grouping Indigenous people under the banner of multiculturalism is rendering invisible historical and contemporary issues of dispossession and sovereignty that are the core of, and unique to, Aboriginal recognition in the national political discussion (see Patrick & Moodie, 2016; Vass, 2014). That is, issues of un-belonging lack a historical focus and are centred in present disadvantages and a deficit approach to adopt norms and behaviours of the ‘successful’ mainstream. The other two declarations, the Adelaide Declaration (MCEETYA, 1999) and the Melbourne Declaration (MCEETYA, 2008) continue to be driven by what Patrick and Moodie term ‘statistical equality’  – achievement of equality of outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008, p.  8) states the need for all Australian youth to Understand and acknowledge the value of Indigenous cultures and possess the knowledge, skills and understandings to contribute to, and benefit from, reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

While the notion of cultural recognition is stated in the declaration, there is a lack of genuine recognition of the violence and dispossession perpetrated on, and the sovereignty and place of, Aboriginal people in national and local affairs (Patrick & Moodie, 2016; Rudolph, 2019; Sullivan, 2011; Vass, 2014). As Rudolph (2016, p.  441) explains, by ‘acknowledging the past as the place of injustices towards Indigenous people’, the Closing the Gap policy discourse ‘reinforces the present as a different time, a new time, a better time’. Furthermore, just as with the social

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inclusion policy approach described above, these scholars argue that the onus of Closing the Gap is placed on individual schools, teachers and Aboriginal families and students rather than placing the problem with the wider social, economic, political and historical context of the nation (see Patrick & Moodie, 2016; Rudolph, 2019). In relation to social exclusion discourses, a deficit approach to Indigenous students underpins the justification to monitor their educational performances. Identifying Aboriginal youth as underperforming places the burden of un-belonging on the individuals rather than recognising the socio-historical legacy of oppression and disadvantage. As Gillborn (2008) in the UK and Lingard et al. (2012) in Australia have argued, talk about ‘closing the gap’ functions as a ‘discursive strategy whereby statistical data is deployed to construct the view that things are improving and the system is moving in the right direction’ (Gillborn, 2008, p. 65), while ignoring ‘past and present practices of (post) colonisation’ (Lingard et al., 2012, p. 327). Lingard et al. argue that the decontextualisation of schooling from social, political, cultural and historical is critical to the perpetuation of ‘deficit thinking’ reflected in policies for Indigenous youth, underpinning the logic of Indigenous ‘student-as-problem’ within policy and emboldens assimilationist approaches that advantage ‘white privilege’ (p. 327). In her research with Indigenous youth in school settings in New South Wales, Australia, Brown (2019) acknowledges the harm that educational policies have brought over a century in erasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture from  knowledge that circulates in the classroom. This dismissal of Indigenous stories, knowledge and culture represents a lack of engagement by policy with the past that serves to normalise the present where Indigenous youth continue to be a problem to be ‘fixed’. This policy erasure served the construction of Indigenous subjectivities as caught in ‘moments of disjuncture’ – explained by Brown’s youth participants as the disjuncture between what ‘others thought Aboriginal people “should be” versus their perceptions of themselves – and the disjuncture between their perspectives and legitimated perspectives of the past’ (p. 6). As we also discuss in Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads), Indigenous students in Brown’s study were then relegated to a ‘liminal space’ as their authority on Aboriginal knowledge was unacknowledged in favour of a policy focus ‘on the “cultural competency” of teachers and school staff’ and the ‘official’ curriculum content (p. 11). Belonging, in this case, is relational and

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conditional to the acknowledgement of teachers, schools and policy rather than the cultural identity of Indigenous youth. Further, as Maxwell, Lowe and Salter (2018, p. 175) show, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge, histories and cultures are relegated to ‘fitting in’, to a subordinate position, within a pre-existing ‘culturally, ideologically, and pedagogically specific framework’. The creation of this subordinate position has been understood as a form of epistemological racism where construction of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge has been dominated by Eurocentric epistemologies (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016). A systematic review of the literature (1989–2016) on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their schooling experiences reveals that students and parents have high aspirations for educational achievement only to be curtailed by ‘exposure to persistent and repeated negative representation of indigeneity or Indigenous academic ability from teachers and the media (that) leads to disengagement, de-identification and reduced wellness’ (Moodie et  al., 2019). Other studies have also challenged the view that Aboriginal youth lack aspirations for their future. For instance, in their studies of the post-school aspirations of young people in non-metropolitan places, McInerney (2012) and Herbert et  al. (2014) did not find any significant difference between the aspirations of non-­ Indigenous and Aboriginal students. Parkes et  al. (2015) challenge Australian youth policy construction of belonging tied to employment participation. They argue that in contemporary ‘work-centred society’, aspirations beyond work participation are invisible in youth policy. Through exploring the dreams and aspirations of Aboriginal youth in urban, regional and remote places, Parkes et  al. (2015) reveal the misrecognition in youth policy of the central role of culture, place and family in Aboriginal aspirations for the future. Their participants reveal how interdependence, rather than independence, to family, culture and place is crucial to construct positive pathways to adulthood. The connection by Indigenous people to family, culture, place and land has been well established in youth studies. Despite this connection, youth scholars argue that in settler-colonial societies official constructions of belonging and nationhood have historically tended to exclude Indigenous narratives from meanings of citizenship. In New Zealand, looking at Māori youth, Kidman’s (2012, 2015, 2016) work has rendered visible how ‘tropes of land and childhood’ intersect ‘in ways to racialize, essentialize, and exclude the everyday geographies of belonging of Indigenous

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children and youth in the present’ (Kidman, 2016, p.  29). Against this exclusion from state narratives of nationhood, Kidman (2012, 2016) shows how Māori youth construct their own cultural memories of place and belonging through descriptions and connections to land (e.g. mountains, lakes and rivers) and tribal narratives that offer a way of understanding their natural and social world that differs from the official curriculum at school. Indigenous youth resistance to official discourses circulating in society, particularly in schools, has been documented by other scholars around the world. For example, Brooks et al. (2015) show how in two Canadian communities Aboriginal youth utilise arts and hip-hop music to construct belonging against lack of recognition of their forms of belonging. Further, Webb (2013) documented in Chile how Mapuche youth challenged notions of belonging and the ‘good citizen’ constructed by the state by incorporating home and community socialised values of respect for individuals and the environment, and responsibility and hard work to their everyday lives. The studies mentioned in this section suggest the need for youth policy to seriously take into account the connection of Indigenous youth to land, family and culture. This connection challenges official narratives of belonging but also serves to interrupt discourses that view Indigenous youth through a deficit lens and as a perennial at-risk group. The narrow youth policy focus on education, training and work discussed so far in this chapter highlights the invisibility of other realms of young people’s lives that contribute to the formations of belonging beyond materiality. In the next, and final, section of this chapter we discuss some of the most recent developments in the relationship between youth policy and belonging through a youth studies lens. This discussion brings to sharp relief omissions in the analysis of youth policy and belonging by youth studies scholars. Ultimately, it contributes to our understanding of what work concepts of belonging do in youth studies and youth policy studies.

What Do Concepts of Belonging Do in Youth Policy Studies? This chapter brings to the fore the work that sociologists and youth researchers have done over the last decades to illuminate the relationship between youth policy and belonging for young people. It shows how belonging has not been a central concept in youth policy debate but rather

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addressed implicitly through the frameworks of social inclusion, exclusion and integration. We have argued in this chapter that these policy frameworks have fostered an individualised approach to belonging that is built upon young people’s self-capitalisation through participation in education and labour. We have showed how these policies have been underpinned by a shift from poverty and financial deprivation as the root of societal ills to individualised approaches such labour market activation and employability as the panacea for membership in society. Similar to youth transitions approaches, explained in Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation), youth policies in the last few decades have imposed a normative, categorical and universalising frame on young people that limit recognition of the diversity of the social dynamics, spheres of life and experiences that give meaning to youth. These frameworks also uncontestably assume that investment in education will be rewarded with participation and membership in the labour market and wider society. This idea has been challenged by a vast array of youth research that shows the increasingly weaker nexus between education and work in an ever more precarious labour market landscape (see Andres & Wyn, 2010; Bendit & Miranda, 2016; Denny & Churchill, 2016; Roberts, 2020). It is important to note that these frameworks reveal the normative sites, values and forms of youth belonging. They show where and how young people should belong. In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) we showed how education systems and the labour market have become productive and problematic spaces for youth belonging in a post-Fordist era. Both institutions have shaped youth, and society’s, hopes and anxieties towards building a future in times of rapid social change. The policy pressure for young people to participate in one or both institutions has intensified as traditional economic structures of production have declined and new forms of employment have demanded new skills and qualifications. We argue that at the centre of these policy frameworks, with their demand that youth are learning or earning, is an idea of conditional belonging. This idea of conditional belonging informs the frameworks presented above by placing youth as responsible for their social inclusion, exclusion and integration. This normative construction of a form of conditional belonging attached to participating in these twin central institutions has defined the meaning of being young. This reconfiguration of youth limits the view of young people as students, learning in formal spaces and merely passive recipients of knowledge; which neglects informal areas of learning, such as the workplace, public spaces, digital platforms, and the home and the

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community (Wyn, 2012), and is based on a deficit view of young people and belonging. Further, the close policy alignment of education and work situates young people, and their family, as consumers of educational products; particularly as parents race to future-proof their offspring amidst an increasingly precarious youth labour market, further weakened by the current economic crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the increasing labour market precarity that particularly affects young workers (Cuervo & Chesters, 2019; De Lannoy et al., 2020; Furlong et al., 2017), the meaning and experience of youth is also tightly related to youth-as-­ workers and, thus, as productive contributors to the national economy, and deserving members of society. This approach obscures the impact of the decline in working conditions and contracting full-time labour market on young people’s lives. Challenges from youth researchers to these policy frameworks have often concentrated on critiques of the supply-side of employment rather than the demand-side factors. The emphasis has been on ‘chastising’ the state for individualising inclusion, exclusion and integration through demands that young people be involved in earning or learning. Some scholars argue that less attention has been placed on the role of the state in ideologically restructuring youth, and the place of youth policy as key ‘in promoting and maintaining the commodity relations upon which the capitalist state depends for its effective economic functioning’ (Kapferer, 1987, p. 1). An essential critique from this position to the field of youth studies is its overemphasis on subjectivities and its related analysis centred on how young people adapt, cope or struggle with new political economic scenarios rather than challenging them (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2016). A contemporary response to this seeming shortcoming in youth studies research has been provided by advocates of a political economy of youth by focusing on issues such as ‘proletarianization of youth work’ and ‘the distribution of wealth away from the youth segment to older workers and the economic elites’ (Côté, 2014, p. 537; see also Sukarieh & Tannock, 2016). A political economy of youth calls for viewing youth-as-class in their struggle against the neoliberal capitalist economies that ‘create conditions that on average delay the ability of younger people to earn a living wage’, and that ‘have produced employment conditions that need to be rectified, rather than accepted as a “new normal” to which recent generations have happily adapted’ (Côté, 2014, p. 538). The emphasis is on the construction of the youth problem as a political strategy by neoliberal governments and global capitalism. Supporting the argument for a

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political economy of youth, Sukarieh and Tannock (2016, p. 4) argue that the field is overwhelmingly concerned with a ‘narrow range of social actors’; and very little attention on the ‘interests and agendas of elite social actors’ (e.g. international development organisations, high level policymakers, think tanks, trade union, faith groups, and multinational corporations). While a political economy of youth has been critiqued, for example, for constructing youth-as-class, which tends to reduce all young people into similar experiences and a homogenous categorisation (see France & Threadgold, 2016); their proponents argue that to understand the contemporary meaning of youth one must interrogate the work that neoliberal governments and global capitalism do to exploit or empower young people. While debates such as those around the need to understand the meaning of youth from a political economy perspective can contribute to fruitful dialogue in youth research, we argue that the concept of belonging has the capacity to open up different ways of being that policy does not allow for. By this we do not mean an essentialising of belonging as a new orthodoxy in youth research that can replace the orthodoxy of youth transitions that has been at the core of policy approaches in the last few decades. What this means is understanding different ways that young people can belong and participate in society rather than categorisations of positive or negative belonging through inclusion, exclusion and integration frameworks. Indeed, a belonging frame can offer youth policy a critical framework of relationality that opens up to the social dynamics that shape young people’s lives. For example, similar to approaches that expand the legal framework of citizenship (see Chap. 6 (Citizenship)), a belonging frame can incorporate dynamics of youth life that are centred around relationships of care, mutuality, recognition, and solidarity. As we stated above, the tendency to see youth as a social category, such as NEET, obscures the quality and nature of social relationships in young people’s lives. Categorisations of youth as NEET produce a limited understanding of young people’s social worlds and tend to frame this group through a moral lens, limiting the capacity of policies to make a positive contribution. A belonging frame expands the lens on these young people’s social circumstances beyond the normative frames of education and work by rendering visible their multiple connections to their community  – for example, as carers, teenage parents, leaving care, and the ways they connect to significant others through practices of care, mutuality, love and solidarity. In other words, giving meaning to youth solely through academic

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achievement or labour participation obscures other different forms through which they can become productive members of society. Policy frameworks such as social inclusion and exclusion provide little understanding of youth social relationships and connections. By amplifying youth lives, a belonging frame can contribute to policy to view youth as a social process rather than a social category (Wyn & White, 1997). As we discuss in Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation), when policy focuses its attention on markers of progress determined by discourses of normative pathways, youth lives between these markers becomes invisible. Cuervo and Wyn (2012, 2014) researching rural youth through the lifecourse show how relationships to people and places that matter to them are a critical source of wellbeing and security in times of uncertainty and rapid social change. Other longitudinal youth research also shows the active work that young people do in the realms of intergenerational relationships, wellbeing and care, and place-making to belong to their communities (Henderson et  al., 2007). These approaches to youth studies illustrate how focusing on understandings of youth connections to people and place brings up new dimensions to narratives of disadvantage and deficit that are commonly produced through universal and categorical views constructed through a transitions approach. Furthermore, social inclusion, exclusion and integration frameworks presuppose participation and belonging in society as an achievement rather than a process. Our focus on Indigenous youth, for example, reveals one way in which a relational framework of belonging shifts the focus beyond normative configurations of the meaning of youth. In this case, family, place, history, culture and land are at the core of Indigenous youth belonging despite the ways in which policy and institutions work to erase Indigenous knowledge and identities to the level of threatening their cultural, political and economic realities. Further, while youth policy has been blind to family-youth connections, youth research shows that family support can often act as insurance against contemporary societal risks such as labour market precarity and housing unaffordability (Cuervo & Fu, 2020; Leccardi & Ruspini, 2006; Pusey, 2007; Wyn et al., 2012). Despite this increasingly critical role of mutuality between youth and family, the role of the latter is generally absent in youth policy and youth studies dominated by youth-as-­ transitions approaches. We are aware, of course, that not all youth can enjoy family support and that in some instances, the family realm can be a difficult and even violent site for young people. For some young people in situation of homelessness family might well be the cause of their

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contemporary experience (Watson, 2017). Nevertheless, family, as well as other personal networks, are part of the web of relationships within which youth manage their lives and construct a sense of belonging in increasingly precarious and uncertain times. The social inclusion/exclusion policy framework initiated by New Labour in Great Britain saw its continuation by the introduction of austerity policies in the last decade in Europe justified by the impact of the Global Financial Recession of 2008–2009 (Antonucci et al., 2014; Furlong et al., 2017; Levitas, 2012). Through these austerity policies young people have been one of the groups more subject to stringent forms of conditional belonging in society. As we write this book, the multidimensional crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has reaffirmed the potential critical role of the state through employment benefits and social services and as a key actor to guarantee social and economic equality. It has also showed how the inaction of the state can have grave impact on all levels of society. For how long governments are inclined to continue developing wide welfare support is unknown. There is a risk that government expenditure and support is contracted due to fiscal deficits. This could mean a possible return to austerity and extreme individualised approaches to inclusion in society solely centred on participation in education, training and employment. Ultimately, this will reanimate the policy misrecognition of the multiple forms of belonging by young people. It will be the task of youth researchers to expand the policy and research agenda on what belonging means for young people beyond limiting policy frameworks.

References Allen, K. (2014). ‘Blair’s children’: Young women as ‘aspirational subjects’ in the psychic landscape of class. The Sociological Review, 62(4), 760–779. Altman, J., & Fogarty, B. (2010). Indigenous Australians as ‘no gaps’ subjects, education and development in remote Australia. In I.  Synder & J. Nieuwenhuysen (Eds.), Closing the gap in education: Improving outcomes in southern world societies (pp. 109–128). Monash University Publishing. Andres, L., & Wyn, J. (2010). The making of a generation: The children of the 1970s in adulthood. University of Toronto Press. Antonucci, L., Hamilton, M., & Roberts, S. (2014). Constructing a theory of youth and social policy. In L. Antonucci, M. Hamilton, & S. Roberts (Eds.), Young people and social policy in Europe (pp. 13–34). Palgrave Macmillan. Armstrong, D. (2006). Becoming criminal: The cultural politics of risk. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 10(02–03), 265–278.

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CHAPTER 5

Transitions and Participation

Introduction The concepts of transition and participation are so ubiquitous within youth research that they scarcely attract critical attention. It is largely taken for granted that young people ‘belong’ in a transitional status, between childhood and adulthood. Youth is routinely categorised as a stage of life in which biological and psychological developments are matched with social and institutional processes, with success marked by the transition into adulthood, socially, economically and biologically. It is common for research on youth transitions to focus on young people as primarily economic beings, giving priority to the domains of educational qualifications and skills and employment (or ‘school to work’), while participation conventionally focuses on young people’s citizenship, seen as political engagement and agency (or ‘voice’). Thus, the concept of transition invokes the stages and milestones that mark the trajectory from childhood to adulthood, and youth participation is its partner, invoking the practices that are seen to be appropriate for young people’s ‘expression’ or ‘voice’ through these stages. Together, this pairing of concepts covers much of the youth research landscape. In the following sections we take a closer look at the use of these concepts. We explore the work that categorical, universalising and substantialist dominant conceptions of transition do in youth studies. We juxtapose © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_5

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these against the ways in which alternative, relational concepts of belonging shift from assuming the a priori reality of youth as a universal category bounded by normative prescriptions, to an approach that focuses on the dynamic, changing relationships between young people and their worlds. A relational analytical register spans the multiplicity of individual’s subjective identifications through to institutional processes, focusing on the relationships between people, people and things, and researcher and researched. Firstly, we discuss the concepts of youth transition and youth participation to identify their conceptual provenance and the dominant uses of these terms in youth research. Our consideration of these concepts builds a picture of the deeply entrenched assumptions about who young people are and how they belong in society, echoing some of the insights presented in Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) and foreshadowing our discussion in Chaps. 6 (Citizenship) and 7 (Mobilities). Concepts of transition and participation, when framed by categorical and universalising conceptions of young people, locate their capabilities within narrow institutional performativities. In this way, these ways approaches define how and where young people belong and support the institutional measures of inclusion and exclusion and the language of a mainstream that underpins unbelonging. In exploring the assumptions underlying dominant approaches to transition and participation, we show how they impose an order on the fluid, messy, and changing landscape of young people’s lives that many young people cannot recognise. Next, we turn to work by Indigenous authors on youth transitions, whose use of relational concepts of belonging bring a more critical understanding of young people’s transitions and trajectories and of their participation in the institutions with which they must engage (especially formal education). Indigenous scholars show how transition and participation can be usefully unshackled from categorical, substantialist and normative approaches, to recognise that young people’s trajectories and the nature and quality of their participation in education are made intelligible in the present through acknowledgement of the complex interrelationships of cultural knowledge and historical context. Although there is substantial international literature to show that Indigenous young people and their families place a high value on formal education, their participation in education is framed by the imperative (for them) to ‘close the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes. Indigenous scholars show that categorical, substantialist conceptions of transition and participation

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inevitably create unbelonging and a lack of visibility for many Indigenous young people and recreate colonial dispossession. By contrast educational practices based on relational approaches to transition and participation make their lives more visible, to underpin a sense of connection to and belonging in formal education. Following this, we focus on gender, to show how the trajectories and participation of young women through education and into employment are made invisible through conventional notions of transition and participation that take a universal, categorical and normative approach. One of the features of these approaches to transition and participation, as we have pointed out above, is that they assume a causal link between educational credentials and employment outcomes, often drawing on a metaphor of ‘pathways’ that are imagined to exist between the domains of education and work. An examination of gendered patterns of transition show that the relationships between educational credentials and employment works better for men than for women. Although more young women in Western countries have, for the last quarter of a century, participated in higher education than their male counterparts, their participation in employment is largely through part-time employment and their income is consistently less than their male peers. In this section we explore how the invisibility of women’s trajectories is fostered through categorical approaches to transition and participation in higher education and work, and illustrate how a relational approach, drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and doxa, makes the nature and quality of women’s transitions and participation visible. Extending this analysis, we explore the global phenomenon of transition regimes. Here, we show how a re-framing of youth transitions and participation, using the affordances of relational concepts of belonging, shifts the focus from categorising and normative concepts of belonging to recognise the complex processes that connect young people, meaningfully, to their worlds.

Youth Transition As Talburt and Lesko (2012) point out, the concept of youth invokes a universal category of transitional beings whose destiny is to transition into responsible and productive adults. Transition is a metaphor that leads intuitively to the identification of the normative and non-normative patterns of trajectories through a defined phase. The metaphor of transition

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is at its strongest in research on young people’s patterns of engagement in education and work. Its capacity to identify normative and ‘at risk’ trajectories is an important source of information for government policies. These policies not only categorise young people according to institutionally sanctioned markers, they also create sub-categories of young people who are labelled ‘disadvantaged’, ‘at risk’ or NEETS, an acronym which is widely used to describe some groups of young people and stands for Not in Employment or Training. One of the attractions of using a categorical approach is that the data it generates can be read as having causal properties, such as the assumption that there is a causal relationship between a young person’s level of education and their employment outcome. This assumption in turn presents the reason for poor employment outcomes (simplistically) as poor educational decision-making by a young person or their family, or poor patterns of participation. The assumed chain of events, set against institutional markers of progress, misses the complex relationships that create unemployment and under-employment, success and failure. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have noted the emergence of insecure work and underemployment as the ‘new normal’ for young people (Furlong et al., 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in late 2019 has, at the time of writing this book, impacted disproportionately on young people’s employment, and is predicted to cast a long shadow over their employment in the future (Tuohy, 2020). There was little evidence that youth unemployment and underemployment can be solved simply through personal investment in education alone (Chesters, 2020; Chesters & Wyn, 2020). The economic recession that is predicted to accompany the pandemic will further undermine the value of educational credentials and require a ‘reset’ of the ways we think about young people’s place in our society. This shift in thinking will necessarily require a more critical approach to the idea of youth transitions. As we discussed in Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings), the idea of youth transition as a problematic and deficit phase of life owes a debt to the emerging discipline of psychology, in which writers G. Stanley Hall (1904), followed by Piaget (1954) and Erikson (1965) categorised youth as a period of storm and stress and defined a series of developmental stages towards the achievement of adulthood. It is easy to see how this psychological approach translates into the contemporary focus on youth transitions from education to work positioning young people as deficit, ‘immature’ and lesser versions of adults.

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Youth-as-transition became a common metaphor in the 1980s, to frame thinking about the collapse of the youth labour market (see Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads)). The economic developments of the 1980s and 1990s created the conditions for the positioning of young people as economic subjects, whose delayed full economic participation through extended engagement in education was explicitly mirrored by new psychological claims of ‘arrested’ (Côté, 2000) or ‘emerging’ adulthood (Arnett, 2014). As Cohen and Ainley (2000) have argued, achieving employment and becoming a ‘mature adult’ are often conflated within transitions research. The focus of youth-as-transition approaches on young people as economic subjects is also observed by Kelly (2006) when he argues that young people are compelled to perform the ‘entrepreneurial Self’, demonstrating their maturity through entrepreneurial performances of the transition from education to the labour market. Similarly, as we discussed in more detail in Chap. 4 (Policy Frames), Mizen (2002) shows how youth policies in the UK created categories of deserving and undeserving recipients of welfare, based on narrow conceptions of economic participation. Yet, despite the power of institutional and policy frameworks over young people’s lives, the onus for ‘successful transition’ is routinely placed on individual young people. This is illustrated in the tendency for the expansion of tertiary education and the heightened precarisation of work over the last quarter of a century to be accompanied by the shift of responsibility from the collective to individuals. Young people are encouraged to manage these risks and to invest in the accumulation of resources to successfully navigate their transition to adulthood and avoid falling into the cracks of precarity and social exclusion (Bowman et al., 2015; Woodman & Wyn, 2015). There is increasing awareness that the focus on young people’s trajectories, and the developmental and causal links between the stages of these trajectories, misses the relationships between their individual biographies and the dynamics of their social, economic, political and cultural context. Furthermore, as Furlong et  al. (2017) point out, research that aims to measure ‘successful’ and ‘risky’ patterns, facilitates an individualising policy focus that is readily translated into punitive policies. Policy frameworks based on this understanding of transition are disposed to assume that it is young people who are the problem, ignoring long-term shifts in demand for labour or the dynamics of colonisation, focussing instead on remediating those with ‘risky’ patterns. They tend to categorise young people into

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institutionally defined stages of transition and are associated with poorly conceived educational programs and training schemes and dead-end qualifications, regardless of young people’s aspirations.

Youth Participation Young people’s participation in decision-making is largely understood through their engagement in institutions, including schools, youth groups, sports organisations and local, state and national government organisations. Just as these institutions themselves create ‘truths’ and taken for granted understandings about young people, they also create the discursive frames within which participation occurs. Concepts of transition and participation inevitably carry assumptions about what young people are and what they can do. That is not to say that there are many examples of practices that go against this grain, as we discuss below. However, here we consider the nature of the ‘grain’. Bessant (2020) points out that a basic premise that underpins the treatment of young people in the institutions we have mentioned above is that young people are not capable of political action. Echoing the assumptions inherent in youth-as-transition approaches, Bessant argues that young people are seen as lacking rationality, experience and the right level of social and emotional development to be recognised as partners in decision-­ making. She attributes these assumptions to the narratives about stages of development that inform the treatment of young people. Her work urges researchers to instead take account of the historical and social constitutive processes that ‘make’ youth, making the case that the concept of youth is a construct, part of a symbolic order of institutional practices. Subjecting these assumptions to scrutiny, Bessant (2020) shows how representations of young people have systematically underestimated their active engagement in politics and change-making. Hartung (2017) also draws attention to the ways in which young people are ‘constructed’ within the dominant discourses about citizenship and participation. She shows how beliefs about children and young people as competent social actors with rights to participate in decisions that affect their lives, are constructed through discourses of rights and citizenship in the United Nations; non-government organisations (such as World Vision, Amnesty International and Peace Child International) and states (meaning local, state and national levels of government that are directly responsible for making decisions regarding public funding and policy-making for

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young people). This position she identifies as a humanistic liberal tradition that constructs human beings as rational, autonomous fixed subjects who are capable of speaking and acting in their own best interests. While this approach has the benefit of focusing on young people’s agency, she argues that it is based on an apolitical concept of young people, disconnected from their social context. Hartung also documents how children and young people’s participation in decision-making and involvement in politics within institutions and organisations is rendered ‘unknowable’ by the use of standard assessment tools for measuring organisational outcomes. These tools, she argues, favour tangible and measurable outcomes, excluding dimensions of participatory practice by children and young people that are unique to specific contexts. For example, she argues, the role played by emotions in participatory relationships is often ignored. Hartung shows how participation is not a neutral instrument but a technology of power which often homogenises and universalises children and young people, reifying the binary between young person and adult. As we explore in more detail in the following section, this makes the lives and actions of those who do not conform to the norm invisible. Bessant (2020) argues that the blindness to young people’s active participation in political life is curious, given the ample evidence of their engagement. She demonstrates how young people have been politically engaged across time, from the eighteenth century through to the present, revealing how there is a consistent disconnect between dominant ideas about how children and young people should engage with politics, and what they actually do. Her examples span the experiences of the 14-year old Jehanne of Domremy in the north of France (known as Joan of Arc), who led an army to end the siege of Orléans and enabled Charles VII to be installed as the King of France in 1429, to the contemporary global environmental warrior, Greta Thunberg, who has galvanised action to protect the planet’s environment since organising a school climate strike movement at the age of 15. Bessant’s point is that young people are active participants in the political struggles of their times, as school-non-­ attenders, delinquents, environmental activists, refugees and public artists  – but not in ways that are recognised using institutional lenses or measurement tools. These authors show how participation, when framed by categorical and universalising conceptions of young people, locates their capabilities within narrow institutional performativities. These ways of ‘making’ young

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people (Bessant, 2020), define how and where young people belong. In the next section, we show how shifting the conceptual frame to a relational concept of belonging brings a more critical understanding of young people’s transitions and trajectories and of their participation in the institutions with which they must engage. To do this, we turn to the work of Indigenous scholars.

Indigenous Young People’s Transitions and Participation Writing by Indigenous scholars cuts across conventional approaches to transition and participation. This is because the conceptual lenses Indigenous scholars use are inherently about the relational dimensions of belonging. When Indigenous scholars analyse the lives of young people and their engagement in institutions, they use relational concepts, seeking to recognise relationships between past, present and future, between people and between people and ‘things’ that are non-human. For example, Elliott-Groves and Fryberg (2019, p. 642) explain: Emerging from a largely interdependent standpoint, Indigenous people view themselves as a reflection of the multiplicity of reciprocal relationships (with each other and with ancestors, plants, animals, and the cosmos) that inform their past, present, and future selves. Indigenous conceptions of reality are typically based on an understanding of mutual reciprocity

Elliott-Groves’ home community is the Cowichan Tribes on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada and Fryberg is from the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, in the USA. Their approach positions young people not as individuals with a responsibility to confirm to institutional markers of progress, but as connected, to their people and their places with specific histories that inform the present and the future. From this perspective, young people’s lives are given meaning through the knowledge that is passed down through the chains of generation. By making visible the threads of connection across time and space, Indigenous scholarship reveals the narrowness of many school-based conceptions of transition and participation  – a narrowness that erases the lives of those who are not deemed to be normative. We discuss this in Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings), where we draw attention to the invisibility of young Aboriginal people in Connell et al.’s (1957) study of Sydney youth. While

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the book Growing up in an Australian City aims to explore how young people will shape the future of the new colony, it does not see a place for young Aboriginal people in this future, nor does it register the significance of Australia’s Indigenous peoples or a reckoning with its settler-colonial conditions for shaping the nation. Our first example draws on the experience of Australian Indigenous young people. Morgan (2019) (a Gumilaroi man from Walgett, New South Wales) highlights the forced participation by young Indigenous Australians in programs (such as formal education and the forced separation of children from families) that they had little involvement in determining. He characterises this approach as a ‘Guest Paradigm’, following Derrida’s concept of a ‘host-guest paradigm’ (Derrida, 2000). Being forced to participate in practices that they have had no say in, and that do not recognise Indigenous history, knowledge or practices, Morgan argues, means that Indigenous people are treated as guests, not sovereign citizens. He points out that Indigenous people have well-developed epistemological systems that recognise ‘the interconnectedness of all things, and this symbiotic relationship helped to create a harmonious coexistence with all living things and the environment’ (Morgan, 2019, p.  113). Yet, Indigenous knowledge, heritage and history is largely absent from school curricula. As guests in a foreign system, Indigenous students are not able to see themselves in the narratives of past, present or future. The erasure of Indigenous young people from normative educational transition narratives is highlighted by Elliott-Groves and Fryberg (2019). They point out that positive representations of contemporary Indigenous young people are seldom reflected in public institutions in Canada and the USA. Yet, they argue, identity formation is connected to the cultural narratives that are embedded in the social representational landscape. Echoing Morgan’s argument, they suggest that the lack of connection with Indigenous culture and knowledge and of positive representations means that young Indigenous people cannot find ways to connect their past and present with possible, positive futures, placing young Indigenous people at risk of psychological harm and suicide. Returning to the Australian context, Morgan notes that the debilitating legacy of school failure, now carried by Indigenous young people, and documented by many reports and inquiries (see Closing the Gap Report, Australian Government, 2020) is routinely addressed by increasing access to resources. As Morgan (2019, p. 121) explains, simply increasing access to resources ‘… implies a passive, consumer role rather than a position of agency and voice. Access does not necessarily lead to empowerment’.

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Morgan goes on to explain that offering ‘access’ is granted by those in power  – it is not an expression of a mutual decision-making process. Morgan also draws attention to the pattern for Australian Indigenous students to be failed by school systems and yet, when they find their way into higher education, to achieve scholarly excellence (Behrendt et al., 2012). This unexpected outcome, Morgan suggests, may be related to the relatively more open approach to knowledge that is possible within higher education, compared to school education. Morgan concludes that the missing elements in representations of youth are ‘a living, relational ecology of place and the symbiotic kinship structures that define our identity’ (2019, p. 122). As Morgan concludes, and as the review of Indigenous writing across many cultures, including Australian, New Zealand, African, North American and Chilean contained in the Handbook of Indigenous Education (McKinley & Tuhiwai-Smith, 2019) shows, the ongoing project of colonisation of Indigenous young people is inseparable from the universalising, normative and categorising assumptions of conventional assumptions about youth transitions and youth participation. Taking this a step further, Brown (2018) a young Indigenous woman who belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia, whose work we introduced in Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads), explains how Indigenous educational disadvantage can be seen as a product of colonial dispossession. This is an important point, because it exposes the artifice of policies such as ‘Closing the Gap’ that purport to support the educational achievement of Indigenous students while at the same time holding in place the very institutional processes that create and re-create disadvantage. Her work illustrates how universal, normative and categorical concepts of transition and participation work to exacerbate disadvantage, alienating those whose trajectories do not conform and marginalising those who cannot see a place to participate meaningfully. This is because such policies are based on an ahistorical understanding of learning, seeing the learner as a part of a ‘universal’ transitional category, and, by putting the onus on Indigenous students to ‘step up’, inflict a form of institutional violence that fails to recognise what Indigenous students know or to respect who they are. Brown (2018) sees a link between the absence of recognition of the history of colonisation in Australia in the curriculum and classroom, and the ongoing impact of colonial violence in educational institutions. This failure to recognise Indigenous peoples as authoritative is in part only possible because normative, homogenising discourses about youth almost always position Indigenous youth as

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outside the norm, as lacking skills and knowledge; as ‘a problem in need of fixing’ (Brown, 2018, p. 5). She concludes that: The insistence on forgetting is inhibiting a more nuanced, appropriate and applicable way of addressing Indigenous educational inequality, and inhibiting the provision of generative learning spaces for both Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous learners while allowing structural inequality and thus indirect violence, to continue. (Brown, 2018, p. 14)

Her work, and that of other Indigenous scholars highlights how concepts of transition and participation can be usefully unshackled from categorical, substantialist and normative approaches, and why they should be.

Young Women’s Transitions and Participation Despite the fact that (in Western countries) young women have had higher participation rates in higher education than their male counterparts for the last quarter of a century, their transitions to employment are less impressive and their participation in full-time work is surprisingly marginal. This observation is noted in an emerging international literature. For example, Kupfer’s (2014) UK analysis of the transitions from education to work shows that women lag behind men in most occupations in job quality as well as experiencing lower pay and less opportunity for promotion. This finding is supported Stier and Yaish’s (2014) study of women in Israel and in Germany, Leuze and Strauß (2016) show that despite being in the majority of higher education graduates, women earn considerably less than their male counterparts. In Australia women in their mid-twenties had, by 2001, increased their participation in higher education from 9% in 1976 to 24%, compared with men whose participation increased from 16% to 23% during that time (ABS, 2010) and by 2014, 42% of females and 31% of males between 25 and 29  years of age had attained a bachelor degree or above (ABS, 2015). Yet, despite their increased educational participation, Australian women’s labour force participation has grown relatively slowly. The proportion of all women in the labour force has only risen from 52% in 1992 to 57% in 2006 (Craig et al., 2010, p. 32). This apparent paradox is analysed by Wyn et al. (2017), to make visible the transition experiences of young women in Australia. They argue that categorical conceptions of transition and participation have served to obscure patterns of young people’s lives, drawing instead on a reified

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notion of transition as a series of ‘pathways’ between education and work (Billett et al., 2010) reinforcing the notion of a causal relationship between educational qualifications and employment outcomes. As in other areas of youth research, the use of normative markers of transition serve to create a typology of ‘standard’ and ‘poor’ transitions, and ‘full’ or ‘marginal’ participation, in this case washing out the systematic gendered nature of these patterns across countries and time. They are obscured because young adults’ trajectories and participation are simply measured as a collation of individual ‘units’ according to predetermined markers of progress. We can see here the effect of categorical concepts of transition that identify where and how people (should) belong within an institutional schema that ignores the nature and quality of their participation and trajectories. When the analysis of patterns of transition and participation in education and employment are analysed using a relational frame, the nature of relationships that shape how and where people do and can participate becomes clearer. Wyn et al. (2017) shift the frame of analysis of women’s transitions through and participation in education and work using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. They show that while the concept of transition enables a mapping of individual and aggregate patterns, Bourdieu’s relational framework reveals the sociological dynamic between social institutions and individual biographies that creates these patterns. Resonating with Bessant’s (2020) use of Bourdieu’s work to interrogate youth participation referred to earlier in this chapter, Wyn et al. (2017) are drawn to Bourdieu’s rejection of substantialist approaches that privilege ‘things’ (such as rates of school completion or labour market entry), in favour of a relational approach that sees phenomena as a set of structured relationships in which hierarchical social positions can be reproduced or challenged. They show how this approach avoids the tendency to reify the objects of study, to instead understand how things (such as educational credentials or skills) gain their meaning (and value) from the field of practices and relationships in which they are embedded. Bourdieu’s concepts of field (a structured set of relationships and ‘rules of the game’), habitus (flexible, transposable but durable dispositions) and capital (economic, cultural and social) (Bourdieu, 1990) are used to analyse young women’s experiences, focusing on the time economy (who has autonomy over the use of their time and what this looks like) within and across these fields Wyn et  al. (2017) point out that time is a limited resource for which there is competition both within and across fields. The time economy can be analysed as a key logic that is controlled in different

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ways in the fields of formal education, workplaces and in personal and family life. In workplaces, the time economy is determined through formal, contractual arrangements such as working hours as well as informal ones such as a culture of ‘staying on’ at work to complete tasks or socialising after work. In higher education, individuals have a relatively high degree of autonomy. They can study part-time, can choose study options that enable them to exercise some control over how their day is spent and can ‘change track’ to respond to changing life circumstances. In family life, the time economy can also be flexible, but when family life involves a carer responsibility (for babies, children, siblings or elders) the time economy can be highly inflexible. Focusing on educational institutions and workplaces as fields (rather than transitional pathways), Wyn et al. (2017) show how the time economies in these fields operate according to very different logics. The time economy in higher education enables a high degree of autonomy, which both women and men use to engage in paid work and to meet their responsibilities as carers. But the time economy of workplaces is highly regulated, giving individuals little autonomy, and most workplaces simply assume that employees are free of any care responsibilities (Cuervo et al., 2012; Pocock, 2003). While the advent of Working From Home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic has made all workers’ domestic lives more visible (sometimes with humorous consequences), nonetheless, the challenges that the time economy places on people to manage paid employment and carer responsibilities tends to be resolved overwhelmingly by women assuming the responsibility, and making the ‘choice’ to invest time in relationships, caring and reproductive labour. The widespread nature of precarious work, long working hours for full-time workers and non-standard working hours increase competition for the scarce resource of time across the fields of work and family. As McNay (1999) points out, the association of child-caring work with women is seen as self-­ evident and ‘natural’, becoming inscribed in institutional practices and taken up in the habitus of individuals. The invisibility of the caring responsibilities of employees is a form of symbolic violence that produces gender inequality (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Gendered patterns of inequality in workplaces do not occur along a supposed pathway from education to work. They are created through entrenched practices and logics within workplaces that assume a worker is disassociated from other spheres of life. While transitions research can help to identify patterns of progress across education and work, a relational

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framework is needed to understand how these patterns are produced – and to change them.

Global Transition Regimes In this section we shift the focus to the recent normative trend demanding young people to be mobile, national and internationally, which responds to the increasing expansion of international education and labour markets. These global movements of young people present the apparent contradiction of belonging and mobility, for which concepts of transition and participation are central. The term ‘transition regimes’, as explained by sociologists du Bois-­ Reymond and Stauber (2005) refers to the institutional processes, practices and discourses of education systems, labour markets, policies and welfare systems that create common patterns of youth transition. They use the concept of ‘transition regimes’ to refer to the biographical turning points in young people’s transitions to work, and Walther (2006) draws on this concept to explore the nature of national policy frameworks that aim to regulate youth. In the discussion below we discuss how global transition regimes draw attention to the relationship between the state and young people. Next, we highlight how, against this backdrop, youth research drawing on concepts of belonging acknowledges the complex threads across past, present and future that are always being woven through the dynamics of social change and biography. In other words, while global transition regimes position young people as economic subjects whose participation in decision-making is to be constrained within institutional limits, sociologists show how these youthful mobilities are also part of complex relationships – connecting individual biographies to broader social dynamics of culture, economics, politics and environment. Young people’s mobility is associated with a valorisation of youth as productive labourers and international students, and as contributors to the national and global economy and culture. That is, how young people move and belong is, in part, an illustration of national and supra-national political and economic projects (see Cairns et al., 2017; Farrugia, 2018; King, 2017). Mobility is organised through complex institutional structures by national and supra-national political and economic actors with the aim of building youth with a cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial outlook to participate in the global economy (Farrugia, 2018). This represents the mobility of valorised or desirable youth that populate education systems

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and labour markets for professional jobs, and which are ‘celebrated, encouraged, commodified and institutionally catered for’ (Farrugia, 2018, p. 87). In turn, as Robertson et al. (2018) argue, these mobilities are valued by young people as important experiences in their transitions, particularly for the advantage they promise in competitive professional labour markets (see also Brown et al., 2010). Thus, while mobility has tended to be an important ‘material and symbolic’ resource for young people (see Thomson & Taylor, 2005, p. 328), the consolidation of global policy frameworks has underpinned the emergence of global transition regimes, that generate common arrangements of youth pathways (du Bois-Reymond & Stauber, 2005). The European Union, for example, has created one of the most powerful transition regimes designed for the valorisation of youth mobility. This has taken the form of higher education infrastructure, developed in the early 1980s to play a vital role in the design of a new European material and imaginary space of belonging (Boswell et al., 2011; Cairns et al., 2017; King, 2017). Similarly, in the United Kingdom a policy shift in the mid-2000s encouraged British higher education students’ transnational mobility with the goal of fostering intercultural skills and a cosmopolitan outlook (Brooks & Waters, 2010, p. 143). This movement of people has inspired researchers to use concepts of belonging to characterise as a sense of identification with mobility (Dolby & Rizvi, 2008) and a cosmopolitan connection to a cultural, social and, moral outlook of the world (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Brooks & Waters, 2010). This form of belonging, associated with the idea of ‘liquid migration’, is seen to be ‘based on temporality, flexibility, and open-ended trajectories’, contrasting with the more biographical, life-course approach hinged around notions of ‘youth transitions’, raising the possibility that mobility has become the ‘new norm’ for ‘successful youth’ (King, 2017, p. 2). Analysing new European youth mobilities, Samuk et al. (2019, p. 1) argue that mobility has been constructed as a ‘normative stance’ in youth transitions. Conradson and Latham (2005) also point out to the normalisation of travel, for study, work or leisure, as part of the normative youth biography. Mobility as a normative stance is also supported by research in Great Britain where ‘rootedness to place is thus antithetical to the kinds of subjects demanded by the creative economy and associated with, or productive of, creative places’ (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013, p.  501). The types of international and rural to urban mobilities that have characterised

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the last 20  years have established mobility as ‘an important marker and maker of transitions’ for young people (Robertson et al., 2018, p. 203). It remains to be seen if the restrictions on international travel that have been put in place as a measure to inhibit infection with COVID-19 at the time of writing this book bring about a re-setting of mobility as a marker of transition for young people. While this pandemic is likely to remain a threat for some time to come, it is also likely that the pressures for mobility in the form of global education and employment markets, and the pursuit of a better life by young people who are poor, are affected by war or environmental disaster are likely to remain  – and possibly to become exacerbated. The significance of mobilities for young people is revealed in a wide range of sociological research, which shows how mobility is a practice involving multiple relations across dimensions of life. Youth research on mobilities consistently seeks to account for the non-normative, fluid, dynamic relationship of young people to society, using relational concepts of transition that focus more on the relationships that build meaning, being and connection than on trajectories. Considering the ‘multiple becomings’ (the fluidity of ways of being), that young people build throughout the life course renders visible the messiness, multiplicity and fluidity of youth transitions. For example, in her research with visually impaired British youth, Worth (2009) has argued for conceptualising youth transitions as a form of ‘becoming’. Another example is Galam’s (2018) research on the education to work transitions of young Filipino males who do unpaid work in the international seafaring industry as a strategy for investing in their future. By participating in unpaid work within the Filipino ‘experience economy’, these young men learn to deploy servitude, while at the same time acquiring ‘masculine agency and adulthood’, which ‘becomes a profoundly rational exercise in futurity’ (Galam, 2018, p.  1057). Other researchers have focused on the relationship between futurity, agency and hope as a characteristic of transitions in a precarious labour market by young Australians (Cook & Cuervo, 2019). They examine the different modes of hope expressed by young people and analyse how this fluid way of thinking and planning for the future is shaped by individuals’ experiences, by institutions and social contexts. In their study of Italian students imagining their futures, Cuzzocrea and Mandich (2016) argue that mobility is positioned as a way out from the lack of opportunities in the region (Sardinia). Hopes of mobility are not just imagined within the Italian

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territory, they are transnational moves to bypass the insecurities of their local context (see also Cairns, 2014). Yet, while mobility is imagined also as a ‘form of self-experimentation’, it is also seen an ‘entry ticket’ to better social conditions and opportunities in the future (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016, pp. 559–560). In these studies, the concept of futurity is put to work to challenge the normativity of traditional transitions to adulthood, anchored in the experience of previous generations, by making visible the multiplicity, dynamic and messiness of today’s young people’s experiences. By making space for temporality and futurity in the analysis of young people’s lives, this research challenges the normative emphasis on transitions to rather view it as an open and fluid process. Cahill and Leccardi (2020) illustrate how the concept of transition can be repurposed when it is unshackled from normative assumptions. Emphasising the need to re-think young adults’ participation in global transition regimes, Cahill and Leccardi employ the critically-reimagined concept of resilience. Appropriating this concept from its psychological origins, Cahill and Leccardi argue that a sociologically-informed concept of resilience expands our understanding of the work that young adults do to manage the tension between uncertain personal futures and largely negative collective futures (including climate change and economic recession). They draw on research on Australian young adults from the Life Patterns longitudinal research program (Wyn et al., 2020) to explore how meaning is forged in a context of a fractured and disrupted (transition) timeline. To make meaning adhere to their lives without the security of traditional transitional timelines they show how young adults have developed a new aesthetics of life making that enables them to live with the present despite an uncertain future. Thus, they show how this aesthetic involves paying attention to performing in the present, accepting contradictions and ambiguities as opportunities for emergence. The use of the relational affordances of concepts of belonging to understand youth mobilities also enables a better understanding of the unequal patterns of place-making for youth. For example, some youth researchers have argued that the policy frameworks that orient youth to be mobile also weaken and transform their local formations of place-making. This is illustrated by Allen and Hollingworth (2013) who argue that mobile subjects are evoked within descriptions of work in the knowledge and creative economy, as well as government policies that attach mobility to aspirations. However, drawing on Skeggs (2004), they argue that mobility has

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come to be ‘associated with a bourgeois ‘cosmopolitan’ subjectivity  – highly individualised, flexible and able to move seamlessly through various spaces – while the immobility and attachment to place of the working class has acquired connotations of defeat, fixity and failure’ (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013, p. 500). Thomson and Taylor (2005, p. 338) argue that ideas and practices of cosmopolitanism and localism ‘are useful as they make power visible, suggesting a more nuanced configuration of ‘exclusion’ that combines material inequalities with the specificities of place and creativity of agents’. The strengthening of mobility as a normative component of youth transitions then serves to reinforce pre-existent inequalities, at a class base, of who is able to be mobile and who is stuck in place (see Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Geldens, 2008). Thus, the roll-out of policies and programs designed to smooth the mobility of students and professionals also serves to reinforce processes of social inequality as some young people have access, while others do not, to these opportunities and to different forms of belonging, and of shaping their futures. While youth mobilities have tended to be viewed as trajectories (or transitions) that open options for young people, expanding their opportunities for participation (economically and politically) this is not the case for all young people. There is a body of research on the question of youth mobilities that focuses on the way in which mobility for some young people results in ‘unbelonging’, limiting their participation economically, socially and politically. For example, Meardi (2012) shows how post-EU enlargement, there has been a lack of social and labour inclusion for young people who have migrated for work, including low levels of bargaining power and satisfaction with working conditions. There is a wide agreement that while young people move in and out of their regions for labour opportunities, the promise of availability of work is not always fulfilled (Brown et  al., 2010; Rabe et  al., 2019; Woodman & Wyn, 2015) and opportunities are stratified by gender, class and race. Ultimately, global transitions regimes increasingly entail high levels of youth mobility that can provide an institutionalised place for youth within education and employment realms, yet in many instances of a precarious type that cannot support young people’s construction of a sense of belonging. Our consideration of global transition regimes illustrates the challenge of acknowledging the dual dynamic of societal transformation and biographical trajectories. These elements are shifting and always connected, challenging youth researchers to recognise the specific historical context

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of young people’s lives, their subjective experiences and the meanings they make and at the same time, the operation of wider institutional, state and global processes of transition and participation.

What Do Concepts of Belonging Do in Research on Youth Transitions and Participation? The field of youth research is saturated with the concepts of transition and participation. Yet, these concepts seldom receive the critical attention they deserve. Our analysis reveals how, operationalised through concepts of transition and participation, the idea of belonging can be used to render vastly different views of young people and of the nature and dynamics of inequalities. This chapter has explored the ways in which dominant concepts of transition do the work of delineating where young people (should) belong, drawing on categorical, universalising, homogenising, individualising and normative frameworks. These concepts, which are popular in research on young people in education and in the labour market, are supported by technologies of measurement that purport to show desirable, deserving and normal trajectories through education and into work. From this perspective, the concept of transition does the work of identifying faulty or risky trajectories, creating categories of young people such as NEET or ‘the disadvantaged’, a term which Brown (2018) suggests has become synonymous with Indigenous youth. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the concept of transition is often associated with the assumption of a causal relationship between education and employment (Chesters & Wyn, 2019), that tends to extrapolate the experience of a minority (and especially of young men) to everyone (Wyn et al., 2017). Concepts of transition that delineate where young people (should) belong are mirrored by concepts of participation that delineate how young people (should) belong. Institutionally sanctioned and professionally determined age-appropriate engagements and contributions with the institutions in which young people must engage are also based on normative, categorical and universal assumptions about young people, that tend to portray them as not capable or knowledgeable (yet), to make them invisible through a failure to recognise young people’s histories, their knowledge and who they are or to fail to recognise young people’s political acts for what they are because they are not sanctioned.

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But other frames of reference are also used to understand the dynamics of transition and participation. In this chapter we draw a contrast between approaches in youth research that seek to define where and how young people belong to those that seek to understand the relationships between young people and their worlds. In its simplest terms, the difference between these approaches is the shift from categorising young people according to standards and norms to understanding the nature and quality of relationships in their worlds. We present examples from three areas of youth research about belonging: Indigenous participation in formal education, gendered patterns of transition from education to work and global transition regimes to illustrate the work that different conceptual approaches do. We draw on an international literature by Indigenous scholars to show how Indigenous young people are marginalised from education by practices that make their lives invisible and fail to acknowledge the violence of colonial dispossession. In drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, we highlight a crucial area where categorical concepts of transition and participation have obscured the experiences of Indigenous young people, silencing them in the present, erasing their history, and foreclosing their futures. Shifting to the relational register that is explicit in concepts of belonging, we make visible the practices of belonging that support young people’s trajectories. When we make these practices visible, we can see how young people manage the challenges of structural change and uncertainty and can recognise the threads of connection that young people must weave in their own way to make their lives. Drawing on previous work by Wyn and Cuervo, we also show how women’s lives are made invisible by institutional practices in workplaces; practices that some scholars have described as a form of symbolic violence. Drawing on the relational approach offered by Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, we show how the time economy, a key ‘logic’ of ‘the rules of the game’ in workplaces, creates conflicts of interest between the fields of work and caring responsibilities, conflicts that are vested in women, to be resolved by the ‘choices’ that the make. Youth research on global transition regimes has tended to resist the reliance on categorical concepts of transition and participation, to reveal the ways in which young people navigate the emergence of global education and employment markets. The research reveals the way in which ‘staying in place’ rather than being mobile can be a strategy that enables young people to use resources to make productive lives; it shows how migrant

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young people experience ‘un-belonging’ and it explores how concepts such as resilience can be framed sociologically to make visible the work that young people do to belong in times when timelines are fractured and futures seem foreclosed.

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CHAPTER 6

Citizenship

Introduction This chapter considers how, and with what implications, a belonging frame has emerged to shape new understandings and agendas regarding contemporary youth citizenship, producing both more expansive and more limiting approaches to civic and political engagement. As Wood and Black (2019, p. 167) note, ‘Citizenship and belonging are often used in interchangeable ways… but very little work has untangled the closely woven associations between these two terms or considered what this might mean for how we understand young citizens today.’ Here we demonstrate how belonging is situated in the context of its moment in an intellectual history in youth citizenship studies and deployed in a youth policy landscape. The chapter explores legal versus ‘maximal’ theorisations of citizenship for youth today, the role of the state and communities in regulating inclusion for mobile, migrant and Indigenous youth, citizenship and belonging as ‘boundary work’, possibilities for global citizenship and cosmopolitanism, the rise of both productive and destructive trans-national and translocal social and civic networks as well as sovereignty projects for youth, and the everyday practices and local and digital spaces of engagement where young people may feel the capacity to belong and act.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_6

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Defining and Connecting Citizenship and Belonging: From Legal Status to Participation and Membership There are two key ways that youth citizenship studies and policy connect with the concept of belonging. Both emerge out of efforts in citizenship studies to move beyond narrow, minimal and legalistic definitions to account for more substantive elements of citizenship. Specifically, citizenship is increasingly conceptualised in more wholistic ways via i. an emphasis on participation and active engagement in the life of the political community as a core dimension of what it means to be and act as a citizen beyond merely holding a legal status, and ii. attention to the importance of recognition from and sense of membership in society. In these ways, citizenship is seen as fundamentally about belonging because it encompasses formal membership, rights and duties that are actualised through participation, but also forms of inclusion and exclusion in relation to groups, networks and places and the emotional and social processes and effects of being part of, or marginalised from, a larger whole. Next, we examine how these two deeper dimensions of citizenship – participation and membership – have been advanced in the citizenship studies scholarship before considering the ways youth citizenship studies in particular has taken up, and in many ways driven, this turn to belonging. Youth citizenship is a longstanding research and policy issue, sitting at the heart of questions about markers of and pathways to adulthood, young people’s contribution, status and voice in society, and the relationship between youth rights and responsibilities. In classic Western liberal theory, citizenship has been conventionally defined as a legal status in which inheres a set of entitlements and duties that are granted and protected by the state. According to Marshall (1950), this ‘set’ is made up of the three core elements of political, civil and social rights (respective examples include voting, freedom of speech, welfare) which together form the foundation of modern citizenship. Since Marshall’s influential work, many theorists have further differentiated between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ or ‘minimal’ and ‘maximal’ concepts of citizenship. Political and sociological theorists such as Isin and Turner (2007, p. 4) argue that global socioeconomic change, especially that which challenges the authority of the nation-state over citizens, is driving these more substantive citizenship definitions away from formal and technical notions alone and towards paradigms ‘in which the emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings and identities.’ For example, Turner’s (1997) sociological model of

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citizenship includes not only legal status, but also ‘cultural identity’ and ‘membership of a political community’. And influential legal scholar Bosniak (2000, p. 479) has outlined a similarly expanded typology of citizenship consisting of: legal status, rights, political participation, and identity or solidarity: specifically ‘the quality of belonging, the felt aspects of community membership’. These more wholistic conceptualisations of citizenship have particularly stressed active engagement; for example, Faulks (2000, p. 4) argues that ‘a key defining characteristic of citizenship… is an ethic of participation’. This attention to participation is particularly apparent in youth citizenship studies. Youth studies scholar Evans (1995) distinguishes between minimal citizenship as a civil and legal status, which may seem less meaningful to young people in an everyday sense when they are yet to be able to access rights and responsibilities (for example, due to voting age rules), and maximal citizenship as active awareness of membership and participation in what she calls a shared democratic culture, or what others have described as engagement in the life of the political community (Turner, 1997). In large part owing to young people’s exclusion from formal citizenship because of their age (as well as in some cases their gender and ‘racial’ status), youth citizenship scholarship and policy has had a core focus on political socialisation and participation since at least the 1950s, leading to the landmark outcome of the participatory rights of young people becoming enshrined in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Harris, 2017, p. 295). Debates on young people’s participatory citizenship with a particular focus on civic and political knowledge and engagement intensified through the 1990s, with considerable concern about youth voter turnout, civics deficit, political apathy, and changing forms of social movement activism. This focus has meant that young people have been encouraged to increase their knowledge of and participation in formal civic and political processes and institutions. At the same time, there has been critical examination of conventional definitions and measures of participation, as well as investigation of the barriers to young people’s engagement, raising fundamental questions ‘about the efficacy of the official youth participation agenda’ (Bessant, 2004, p. 397). This focus on participation in youth citizenship studies and citizenship studies more broadly has implicitly engaged questions of formal belonging as expressed through civic and political engagement; that is, how young people relate to and practice membership in the state and civic life, how

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they belong to the polity, and how they act on or against the state. A participation agenda attends to citizenship-as-belonging through the formal dimensions of active civic and political membership of a nation-state. However, there has also been a move towards theorising citizenship more explicitly as encompassing felt belonging and connection with communities of membership in ways that may be less formal and operate outside of the basic enactment of political or civil rights. For example, in landmark feminist citizenship scholarship, Werbner and Yuval-Davis (1999, p.  4) move beyond these limited kinds of conceptualisations of citizenship as solely about the state-individual relationship to instead define it as ‘a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging’. Specifically, as Yuval-Davis (2007, p. 561) has since articulated, ‘we need to situate citizenship in the wider context of contemporary politics of belonging’. What might this sense of citizen-belonging, and the politics that govern it, consist of? Anthias (2006, p. 21) argues that ‘to belong is to be accepted as part of a community, to feel safe within it and to have a stake in the future of such a community of membership. To belong is to share values, networks and practices’. This ‘sense of belonging’ dimension of citizenship thus incorporates the subjective and affective experiences of recognition and connection (and non-recognition/disconnection), but in doing so it invokes social, structural processes of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, in citizenship studies, the operationalisation of the concept of belonging as felt membership necessarily attends to the social and political processes by which inclusion and exclusion are constructed, or what Crowley (1999, p. 15) has famously coined ‘the dirty work of boundary maintenance’. So for example, in her influential analytical framework that we have explored in Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads), Yuval-Davis (2006, p. 210) outlines a differentiation between belonging as emotional attachment and feeling ‘at home’, and the political projects of belonging that work to define ‘us’ and ‘them’, but crucially notes that particular political projects of belonging draw selectively on various signifiers of belonging to do their boundary work (2006, p. 199). Others such as Antonsich (2010) and Fenster (2005) have also argued that it is important to focus on the politics of belonging and how it is related to boundary making and processes of inclusion and exclusion, rather than only attending to belonging as a personal feeling of attachment to place, community or identity. In youth citizenship studies, the politics of belonging has been an important dimension in the expansion of citizenship approaches to youth

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experience. As Arnot and Swartz (2012, p. 4) argue, this is in large part because of the ‘youth bulge’, that sees young people at the vanguard of global change including forced global migrations, accelerating urbanisation, deepening socio-economic stratifications, and intensifying nationand identity- building projects (for example, in settler-colonial, high migrant-receiving or post-conflict societies). Also significant are the ongoing forces of colonialism, neocolonialism and land appropriation that disproportionately affect Indigenous youth. Young people’s experiences of citizenship under these conditions are fundamentally shaped by new politics of belonging, both positive and negative. For some youth, these processes create ‘potentially aggravated means of exclusion from mainstream society’ (Arnot & Swartz, 2012, pp. 4–5). For example, the global increase in forced migration has led some nation states to redefine the notion of who can belong, through measures such as tightened border control and visa regulations, national values tests, tolerance of far right extremist political activities, and increasingly punitive Indigenous social policy regimes, all of which disproportionately implicates and affects young people. Other forms of marginalisation are resulting from the rise of the ‘modern urban public’, which can disconnect youth from traditional bonds and in their place generate forms of local urban belonging based on cultures of violence, territorialisation and crime. Young people’s over-representation amongst the world’s un-, under- and low skilled employed, and their resultant experiences of poverty, precarity and marginalisation, can also see them paradoxically positioned as technically having political rights but being outside the space of practical and felt citizen-belonging. On the other side, youth citizenship studies identifies many productive elements in some young people’s new politics of belonging that are engendered by global change, such as opportunities for transnational solidarities, multi-­ scalar domains of political and civic agency, and new communities of membership and responsibility (for example, urban, cultural, digital, and Indigenous sovereign citizenships). Thus far we have outlined the ways in which citizenship and belonging have become entwined around the two core problematics of participation and membership. We have indicated how youth citizenship scholarship in particular has been central to some of these conceptual developments. In

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what follows, we explore more deeply two key domains in which citizenship and belonging are increasingly ‘thought together’ in youth research: these domains are on the one hand the nation, which continues to be the locus of formal citizenship, and on the other, the local, global and digital worlds. We then consider the work that the concept of belonging does in understanding youth citizenship across these domains, evaluating the opportunities and challenges that this frame brings to questions of citizenship for youth today.

Youth Citizenship as Belonging/Not Belonging to the Nation One of the most important ways that youth citizenship is interrogated through a belonging frame is through investigations of young people’s relationship to the nation-state. As Calhoun (2007) has famously argued, even in a globalised, mobile and interconnected world, nations still matter. A large body of work exists on youth and national identity, processes of inclusion in/exclusion from the nation, particularly in a context of diversifying populations and increasing migration, ongoing processes and effects of colonialism/neocolonialism, global connectivity via transnational and virtual mobility, and the global political, social and economic forces that challenge nation-states as the sole authority over citizens. Youth have always played a prominent role in national and imperial imaginaries, especially at key moments of nation-making such as fin de siècle youth citizenship projects in the US and Britain, as well as much of Europe (Lesko, 2001). We explored this in Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings), showing how white youth were positioned as builders of the modern Australian settler-colony in the mid twentieth century and especially as the avant-­ garde of its cultural break from Britain. Youth have also been mobilised as ‘nation-builders’ in the establishment of new regimes that often explicitly pursue youth citizenship formation programs, such as China and Cambodia (Raffin, 2012), or as Müller (2012, p. 68) outlines, post-liberation states and other socialist-oriented newly independent states of the South with strong youth-centred socialist-­ inspired nation building projects (for example Tanzania, Zanzibar, Eritrea, Mozambique, Vietnam, Namibia). Similar such ‘top down’ youthful-­ citizen-­for-the-nation programs are found across other regions such as the

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Middle East and North Africa (see for example Shirazi, 2012) and Eastern Europe (Krupets et al., 2017). Young people are frequently constructed as ‘citizens-in-the-making’ or future leaders, who must embody ‘personal nationalism’ (see Müller, 2012), as their belonging to the nation is not yet secured and must be carefully cultivated through education. Young people are highly visible in the nation-making projects integral to the establishment and maintenance of settler-colonial states. Indigenous youth have been central to colonial practices of nation-making, constituting risky/at-risk figures and bodies who must be disconnected from their communities and controlled by the state because of their threatening status as a new generation of Indigenous peoples who challenge the legitimacy of the settler-state and represent the survival and flourishing of Indigenous peoples and cultures in the face of colonial ‘dying race’ ideologies and policies. For example, in the case of Canada, de Finney (2015, p. 172) demonstrates that Because Indigenous girls and women were perceived by Canadian colonial authorities as critical to the future of Indigenous statehood and cultural survival, gendered colonial policies have sought to disenfranchise them from their Indigenous status, their leadership in Indigenous societies and their access to housing and employment in their communities

Indigenous youth undo colonial claims that first nations peoples constitute a population of the past, and thus violent dismantling of family and community has been implemented to attempt to shape future generational and cultural identities, and thereby how young people come to see themselves as citizens. As Nakata (2017, p. 398) argues in relation to Indigenous child removal policies at the heart of the making of the white Australian nation, ‘The task of making the nation here relies upon interventions into childhood as a direct and effective means to impact upon the next generation of future adult citizens’. We can see here that youth citizenship and belonging are closely tied through a range of nation-building projects. Across various contexts, ‘the “young person” figures as a dense site of investment – political, economic, social, cultural, psychic – in debates about the transmitability, reproduction, and value of the national culture and of the national bond’ (Fortier, 2008, p. 40). While youth has long been a ‘space’ for worrying about the nation (Hage, 2000) and for monitoring indicators of successful nation-­ building (Lesko, 2001, p.  6), it has been particularly in ‘the age of

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migration’ (de Haas et al., 2020), characterised by a massive increase in the global movements of people, that the politics of national belonging has perhaps most intensely centred questions of youth citizenship. In this context, as Maira and Soep (2005, p. xix) suggest, youth have become ‘the ideological battleground in contests of immigration and citizenship’, with young people of migrant or refugee background in the spotlight; a situation cross cut by enduring contestations over settlement and sovereignty in many places. While some research on youth citizenship, migration and the nation focuses on issues of legal status, the bulk of it extends beyond questions of formal citizenship to encompass broader notions and experiences of belonging. Much of this work, influenced by psychosocial paradigms of youth identity, belonging and resilience, has advanced the argument that migrant and refugee background young people struggle to belong or have a split sense of national belonging because they are ‘torn between two cultures’ or have divided loyalties between their ‘home’ communities and their ‘host’ societies. Research on migration and especially second generation migrants conventionally analyses pathways and processes towards assimilation, and considers that young people are both better placed to integrate but potentially more vulnerable to belonging challenges than older people (see for example Worbs, 2005). Often influenced by the ‘straight line’ theory of migrant settlement (see Alba & Nee, 2003), this kind of scholarship considers that over time, generations of migrants become progressively more assimilated into the host society, and therefore young people are likely to have a greater sense of belonging than their parent’s generation. On the other hand, youth are considered to be more vulnerable because of their age and their life stage, and their capacity for belonging can be compromised because of their circumstances of ‘double jeopardy’; that is, they are ‘faced with the problem of acculturation along two dimensions’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 243) – that is, into the host society and the social institution of adulthood. In either case, the focus is generally on individuals or migrant communities and their attitudes, practices and personal feelings of attachment rather than socio-political projects of inclusion/ exclusion. This approach has in turn shaped much policy regarding social cohesion, settlement and integration in places such as Australia, the UK and parts of Europe, where the focus is on adherence to shared national values and resolution of identity conflict. Belonging is often constructed as a predominantly psychological problem of identity and young people who struggle to belong are seen as at-risk or having special challenges.

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The Politics of Citizen-Belonging Alongside scholarship that focuses on national belonging as an individual or community problem of identity, attachment, assimilation, and loyalties is another body of work that explores more closely the conditions of young people’s citizen-belonging as well as their socio-political practices or acts of national inclusion. This work is more attentive to the social and political contexts within which young people of migrant or refugee background express their belonging, or have their belonging regulated or brought into question, including via exclusionary forms of ‘boundary maintenance’ (Crowley, 1999, p. 8) that are enacted or supported by the state. Much research has examined projects of the politics of belonging that have been directed at Muslim youth in the West since 9/11, including the ways that they are constructed as potential threats to the state, how their expressions of national loyalty are monitored, and how they are called to account to perform integration (Abu El-Haj & Bonet, 2011; Harris & Hussein, 2018; Harris & Karimshah, 2018; Maira, 2009; Mythen et  al., 2012; Nayak, 2017; Thomas & Sanderson, 2011). In turn, some argue that Muslim migrant youth are creating new ways to imagine and enact national belonging in ways that challenge, undermine or resist these political projects of conditional inclusion or even active exclusion (Maira, 2009; Patton, 2014). This work on youth belonging to the nation takes an agency-based approach to youth citizenship, documenting belonging as an active process of engagement and contestation via micro practices rather than a fixed and pre-defined status that can be achieved. For example, Amin (2002, p. 965) argues that young British Asian Muslims are not following the path of the first generation of migrants by pursuing recognition and rights as minorities but are making distinctive citizenship claims as equal members of the nation. He analyses the UK youth riots of 2001 as expressive claims of ownership over both public spaces and the nation, suggesting that, their frustration and public anger cannot be detached from their identities as a new generation of British Asians claiming in full the right to belong to Oldham or Burnley and the nation, but whose Britishness includes Islam, halal meat, family honour, and cultural resources located in diaspora networks.

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More broadly, many young people of migrant backgrounds in multicultural societies are enacting this kind of ordinary hybridity in their expressions of national belonging (Harris, 2013). For some theorists of youth citizen-belonging, this is understood as the creation of an alternative strong and stable national identity made up of ‘home’ and ‘host’ elements: a hyphenated identity that allows them to integrate into the nation as, for example, ‘Somali-Norwegian’, as explored further in Chap. 7 (Mobilities). For others, there is a greater focus on national belonging as a dynamic practice or process rather than a fixed identity, where the emphasis is on the generationally-specific capacity to keep belonging ‘fluid and useful’ (Colombo & Rebughini, 2012, p. 96). As young people are increasingly obliged to develop multiple and mobile identities to be responsive to global opportunities and adapt to fast-paced change, it is argued that ‘the movement itself constitutes a new space of identification, of belonging’ (Dolby & Rizvi, 2008, p. 1). From this perspective, as Colombo and Rebughini (2012, p. 96) elaborate, ‘far from being the mere result of ascribed characteristics, belonging emerges as a blurred and mobile location’ which requires continuous construction. Influenced by transnational rather than migration perspectives, others have similarly attempted to conceptualise these new versions of young people’s national citizen-belonging as a dynamic ‘space’ rather than a fixed position or an identity composed of ‘here’ and ‘there’. For example, Mansouri and Mikola (2014, p. 34) suggest that in Australia, as claimants of citizenship, migrant youth often refer to multiculturalism as their space of belonging. For many young people, multicultural space is not only a space between two worlds; it permeates all spheres of their lives including engagement with the state, civil society as well as family networks

However, in national contexts where multiculturalism is not official policy, or where such policy sits alongside conceptions of national identity associated with ‘bloodlines’ or racial essence, citizen-belonging for minoritised youth emerges as a struggle enacted simultaneously against the state and in everyday relations. For example, in her ethnography of mono- and multiethnic youth in South Korean schools, Walton (2018) shows how multiethnic youth in South Korea are constructed as outside the national identity through paternalistic policy efforts to identify, integrate and ostensibly support ‘multicultural families’ and through an everyday enforcement of a hierarchy of racialised difference. She writes (Walton,

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2018, pp. 109–10) that according to conventional conceptualisations of what national identity consists of, the multiethnic students … were Korean because they were born/raised in Korea, spoke Korean as a first language, and understood the cultural nuances of someone who has been culturally socialized in Korea. In this sense, they have effectively ‘achieved’ the aims of the government’s assimilationist ‘multicultural family’ plans and therefore, according to these criteria, should be regarded no differently from their monoethnic Korean peers. However… the multiethnic students’ racialised difference interrupted a unified, primordial, national identity and prevented an affective sense of belonging among their peers

In other words, being recognised as belonging, and assertions to belong in the face of these complex politics of simultaneous assimilation and racialised exclusion, are played out through powerful processes of ‘affective citizenship’ (Walton, 2020, drawing on Zembylas) at the everyday level of friendship groups and playground hierarchies. These debates about the politics of national belonging for migrant or refugee background youth have been further developed through a broader conceptual lens of ‘youth mobility’ (discussed in detail in Chap. 7 (Mobilities)) that responds to changing and expanding forms of migration and mobility, away from highly managed permanent migration and settlement patterns to temporary, multiple and transitory movements on a much wider scale. As Robertson (2016, pp.  2276–7) has written, ‘the heterogeneity of new migration flows’, which are structured by migrant agency but equally through new modes of migration governance that seek highly flexible forms of transnational labour’ produce ‘blurred boundaries around traditional categorisations of migrant mobility, particularly temporal blurriness between temporariness and permanence

Young people are often targeted as valued migrant labour or international students as well as important contributors to the national economy through their production and consumption practices, but their citizen-­ belonging is fragile because migration governance often creates limits to their capacity to participate, and limbo and unpredictability for longer-­ term settlement. These changes raise new issues for the state, which benefits enormously from variegated forms of migration options, especially in relation to young workers and students, but must manage proliferating

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visa categories and regulation of formal citizenship. These changes also raise new challenges in the lived experience of belonging for mobile young people, as questions of inclusion and exclusion in the community of membership must be constantly negotiated. For example, Yang (2018) demonstrates how Chinese students in Singapore and Indian students in China have vastly different socioeconomic and cultural experiences of lived belonging and cosmopolitan connection in the countries where they are studying depending on state and market power structures, local immigration politics and attitudes, and their differentiated starting social positions. Citizenship belonging projects are further challenged by alternative, enduring conceptions of ‘the nation’ advanced by Indigenous youth in settler-colonial states. These establish that sovereignty was never ceded, and thus undermine the legitimacy and authority of the settler state as the nation, instead seeing youth adhering to an Indigenous national identity in which status, authority, power and belonging derives from connection and responsibility to, and recognition by, land and communities. For example, de Finney (2015, p.  178) demonstrates how young people in Canada ‘argue for a return to the pride and belonging they gain from their Indigenous nationhood, even when they do not live in their Nation’s territories. Many girls say they anchor themselves in a strong Indigenous identity rooted in relationship to land and community’. Such projects of Indigenous nationhood enable young people to develop more meaningful forms of citizen-belonging in terms of their cultural and political identities, but they also expose the machinery of settler state nation-making and especially defensive efforts to tell one seamless and official story about the nation. As Kidman (2015, p. 646) writes in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, expressions of tribal identity and tribal “citizenship” by indigenous young people activate a particular kind of relationship with the nation-state that allows them to “speak back” to the orthodoxies of national memory regimes as well as the inequalities evident in social policy discourse and public debate. This acts as a signal that memory, belonging, and identity can be derived from tribal repositories of memory as opposed to the national archive and that these memories can unsettle the apparent unity of national narratives and identities

Conditions of mass migration, extensive youth mobility and the ongoing politics of colonisation have generated a new focus on understanding

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young people’s capacities and opportunities for, and contestation of, citizen-­belonging in the nation-state. As implied by the tension between use of terms and metaphors such as ‘home’, ‘host’, ‘space’, ‘spheres’ and ‘locations’, scholars of contemporary youth citizenship grapple with changing conceptualisations and contestations of national belonging and political projects of unbelonging that characterise youth experiences of citizenship today. The use of these spatial metaphors indicates that citizenship in the nation cannot be conceived of simply or solely as a formal state-­ individual relationship, but that belonging to the nation encompasses identities, practices, networks and domains of membership, recognition and participation. What is also apparent is that while the nation-state may continue to be the central actor in the regulation of young people’s legal status as citizens, conditions of transnationalism, translocalism and globalisation are becoming increasingly important to theorising youth belonging beyond and/or beneath the nation, and it is this context that we turn to next.

Multi-Scalar Citizenship: Cultural and Political Participation in the Local, the Global and the Digital The body of work we have canvassed so far here is focused on the politics of youth belonging within the space of the nation-state. But belonging has also become an increasingly important way to think through citizenship for young people today because processes and opportunities for recognition, participation and membership have all to some extent become unmoored from this space. With the breakdown of traditional communities and transition processes, and the increase in movement of people and information we are seeing some deep shifts in young people’s ‘communities of membership’ and identifications beyond the nation. These processes have complicated some forms of belonging but enabled and even demanded others, through new kinds of real and promised mobility and the proliferation and accessibility of points of connection and identification. In this next section we look at the work that a belonging frame does to theorise youth experiences of citizenship beneath and beyond the nation, specifically at young people’s practices of cultural and political participation and membership at the levels of the local, global and digital.

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It has become a commonplace in youth research to note that global and/or local cultural, lifestyle and interest networks are emerging as ways for young people to stake their citizen-identities in times when they can no longer easily mobilise a sense of belonging around a career for life or other traditional markers of adulthood and citizenship (see Weller, 2007). This approach connects with a set of arguments about how consumption and personal expression through image, self-realisation and lifestyle are increasingly important to young people as more traditional forms of identification recede and new ways of making a life emerge. As Rizvi (2012, p. 194) says, ‘the conditions in which they forge their identities can no longer be interpreted through a pre-determined cultural script concerning relations of locality, traditions, family, class and community’, and thus alternative sources of meaning-making and identity emerge. These are not only relevant to personal projects of self-making, but leisure, popular culture and networked spaces of sociality are becoming integral in creating citizen-belonging.

Citizen-Belonging and Popular Culture Consumption has become an important way for young people to express themselves, claim membership in a community (often of taste), and be recognised as active citizens, and this can be especially relevant to young women positioning themselves as modern, globally oriented subjects (Best, 2009; Harris, 2004; Joseph, 2014). For example, Mojola (2015, p. 218) considers ‘the scripts that are used to bind “modern” femininity and consumption together’ with notions of the global, independent and powerful young female citizen for young women across the contemporary African landscape, noting that such ‘scripts’ have been long integral to colonising projects of ‘civilisation’, ‘modernisation’, and depoliticisation. In her study of Kenyan schoolgirls, she finds that today, ‘globalized cultural scripts and sub-scripts about modernity, women’s empowerment, girl-power and economic independence’ (2015, p.  218) that invoke a global girl citizen-consumer are increasingly compelling to young women’s sense of belonging. However, these come up against Kenyan young women’s gendered economic limitations, provoking both problematic and creative strategies for achieving this desired consumer citizenship. Much of the debate about youth citizen-belonging through consumption centres on the imperial and especially North-South flows of commercialised youth culture, however it is important to also take note of

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inter-regional and intra-regional cultural flows (also of course shaped by colonial and other forces of power) that are an important part of this picture of the young consumer citizen, as well as the political possibilities in the belonging they enable. For example, theorists of the ‘Korean wave’ of TV shows and pop music phenomenally popular across China, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere, or the transnationally linked subcultures of cosplay, originating in Japan but now highly active across Taiwan, Korea and China and beyond, argue that young people connect and identify through their consumption and production of these various cultural forms, creating membership in often virtual social worlds out of fandom and leisure pursuits, and are re-shaping cultural, ethnic and regional identities in the process (see Lim, 2014). While they identify clear commercial and political forces at work in the construction of a pan East Asian or even trans-Asian identity amongst a new generation, for example, there are also border-crossing political and social affinities that emerge through creative hybridisation, community building and reciprocal cultural exchanges. This is what Iwabuchi (2010, p. 416) has cautiously described as ‘the dialogic potential of transnational media culture connectivity’. This is particularly relevant in places where the state exercises considerable control over media and cultural forms as well as national identity. For example, Lim (2014, p.  26) shows how Malaysian young people have to negotiate taboos and censorship in order to carve out more democratic spaces to engage and debate with others and self-express, and popular culture is a vital platform for politically careful forms of civic participation and commentary, and connection and engagement with others. There is a long tradition of exploring citizenship through a belonging frame in the study of youth subcultures, which has an emphasis on not only (creative) consumption but also production. For example, youth cultures focused on music, dance, performance, sport, art and other cultural practices have been analysed as critical sites of youth civic and political socialisation, participation and membership. As traditional civic and associational life recedes in many places, and trust in political institutions is diminishing, young people are achieving recognition and participation in these informal spaces. For example, Pfaff (2009, p. 183) argues that young Germans are increasingly learning civic competencies through their engagement in youth cultures, where they participate in debates, learn to express political opinions, and gain knowledge about civic and political processes. Tupuola (2006) shows how Pasifika youth across the US,

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Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands forge political solidarities and a sense of transnational community belonging through shared consumption and production of hip hop. Riley, Morey and Griffin (2010, p. 48) use the work of Maffesoli to analyse the UK electronic dance scene as a new participatory ‘space of autonomy’ where young people can escape the purview of the state and create self-determined shared values of sociality and sovereignty, or constitute themselves as ‘pleasure citizens’. Membership and engagement in youth cultural life ‘where ethics and aesthetics meet’ (Stephenson, 2010, p. 11) is important for groups such as young Muslims in the West, who are simultaneously marginalised from and highly surveilled by formal political institutions. Young Muslims in Australia and elsewhere use independent media, fashion, music, theatre and sport to forge peer communities and articulate social and political issues (Harris & Roose, 2013; Johns, 2014; Nasir, 2016; Nilan, 2017). Belonging via digital cultures and communities is also an important way that citizenship practice manifests. As argued by Abidin and Cover (2019), youth who create digital media content and become ‘influencers’ by gaining a large public following have an important role in advocacy, activism and community-building via their self-representation as well as their status in online networks, for example, queer-identifying YouTubers. Young people’s creative street practices (for example, joyriding, parkour or graffiti) have also been analysed as important expressions of simultaneous global and local youth cultural citizen-belonging (see Nilan & Feixa, 2006). Although very differently expressed in different places, these can serve similar purposes: defying local authority, expressing political views through art or documentation of bodily movement, building solidarity, and creating alternative communities and identities around leisure and self-expression especially when work and pathways to formal citizenship become precarious. For example, Vromen and Collin (2010, p. 109, drawing on the work of Bang) show how ‘ordinary youth’ in Australia are increasingly animated by local cultural resources and interests to engage as ‘everyday makers’ and express their views, sense of belonging, and to act as citizens of their local context. At the same time, in sharing information, images and discussion of these emplaced cultural practices, especially through social media, youth in different places can forge a sense of connection between local practices of citizenship and membership in a larger global community.

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Citizen-Belonging and the City Alongside understandings of youth citizen-belonging through local cultural practice is a focus on belonging to the city as a key element of youth citizenship today. Cities are where two thirds of the world’s youth reside, and young people continue to constitute large numbers of those moving to cities and contributing to urban life. As Feixa et al. (2016, p. 9) note, it is estimated that by 2030, 60% of urban dwellers will be under the age of 18. Some studies of youth and urban life is quite optimistic about young people’s opportunities for participation and recognition in the urban context, with theorists of the global cosmopolitan city sometimes positioning youth as those best able to manage the new demands of mobile belongings and embody the capacity to ‘dwell in borders’. For example, Sennett (2015) has argued that young migrant workers have particular cosmopolitan skills that see them as exemplars of urban citizens in a globalised world. He writes that They are skilled at living in time, at home with change. In the developing world, they are the city’s future; perhaps these migrant cosmopolitans are also, in the developed world, a model for how to inhabit the city well

A related argument is pursued by Chau et al. (2018) who show how young female circular migrant domestic workers, such as the live-in carers in Basel who are the subjects of their research, productively negotiate their ‘right to the city’ even while excluded from formal rights, access and belonging by the state. Others, however, focus on the politics of belonging that marginalises youth from the ‘global city’ and sees low-income youth in particular struggle to position themselves in new individualised visions of the good youth citizen who is self-resourced and adaptable to change. For example, Dillabough and Kennelly (2010) explore this process of unbelonging from the global city, and how young people might carve out a space in its margins, via the experiences of those they call the ‘lost youth’ of Toronto and Vancouver. In turn, sometimes the capacity of young people to achieve legitimacy, recognition and belonging at the level of the urban neighbourhood has been theorised as fundamentally problematic, with local urban youth cultures providing an important source of meaning for disadvantaged and disenfranchised youth, especially those at the bottom of the mobility hierarchy (Bauman, 1998), and yet sometimes simultaneously locking young people into poverty, crime and social

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isolation (for examples from the UK see Nayak, 2003; Shildrick & MacDonald, 2006). In the US, for example, Nolan and Anyon (2004) have shown how belonging in some urban youth cultures intersects with the growing prison industry such that a population of under-skilled mainly Black youth are being chiefly cultivated for incarceration. Another approach again situates some urban youth in circumstances of ‘disjunctive belonging’, as evidenced in Risør and Arteaga Pérez’ (2018, p. 231) account of youth living in a poor and crime-ridden area of Santiago, where young people have no sense of positive form of belonging to the neighbourhood, but nor do they identify with a story of ‘proper’ Chilean citizenship as neoliberal self-making. They argue that Their belonging to the nation-state is disjunctive in the sense that they are formal citizens, yet they do not fulfil what is socially and morally expected of proper citizens in contemporary Chile. Similarly, they dwell in their neighbourhood, but they do not positively identify with this space. Disjunctive belonging does thus not mean that our interlocutors are situated outside the nation or that they have turned their back on society. Rather, it points to the vulnerable position these young people find themselves in as they strive to become at home in a world that holds very few real opportunities for their becoming

Expressions of urban and ‘cultural’ citizenship are not thus simply valorised as new and productive forms of citizen-belonging for youth, but are revealed as complex and sometimes contradictory belonging projects of survival and compromise. Further, these practices and positions are not only theorised as local forms of belonging, but are often connected to global and virtual networks of recognition and membership, especially in the context of digital life.

Citizen-Belonging, the Digital and the Global Young people live in an interconnected world and inhabit global cultures (Nayak & Kehily, 2008, p. 24). As Rizvi (2012, p. 201) argues, they are attracted to virtual mobility, and to the mobilities of ideas, images and information, as well as tastes and styles. This has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, competences and performances… that link together places that would otherwise be widely separated

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Young people are at the heart of what Beck and Levy (2013, p.  16) term the ‘new communicative thickness of the world’. This youth trend holds, even while overall inequities in internet and mobile access remain deeply entrenched worldwide (The World Internet Project, 2013). It has become a commonplace for social media in particular to be theorised not only as a conduit for new kinds of communicative connectiveness for young people, but as an important sphere of belonging and participation in its own right, with social network sites famously described by Boyd (2007) as ‘youthful counterpublics’, in a time when access to ‘real’ public spaces where open engagement and deliberation may once have occurred has diminished. For example, Hanckel and Morris (2014, p.  872) have shown how online queer communities provide a space for young people to develop a sense of membership and connection, but also articulate a collective voice and take action for social change. In their study of one online group for queer youth, they find that ‘the community not only provides a sense of belonging for the participants and reduces their experiences of isolation, but also connects them to resources and networking opportunities that foster political participation’. This finding is reflected in a wide range of studies, even while it is also noted that such spaces can exclude and regulate as well contest the notion of community itself (see Byron et al., 2019; Robards et al., 2019). In either case, work on young people’s engagement with social media has demonstrated how the ‘online’ world can no longer be treated as a separate or less significant realm of everyday life, but is an integrated part of their networks and communities, where they express identity and belonging. Digital media more broadly have been linked to expanded opportunities for youth inclusion and participation, and social networking sites in particular have been found to promote belonging and social and community connectedness (Collin et al., 2011, p. 7). Consequently, Johns (2014, p. 76) asks how citizenship can or should be defined in an era where social connections and networks are stretched across local and global spaces, and where online “participatory practices” blurs the boundaries between popular forms of youth culture and media production and more civic, ethical or politically oriented activities. Indeed it is these transformations that have led youth and citizenship scholars to argue that narrow definitions of citizenship, which summon individuals to realize their “duty” to a common, shared purpose

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embedded in the nation-state, have been surpassed by newer, more relevant forms of digital citizenship

Accordingly, there is a new research and policy focus on youth digital citizenship that seeks to link formal guidelines about youth rights and responsibilities as users of digital media with an appreciation of the way everyday digital practices and acts are an important mechanism for youth participation and belonging. For example, McCosker et al. (2016, pp. 1–2) argue that, for young people in particular, digital citizenship is not simply a set of rights and responsibilities or appropriate behaviours, but emerges as a fluid interface that connects control mechanisms with people and practices within even the most intimate of contexts … The digital is now a part of, rather than apart from, citizenship and an implicit component of new claims to cultural rights, inclusion and participation

Alongside digital citizenship, global citizenship has also emerged as another important domain for theorising youth belonging. For example, some argue that the combination of the ease and attractiveness of international travel, the prevalence of global media and diasporic movements ‘are widening youth horizons and encouraging cosmopolitan forms of citizenship’ (Nayak & Kehily, 2008, p.  155). Certainly international research such as the World Values Survey shows that cosmopolitan beliefs and practices are more evident amongst younger generations (Norris, 2001; Phillips & Smith, 2008; Sloam & Henn, 2019; Teney et  al., 2014). Generational divides in such outlooks became evident in major political events such as Brexit (see Ehsan & Sloam, 2020). Young people are to some extent those who are driving a shift from more traditional, fixed, monocultural ideas about nationality and belonging to more flexible forms of citizenship (Ang et al., 2006; Maira, 2009). This enactment of multiple identities and communities rather than a more rigid sense of citizenship and belonging are seen as inevitable outcomes of ‘increasing mobility and multiple networks of interconnectedness across social worlds, central to the cosmopolitanism of contemporary lifestyles’ (Ang et  al., 2006, pp. 32–3). Such cosmopolitanism may be fragile or changeable, however, and can be tested by economic crisis and political conflict. Young people can also be attracted to defensive politics of exclusion, often when their social and

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economic needs are unmet, as is evident in various contemporary examples of nationalist and ethnic revivalism, political polarisation or hate speech and crimes that reject the expansion of citizenship. The development of a strong sense of belonging remains a central project for youth especially in times of change, mobility and diversity, and this can also occur through the adoption of more fixed and exclusionary forms of citizen-­ belonging. Young people’s responses to global change can be variously ‘localist’, ‘survivalist’ or ‘global’ (Nayak, 2003), depending on their socio-­ economic circumstances, material and cultural resources and the contexts within which modes of belonging are expressed. Factors such as place, education, social background, gender and age shape global outlooks for youth everywhere, and scholars warn against uncritical celebrations of young people’s ability to be ‘cosmopolitan’ (Hörschelmann & Schäfer, 2007). Youth global citizenship is also theorised through a belonging frame in terms of the expanding space where young people feel a sense of civic duty, with growing interest in the global dimensions of young people’s sense of civic and political responsibility. Furlong and Cartmel (2007, p. 11) suggest that ‘many of the issues young people regard as important cross the traditional lines of party politics and reflect concerns about global insecurity, injustice and environmental damage’. Harris and Wyn’s (2009) research with young Australians has found that while they are most personally concerned about doing well in their studies and getting a good job, their highest rated national and international concerns are war, terrorism, the environment and poverty. To take research on young Australians as just one example, we find that global social wellbeing is more important to them than it is to an older generation (Devinney et  al., 2012), and international politics and NGOs engage them more than domestic issues and party politics (Huntley, 2006). Australian youth place a high value on human rights (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC], 2005), are concerned about global poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor (Huntley, 2006), and are in support of developed countries giving more aid internationally (UNICEF, 2012). The environment is an especially high priority for youth (Tranter & Skrbis, 2014; see also Boeve-de Pauw & Van Petegem, 2010; The Climate Institute, 2013). Alongside the emergence of global citizenship dispositions and outlooks has been evidence of new modes of global citizenship practice. This is linked more broadly to what has been described as a ‘new biography of

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youth citizenship’, characterised by ‘dynamic identities, open, weak-tie relationships and more fluid, short-lived commitments in informal permeable institutions and associations’ (Vinken, 2005, p. 155). This is a result of the fragmentation of traditional civic life, reduced trust in the political institutions of the nation-state and an increased emphasis on individual choice and action (Beck, 1992; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Putnam, 2000). Under these conditions, many young people are becoming ‘self-­ actualising citizens’ (Bennett, 2003): disengaging from national politics and turning away from conventional associational life, but personalising and globalising citizenship by emphasising their own behaviour in terms of lifestyle and consumption and creating informal transnational networks for action. There are indications that young people are shifting away from engagement with the state and other formal sites of traditional citizenship activity and towards network-building and issues-driven political or civic action on a global scale (Bang, 2004). As Bennett (2003, p. 3) suggests, Living in these disrupted social contexts, young citizens find greater satisfaction in defining their own political paths, including: local volunteerism, consumer activism, support for issues and causes (environment, human rights), participation in various transnational protest activities, and efforts to form a global civil society by organising world and regional social forums

As Beck and Levy (2013, p. 23) have argued, under conditions of globalisation, traditional thick belonging may no longer be based on continuously established local consensus, but affiliations, especially political ones, can be forged through collective acknowledgement of interdependencies and sometimes action against global risks. New methods of activism, social movements and political expression are emerging worldwide, and especially travelling through young people’s networked practices and in some cases generating a sense of membership in a global civil society. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009) and Beck and Levy (2013) describe this as the ‘rise of global generations’: those who are operating simultaneously within both national and transnational spheres of power, linking global issues with national political agendas. For example, while there is an argument that mobility and the demands of the global economy have fragmented collectivities and seen the decline of formal and national organisations for political agitation such as unions, young people’s experiences of global, mobile work is creating new political identifications and transnational connections. And as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009, p.  34) note, the

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activism of the global generation may tend to arise less in the centre than in the ‘peripheral zones’ where globalisation has its most problematic effects. For example, young people are a strong presence in blue and pink collar global mobile workforces, such as the global domestic care industry, supplying nannies, maids, cleaners, in-home nurses, servants and old age carers from poor to rich countries. Young men, predominantly from South Asia, constitute large numbers of the labour force of transnational construction workers in many cities in the Middle East. It is common for these industries to be under- or unregulated and in many cases highly exploitative. But young people’s experience of this kind of mobile work is also creating new political belongings and sense of global, translocal and everyday connectedness. Kathiravelu (2016) demonstrates how working class solidarities and strong networks of care are established in places such as Dubai, where young migrant workers have no access to state resources through possibilities for formal citizenship, but build networks of inclusion, community and political connectedness through care chains, local support services, and ‘urban informality’. Many have researched the emergence of informal civil society actors and the organisation of support networks and protests regarding young women who are domestic workers across places such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand (see for example Pangsapa, 2015). Similarly, Qiu (2009, 2018) identifies the politicisation of what he calls a working class network society in China, which has come about through the coalescence of economic recession, increased ICT availability and use, and the politicisation of young people working (or struggling to find work) in blue or pink collar industries. He describes a new working class subjectivity and subsequent new mobilisation of labour groups both within and beyond China, chiefly facilitated by blogs, mobile phones and cultural performances. New media and social networking have become critical tools in young people’s efforts for global connectedness, citizen-belonging and political action. Viral clips on YouTube, memes, tweets and blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and alt TikTok campaigns and new social media styles of personal/political expression circulate widely and rapidly, and generate collective social action, such as young feminist transnational protest against violence against women (Mendes et  al., 2019; Tan, 2017; Titus, 2018; Weems, 2017). At the same time, there is an emergence of other kinds of networked communities of struggle that also provide space for political

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and social belongings for young people, albeit in much more defensive and destructive ways (Bessant, 2018; Heiss & Matthes, 2017).

What Do Concepts of Belonging Do in Youth Citizenship Studies? The turn to belonging in youth citizenship studies has advanced along two key axes: rethinking the question of young people’s relation to the nation-­ state in more expansive ways, and considering how the spaces of the global, local and digital increasingly shape young people’s opportunities for membership and participation in political and civic life. What specifically then does the concept of belonging do to both extend but also delimit thinking about youth citizenship today across these domains? As is evident from an extensive review of citizenship studies, the conventional concept of citizenship has been criticised for focusing too narrowly on technical-legal status and the formal compact between state and individual. Marshall’s classic thesis in particular ‘has been critiqued for failing to capture the complex and multidimensional experience of being a citizen and of belonging in society in the twenty-first century’ (Wood & Black, 2019, p. 166). A belonging frame can incorporate more dimensions and aspects to connection, solidarity, voice, capacity to act and care; focusing less on questions solely of rights and recognition by the state than on broader spaces and networks of responsibility, membership and participation, including domains of the local, global and digital. As Crowley (1999, p. 22) has famously stated, ‘belonging is indeed a “thicker” concept than citizenship’, and thereby lends itself to richer and deeper analyses of experiences of recognition, engagement and connection across these multiple domains. Thinking about citizenship through the prism of belonging thus allows for more expansive notions of what it means to be a recognised, active member of a society, and also acknowledgement of how some kinds of formal citizenship ‘recognition’ and ‘participation’ can simultaneously deny felt belonging, or function as exclusionary projects of ‘the politics of belonging’. It allows for the multiple and layered nature of membership, across formal and informal communities, and the mutability of the practices that constitute lived citizenship, rather than merely being defined as a status category bestowed by the nation-state.

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It is in youth citizenship studies in particular that we see this fruitful interlacing of questions of citizenship with those of belonging in order to deepen these understandings of membership and engagement. Indeed, some have argued that the two cannot be separated, but rather that they are co-constitutive. As Colombo and Rebughini argue, (2012, p. 98), the central aspects of belonging, including processes and practices of admittance, allegiance and involvement, cannot be split off from formal elements of citizenship: Belonging is dynamically expressed by … young people… showing different ways of being or becoming a member of the community and the complex articulations between rights and obligations, entitlement and engagement, participation and identification, and equality and difference characterizing citizenship in the contemporary, globalized world

An interesting example of the interlacing of citizenship and belonging is evident in the work of Hage (2011) on the experience of second generation migrants in Australia. He suggests that unlike first generation migrants, who have not necessarily been interpellated as citizens by the nation, and have been thus obliged to accept some forms of non-­ recognition from the ‘host’ country, second generation youth take their belonging for granted because they have positively responded to the nation’s active call of ‘hey you, citizen!’, with a ‘yes, that’s me!’ Because of this strong integrative sense of belonging and citizen-recognition, when second generation migrants face everyday racism they are much more at risk of psychological disintegration, because racism shatters their citizen-­ belonging connection. Relatedly then, the use of the concept of belonging to frame youth citizenship studies allows for recognition of the lived, embodied, affective and subjective experience of membership and participation, as well as exclusion and non-recognition. This is particularly important in times of globalisation and increased mobility when social, civic and political attachments appear to be unstable or unmoored, generating a desire for deeper and more subjectively-engaged understandings of citizenship. As Wood and Black (2019, p. 167) argue, the changing social and spatial affinities enabled by globalising processes have destabilised traditional notions of citizenship and have thrust the affective and relational concept of belonging much more overtly onto centre stage

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The relational dimension (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014) is also central to the work that a belonging frame does in youth citizenship studies. A relational concept of belonging, not simply an affective one, addresses the spaces made and processes undertaken by social groups to enable (or exclude) different people/behaviours. This suggests that citizenship is more meaningfully understood as a process involving reciprocity and recognition amongst various social actors than as a status held by an individual. Relational approaches focus on how young people ‘can’ belong within the citizenship spaces made possible by practices, processes and social forces of inclusion, exclusion and recognition of communities and social groups, rather than the individual’s personal feelings of or efforts for belonging and recognition. A clear tenor of the ‘belonging turn’ in youth citizenship studies is that this is commonly framed as a positive development towards thicker and more processual analysis of the condition of citizenship, enhancing narrow and conventional conceptualisations of the citizen to ensure their relevance for contemporary times. We see this most productively expressed in relational approaches that add depth and texture to either more legal or more affective interpretations, helping us think about citizenship as a dialectical practice and social process of participation, recognition and membership. However, belonging as a frame also carries some risks. One challenge is that it can be much more individualising in its approach than is perhaps possible in the repertoire of citizenship. While we have emphasised a relational concept of belonging (rather than an individualised one, focusing almost exclusively on affective dimensions of individual experience), this side of belonging is often missing when it is harnessed to explain and analyse young people’s experiences and practices of recognition and participation. An example of this can be found in some research on young people’s vulnerability to manipulation by online extremist groups (as an example of a problematic space for engagement and expression of voice), which can rely on assumptions about young people’s lack of resilience and personal problems caused by failure to belong, rather than address political, structural and systems issues such as social media infrastructure and governance (for a critique and discussion see Harris & Johns, 2020; Vergani, 2014). We see a similar tendency in the trend towards ‘resilience’ as a dominant frame in research and policy on marginalised youth and communities, which can locate complex problems of disadvantage and structural inequality in individual dispositions, behaviours and choices, rather than offer ‘deeper’ and more social constructivist accounts (Ungar,

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2004, 2005). Relatedly, a more individualised belonging frame can over-­ emphasise the practices and responsibilities of excluded individuals and groups and locate the problem as their processes for connection (positive and negative), rather than scrutinising the work done by majoritised groups to exclude and thereby shore up their citizen-belonging. Moreover, as this and other kinds of research on youth belonging reveals, there is a strongly normative dimension to belonging; it is ‘regarded as positive and as something to be achieved’ (Lähdesmäki et al., 2016, p. 238). While the benefits of belonging may appear self-evident, it is important to interrogate this normative tendency in belonging frameworks, and especially to consider how demonstrations of effort to achieve belonging may be called forth and regulated as an expression of power over those who are designated not to belong. For example, struggles over national identity and assertions of white hegemony in conditions of cultural diversity, high migration and globalisation such as in Australia are often articulated through debates about migrant assimilation and belonging to the nation. Young Muslims of migrant background in particular are repeatedly called upon to show their efforts for integration and demonstrate their national loyalty, no matter how strong or unproblematic their sense of belonging may actually be (Harris & Karimshah, 2018). As Hage (2000) argues, what is at stake here is not really belonging but governability; that is, debates about integration and inclusion allow white managers of the nation to feel able to determine the inclusion of others and to situate themselves as the arbiters of belonging. Accordingly, Hage (2009, p. 257) writes that ‘the monocultural assimilationists are never interested in the assimilation of the Other, they are interested in the process whereby they are trying to make them assimilate’. He further suggests (2009, pp. 258–259) that when Muslims are not looking for either multicultural recognition or assimilationist approval, when they become ‘too integrated for their own good: no sense of their assumed marginality’, that demands for the performance of aspirations for belonging may be heightened in order to re-position them as marginal. This theorisation of white national governmentality highlights the importance of interrogating processes of the elicitation of display of effort and desire to achieve belonging, rather than the attainment of belonging itself (see Harris & Karimshah, 2018). Relatedly, as Livingstone and Sefton-Green (2016, p. 6) argue, in places such as the UK and elsewhere, the concept of ‘connection’ is frequently promoted through youth policy, curriculum and government initiatives, for example, to embed a strong sense of youth belonging to community,

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school, civic life, social networks and so on. As they say, ‘in this discourse, connection is good, and disconnection is bad’. They suggest that connection is valorised but undertheorised, and is often overlaid with middle class notions of civil sociality and adultist perspectives on what constitutes positive engagement. Their research indicates that young people may productively facilitate disconnection, to create autonomy and space away from others, especially controlling others such as teachers, youth workers and parents. Young people’s desires and strategies to disconnect, or not belong, must be considered as not simply wrong-headed (or even sociopathic) but as efforts to manage their social and civic relations on their own terms. This is particularly relevant in places where youth participation policy agendas regulate and limit what is legible as youth civic belonging and youth voice. In turn, such agendas are often underpinned by specifically communitarian assumptions about ideal civic practices and how belonging to community should be defined. As Delanty (2018, p.  89) notes, from a communitarian perspective, community is fundamentally about belonging, understood as citizens’ ‘actions, desires and beliefs’ that generate commitment and solidarity, as well as unity and social bonds. This is a conception of community that relies on assumptions that collective values, lack of conflict and cultural homogeneity are good and necessary to keep communities intact, rather than a recognition that communities are made up of multiple memberships, identities, allegiances, and sometimes competing interests (Delanty, 2018, p. 107). It is ‘nostalgic about the recent past’ (Delanty, 2018, p. 99), especially an imaginary of American small-­ town life where like-minded people interacted harmoniously and were heavily involved in traditional associations such as bowling clubs or activities like volunteerism (Putnam, 2000). However, this notion of community as a single, physical, bounded space where members share values and achieve consensus and homogeneity through active participation in mainstream associational life can be inconsistent with many young people’s own experience of civic life. This is more likely to be multi-layered, simultaneously physical and digital, local and global, and populated with micro-­ spaces of contestation, disagreement and debate through expression of difference rather than adherence to shared values (see Amin, 2002; Harris, 2010, p. 574). However, communitarian ideas about belonging tend to underpin youth participation agendas, imposing conservative interpretations of what good civic belonging to community should look like. In this respect, the normative dimensions of a belonging frame can limit and

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homogenise the ways civic engagement is defined and made possible for young people. Further, a focus on belonging can potentially ‘empty out’ citizenship, and move youth citizenship studies away from using harder-edged definitions and undertaking research that may have clearer connections with and implications for the legal and political structures that shape young people’s lives. For example, looking at questions of youth sexual citizenship, Rasmussen et al. (2016, p. 74), drawing on Plummer, maintain that while it has its shortcomings, the language of sexual citizenship is an important ‘sensitising’ concept that can keep central issues of rights, justice and equality, even while critiquing traditional discourses. Indeed, because the shift to belonging is sometimes represented as a move beyond more limiting frames, this can imply that questions of legal status and rights have been taken into account or have been dispatched. This is particularly problematic at a time when young people’s legal status and rights are clearly under threat in many places, or are only recently hard-won and fragile. For example, movements such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Umbrella movement and the Arab Spring make evident that fundamental civil rights for many young people are a matter of constant challenge and vigilance. The first post-apartheid so-called ‘Born Free’ generation of South African youth has only been eligible to vote since 2014. Young people’s fundamental rights-based struggles are proliferating under conditions of wind-back of basic legal entitlements such as (young) women’s reproductive rights (for example, with legislative changes to abortion provision in the US), rights to asylum (in many countries that fail to protect refugees), young Indigenous people’s ongoing struggles for land sovereignty, even in places where treaties have been signed, and the extent of civil rights violations drawn attention to by the Black Lives Matter movement. This tension between what might be a more expansive and encompassing notion of citizen-belonging and an appreciation of the structural conditions that govern legal status is exemplified in the experiences of ‘1.5’ or second generation migrants’ rights to formal citizenship (see for example the activism of the Dreamers). An important argument for the belonging frame comes from migration and transnationalism studies; namely that globalisation and mobility have fundamentally transformed the authority of the nation-state in its conferral of cultural, civic and political identity, especially for youth living in a ‘de-territorialised’ and interconnected world. Investigating the transnational multiplicity of belonging may seem

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more meaningful to capture such young people’s hybrid lives. However, as Tanyas (2016, p. 158) argues, it remains that ethnic diversity, cultural hybridity and multicultural lives exist against a background of secure borders, assimilation and changing forms of racism (Papastergiadis, 2000). Accordingly, transnational spaces and multicultural lives are not simply characterized by those transformations challenging ‘old’ national models of belonging and exclusion but also by very extensions of these models (Anthias, 2010).

Consequently, it is important to remain cognizant of the enduring structures of citizenship that orient to closure and singularity, and in practice produce legal systems that can keep people in permanent temporariness or deport the native-born, and to understand young people’s struggles for citizen-belonging within these interrelated conditions. Several decades ago, Jones and Wallace (1992) argued that citizenship is a valuable wholistic and processual concept that can draw together different frames of analysis in youth research. Today, we see belonging used in a similar way, as an integrative ‘holding’ concept that can bring together many domains of young people’s lives. This has been in large part driven by the identification of a need to deepen approaches to youth participation, membership and recognition within and beyond the nation-state, to link citizenship with more expansive and less technical understandings of young people’s civic and political identities and communities, and to ‘seed fresh understandings of citizenship and belonging that better recognise their spatial, relational and emotional dimensions for young people’ (Wood & Black, 2019, p. 169). We have explored here the ways in which the belonging turn in youth citizenship studies has been generative, and have also investigated some of its shortcomings as a ‘new’ or ‘better’ frame for understanding young lives today. In our view, belonging works well as a way to more deeply consider, but not replace, aspects of youth citizenship. In considering the emergence of a belonging frame, we have demonstrated that relational and multi-scalar approaches to issues of participation and recognition can and should be brought into dialogue with attention to legal and formal structures of inclusion and rights.

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CHAPTER 7

Mobilities

Introduction The heightened movement of young people over the last 20 years has led youth researchers to claim that mobility has become an imperative for youth and a norm within youth transitions. Being mobile is seen to represent a new space of identification for young people, a constitutive element of the contemporary meaning of youth, a marker of transitions to adulthood and a maker of young people’s experiences. This valorisation of mobility has been claimed to such an extent that immobility is associated with failed or thwarted transitions. In this chapter we take a critical look at the mobility imperative, and how this is associated with belonging, to deepen our analysis of the work that the concept of belonging does in youth research. This chapter explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which the concept of belonging is used to understand young people’s mobilities and place making. It moves beyond traditional youth studies approaches that tend to focus on the question of where young people belong in a fragmented, uncertain and mobile world. It interrogates how a belonging frame has been applied to youth mobilities research through an analysis of the multiplicity of young people’s contemporary mobilities at different spatial scales that are produced as a result of social and economic transformations and political conflicts and cultural developments. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_7

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In the following sections we take a closer look at the work that a belonging frame does in youth mobility research. Firstly, we interrogate individualised approaches to transnational transitions and youth mobility decision-making processes, that position mobility as the new norm in youth transitions. Then we examine the concept of spatial reflexivity, which is commonly used to explain the increasing need for youth to be on the move and its impact on rootedness. The chapter next examines the different spatial scales in youth mobility. We begin this analysis by looking at the burgeoning subfield of rural youth migration and the production of mobilities, and the possibility of place-making for rural young people at times where the experiences of urban youth are considered the norm. We then consider how a belonging frame shapes the way young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds are seen to navigate simultaneously different cultures in a mobile and hyper-diverse world. We continue by addressing a neglected research strand in youth mobilities; that is, the mobilities of young people in the Global South. Here the focus is on young people’s everyday (possibilities) of mobility in major urban centres of the Global South. We discuss how the concept of belonging sheds light on unequal patterns of life as a product of flows and fixities in the mega-city. We conclude with a reflection on how a belonging frame can enable a better understanding of the complex, rich and variegated mobilities that shape contemporary youth lives across the globe.

A Relational Approach to Transnational Youth Mobility This discussion expands on our analysis in previous chapters. In Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation) we outlined the emergence of policy infrastructures that have heightened youth mobilities in the last few decades, and the consolidation of mobilities as a normative component of youth transitions. We also identified some of the complexities and disconnections between a mobility imperative and formations of belonging: mostly uneven opportunities for different social groups in terms of mobility, social inclusion and belonging. In Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings) we explored how the decline of youth labour markets and the rise of higher education as a mass education sector in the late 1980s led youth studies to place a strong research emphasis on young people’s transitions. In that chapter we also argued that the narrow focus of youth transitions

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approaches consistently reduced issues of belonging to youth as economic units who mostly belong in education and labour realms. In Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation) and Chap. 6 (Citizenship) we also affirmed that youth transnational mobility signifies a break with traditional nation-state managed forms of migration towards temporary, multiple and transitory forms of movement. Transnational mobility, particularly of students and professionals, has been understood in youth studies as ‘part of the crafting of an individualised trajectory through the education system and into the labour market’ (Farrugia, 2018, p. 90). This youth mobility is underpinned by institutional and infrastructural support that provides young people the tools for the development of individualised, cosmopolitan subjectivities that envision being mobile as part of an investment in the self (see Cairns et al., 2012; Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016). As Brooks and Waters (2010, p. 145) have argued, the transnational mobility of ‘privileged groups in society’ highlights the ‘individualised nature of this movement’ and the neglect of youth as relational beings. Further, while for low-skilled labour migrants and refugees, families and social relations are highlighted as important to the decision-making process of migrating, for high-skilled migrants the influence of social networks and relational approaches is often invisible. Brooks and Waters (2010, p.  153) draw on a relational approach to dispute the ‘emphasis on the individualised nature of transnational mobility’ by arguing that young people’s decisions to engage in higher education overseas are ‘socially-embedded’; that is, shaped by family, friends and partners. They challenge research that presents the mobility of high-skilled professionals as ‘autonomous’ cosmopolitans, detached from previous communities of belonging (see Sklair, 2001), or young people valorising travel as a resource to re-constitute ‘the self in the future’ (Desforges, 2000, p.  993). As we stated above, contemporary youth studies has emphasised the constitutive aspect of being mobile as a signifier of what constitutes being young (see Dolby & Rizvi, 2008). In other words, being mobile is not just about following normative youth transitions mandates and working on self-capitalisation but is significantly embedded in the production of contemporary youth subjectivities, in ways of being and social relations, and in formations of belonging. Recent theorisations on the intersection of youth studies and mobility also argue for rendering visible the role of intimacy and relationships, including their associated care obligations, in the experiences of transnationally mobile young people (Harris et al., 2020). In his analysis of the

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hopes of youth migrants in Auckland, New Zealand, Collins (2018) challenges rational approaches in migration studies where young people’s decision-making to move is based on push-pull factors, an ‘expression of agency’ and as material and symbolic resources for how youth curate their transitions. Using the concept of hope, Collins argues that ‘rational calculative’ approaches have marginalised the role of emotions and power relations in young people’s decision-making. Collins argues that mobility is not only ‘thought and acted upon but rather simultaneously felt and embodied’ (2018, p. 638). In other words, these and other studies challenge views that see mobility and belonging as antithetical to each other and reaffirm how both practices are deeply interwoven and affected by each other. A relational frame is also used by Singh and Doherty (2008) who found that for students from Asian countries migrating to study in Australian universities, the role of family was a critical factor in the valorisation of travel for the forging of a ‘transnational imaginary’ and a reflexive project of creation and re-creation of their identity. Research on transnational youth mobility shows that Asian middle-class families continue to valorise study abroad over the increasingly sophisticated higher education infrastructure in their countries (Waters, 2009), although this attitude may be challenged by border closures and the unpredictability of international travel associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In a mobile and interconnected world, ‘the increasingly geographically dispersed nature of friendship networks provides mobile youth with an insight into transnational mobility and ‘new communities of belonging’ that, at least until recently, decrease the uncertainty of moving overseas’ (Brooks & Waters, 2010, p. 150). Beech (2015) agrees with this idea and reveals the power of social networks, particularly friendship, in normalising transnational mobility for tertiary studies. In her study of British transnational students, communities of belonging are formed by stronger (close friends and family) and weaker networks; the latter having also a significant influence in the chosen destination of study by providing valuable information on the experience and practice of mobility. Communities of belonging play an important role not just as drivers of mobility but as new networks that mobile youth in transnational and diasporic contexts form to belong. For instance, researching the experiences of international higher education students in Australia, Martin and Rizvi (2014) found that new ways of experiencing locality, culture and belonging are produced through social media interactions with networks ‘here’

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(Melbourne) and ‘there’ (India and China). Their research illustrates how belonging and mobility are interwoven through the co-presence of ‘back home’ and other locales where their networks live and with whom they communicate through digital affordances. This notion of being simultaneously ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ through the use of social media is also explored by Wong and Hjorth (2016) in the context of Southeast Asian students’ transnational mobility to Australia. In exploring the entanglement of media use, mobility and youth wellbeing, they argue that students’ home now lies in many instances in the multiple digital screens they navigate to keep connected to home while forging a new community overseas. Furthermore, international students form ‘a diaspora of fellow travellers’ by building new communities without letting go of their home roots (Wong & Hjorth, 2016, p. 57). These studies challenge the dichotomy, often invoked by mobility scholars, of mobility and belonging as two practices that are in tension (Fallov et al., 2013). They illustrate how the relational register of a belonging frame enables an understanding of mobile youth’s simultaneous connection to their family home and new community into sharper relief. We explore these considerations more closely for their epistemological and methodological affordances in Chap. 8 (Researching Belonging in Youth Studies). These perspectives position youth mobility not just as a constitutive form of self-identification, as Dolby and Rizvi (2008) put it, but as a social relationship in so far, as Calhoun (2003, pp. 535–6) has argued, ‘individuals exist only in cultural milieux’ and are ‘necessarily situated in particular webs of belonging’. And while youth transition has tended to neglect relational approaches in youth lives by reducing individuals to economic units, connecting youth mobility to social relations offers a view of individuals as ‘relational selves’. That is, as May (2013, p. 4) aptly argues, individuals as relational beings are ‘connected to other people as well as culturally and socially embedded’, and in relation to an ‘institutional order’ that creates ‘patterned, organized and symbolically-templated “ways of doing things”’ (p. 4). This is a view of the self through a relational approach that overcomes understandings of mobilities as simply a form of identity, which as May argues differs from belonging because the former ‘begins from the separate, autonomous individual’, rather than a view of the self-connected to society, in which ‘belonging focuses on what connects people to one another’ (p.  9). While in this section we discuss youth mobility and belonging to significant others, in the next section we move towards belonging more explicitly in connection to space.

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Spatial Reflexivity in Youth Mobilities and Belonging In previous chapters we have referred to the significant social changes that affected young people’s lives in the last few decades: changes such as the collapse of youth full-time labour market, the expansion of post-secondary school participation, deindustrialisation and the social and economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also argued that the effects of these processes has shifted the onus for belonging on to young people, as they negotiate identities and complex structural and institutional processes, as well as rapid social change (see Chap. 2 (Historical Underpinnings)). Within these new institutional patterns for youth, the concept of reflexivity has become central to young people’s biographies, how they construct their selves, who they want to become, and where they want to belong (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991). Within the framework of choice biographies, youth sociologists, such as Cairns (2017), have focused on the increasing need for youth to develop a high level of reflexivity in their education and employment choices within a world ever more populated with social risks and uncertainties. Studying the transnational mobility of higher education students in Ireland and Portugal, Cairns (2017, p. 413) developed the concept of spatial reflexivity as ‘a means of explaining how a requirement for personal and professional growth creates and sustains the desire to be geographically mobile’. While this concept is an enticing tool to interrogate youth mobility and belonging, it offers some conceptual problems. For example, a problem with the argument of spatial reflexivity is that attaining personal and professional growth can only be achieved through the experience of mobility, prompting questions about ‘whether they lie outside the reach of those who are not mobile’ (Cook & Cuervo, 2020, p. 61). Elsewhere, Cairns et al. (2012) go as far as to assert that while for youth in economically developed societies an abundance of educational and employment opportunities might make the question of mobility a matter of ‘lifestyle choice’; for young people in peripheral countries to be mobile might be the only way to circumnavigate disadvantage. The problem with this analysis is the homogenisation of the experiences of young people in economically developed societies, overlooking intragenerational differences marked, for example, by wealth inequality and poverty  as well as migration histories. As Thomson and Taylor (2005) argue, young people belonging to different social groups, such as upper and working class,

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rural and urban dwellers, non-heterosexual youth, gravitate differently towards imaginations and practices of mobility, thus rendering visible the mobilisation of different forms and levels of capital. By the same token, a deficit lens, an othering, is placed on ‘peripheral’ societies where young people’s sense of belonging must be overridden with a spatial reflexivity conducive to, and constituted by, mobile adventures to places where they can only forge their futures. This also positions young people in these ‘peripheral’ societies as outcasts of modernity, as ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman, 2004), where no valorised form of belonging can be produced. Analyses of the intersection between mobilities and youth transitions are also prevalent in queer mobilities research  – particularly those that problematise normative constructions of transitions to adulthood. Cover et  al. (2020, p.  321), for example, argue that traditionally lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) subjects are made intelligible ‘through accounts of mobility, movement and migration, particularly in relation to growing up and entering adulthood’. In their research with LGBTQ youth in regional and rural areas in Australia, they challenge the idea that they experience their home community as an environment that asphyxiates and isolates them. Rural queer youth out-migration is not simply a product of discrimination or lack of recognition in their communities. Their willingness to undertake migration and mobility can be based on the same desires as their heterosexual counterparts; that is, the enjoyment of the social and cultural opportunities that can be found in urban spaces. Gorman-Murray (2009) also argues for greater attention to emotions, intimate attachments and desires as critical factors on youth migration processes. In this sense, mobility is not just limited to a spatial awareness of structural opportunities and barriers, but also includes a relational approach underpinned by practices of love, intimacy and also the breakdown of relationships that shape youth mobility patterns. The view of spatial reflexivity constituted by the potential and the act of mobility as a form of self-capitalisation in the professional realm suggests an instrumental reflexivity completely detached from any relational dimension (Cook & Cuervo, 2020). As mentioned above, emotions, desires and intimacies in youth mobility are routinely neglected in favour of rational, instrumental and calculated choices. In her study of higher education student mobilities in Great Britain, Finn (2017) argues that there is more than instrumental reflexive mobility and the dilemma should I stay or should I go for youth. She argues for a relational approach, to highlight ‘the need for embeddedness, connectivity and routines of place’, which is

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often neglected in studies of students’ mobilities (p. 752). This is surprising for Finn as she views mobility always existing ‘in relation to some kind of fixity, or mooring’ (p. 752; see also Adey, 2006, for an approach from mobility theory). Equating mobility with reflexivity and self-capitalisation assumes that ‘the refusal to move can mean failure to self-realize, manifest in conditions such as prolonged emotional dependency upon family’ (Cairns, 2014, p. 7). This approach positions families as a barrier to youth self-­capitalisation by provoking ‘an image of an inherently individualistic subject who has more to gain from mobility than they do from family ties’ (Cook & Cuervo, 2020, p. 64). This perhaps is unsurprising as youth studies tends to view family as a place that young people need to detach themselves from (Wyn et  al., 2012). Indeed, youth psychological developmental approaches have traditionally framed family relationships as an obstacle for youth in their developmental ‘task’ of becoming ‘adults’. The point is not to return to an unhelpful binary of youth ‘dependence/independence’ but to make explicit that notions such as spatial reflexivity can exacerbate a view of young people in their mobile transitions as an economic unit detached of any relationship with or connection to the material world. In Chap. 4 (Policy Frames) we highlighted the lack of recognition in youth policy to the central role of culture, place and family in Indigenous youth lives. Indeed, research on Indigenous youth highlights the relevance of family for young people’ transitions and mobilities. For example, Parkes et al. (2015), researching Aboriginal youth mobility in Australian urban and regional places, show how their participants are ambitious for their education and work prospects without abandoning their connection to family. Interdependence rather than independence was key for these young Aboriginal people in pursuing their pathways. This included considering migrating ‘for the purpose of connecting with family’, which was expressed ‘as a necessity for meaningful life’ (p. 772). Similarly, Harris and Prout Quicke’s (2019) examination of Indigenous youth migrating to larger cities for educational opportunities also reveals a strong liaison between these youth and their families, which included aspirations to return to their rural and remote homes to ‘re-anchor themselves in their communities of origin as agents of positive transformation’ (p. 6). Further, during their time in metropolitan educational institutions, the Indigenous youth build a translocal sense of home by drawing extensively on Indigenous student centres which allow them to construct a sense of belonging reminiscent of their home community. An individualised

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approach to mobile youth transitions, however, washes out these relations of belonging. Perhaps nowhere is this felt more than when examining young people in rural places. We now turn our attention to this subfield of youth research and to other spatial scales in the second part of this chapter.

Rural Youth Out-Migration and Unbelonging In recent years there has been a surge of interest in making rural young lives visible (see for example, Butler, 2016, 2019; Cuervo, 2011, 2014; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012, 2017; Farrugia, 2016; Giardiello, 2006; Jentsch & Shucksmith, 2004; Sørensen & Pless, 2017). These studies counterbalance a long history of neglecting the role of place in youth studies, including by late modernity theorists such as Beck and Giddens that have championed an individualised reflexive subjectivity that is detached from spatial contexts (Butler, 2020; Farrugia, 2016). Youth studies researchers have argued that this assumption of placeless lives makes urban youth experiences the norm. Indeed, as Cuervo and Wyn (2012, p.  1) argue urban youth experiences have become ‘ubiquitous, globalised and undifferentiated’ producing a neglection to youth lives outside the metropolis; which are generally depicted through a deficit lens. Central to this burgeoning subfield of rural youth sociology is the perennial dilemma for young people outside the metropolis when they leave school: should I stay or should I go? Studies on youth mobilities have sparked debates on social inequality as a product of distinctions between young people with mobile cosmopolitan aspirations of participating in the global culture and economy and those for whom these imaginaries and routes are closed (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Nairn et al., 2003; Thomson & Taylor, 2005). However, thinking of place provides a way through this dilemma and the relationship between mobility and belonging. As Massey (1994, p. 154) argues a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global with the challenges the notion of place made up of fixed boundaries to show how it is built upon a complex network of social relationships, experiences and understandings that are in turn constructed on a far larger scale.

This extroverted sense of place has been interpreted as providing the possibility for understanding the construction of biographies situated in a

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place that has at the same time a relationship with the ‘outside’ (Farrugia et al., 2014). The problem, however, in the construction of biographies and ways of being is the development of a sense of extroversion in which perceptions of young people’s place and future are understood through an authority external to them. In this sense, the valorisation of urban youth lives as the norm implicitly bestows on rural youth a sense of extroversion by assuming that successful transitions to education, employment and lifestyles are only possible in a metropolitan centre. This potentially implies an erosion of their local sense of belonging, or that immobility is the wrong kind of belonging. To this point, sociologists and youth researchers working in the rural space have argued that the structural positionality of rural youth away from flows of labour and capital that have been increasingly concentrated in urban spaces means that in order to navigate normative biographies rural young people must become mobile (Butler, 2019; Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2005; Cuervo, 2011; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Farrugia, 2016). In addition, many researchers argue that urban places are optimal sites for the expansion of practices of consumption, production, culture and lifestyle, which solidifies youthfulness as a subjectivity. This implies the residualisation of rural places as ‘out there’ where ‘nothing happens’ and where youth belonging is often attached to stigma and shame. Corbett (2005, 2007) and Cuervo (2014, 2016) have highlighted the role of potent social institutions, such as the school, family and community in pushing young people into rural out-migration, towards the educational, labour and lifestyle opportunities of metropolitan areas. Researching small rural communities in Canada and Australia these authors found that rural schools function as talent export industries: the young that the community constructs as ‘talented’ find departure not only attractive but inevitable. In their study on the association of cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial and aspirational subjects with the creative economies of the metropolis, Allen and Hollingworth (2013) also identify negative discourses of ‘rootedness to place’ as antithetical to the demands of the creative economy and the creative places. In Norway, Baeck (2004) also found that the metropolis holds a ‘hegemonic cultural status’ over rural places that attracts rural youth. In Estonia, Nugin (2014) found that youth leaving rural towns framed their decision through a self-capitalisation rationale that saw moving away from their home-place as a form of ‘moving forward’ towards an urban centre with better opportunities. Similar

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approaches to rural youth out-migration were recorded by Corbett (2005, p. 66) in Atlantic Canada were young people felt a ‘migration imperative’ to abandon local fishing towns, and by Pedersen and Gram (2018, p. 620) in rural Denmark where academically-oriented youth also held views of urban places as ‘cool places’ with hegemonic cultural status. Pedersen and Gram, however, also reveal that the views and feelings of rural young people towards their sense of rural belonging are ambivalent, including ‘conflicting feelings of attachment, detachment, pride and entrapment’ (p. 620). Historically, rural youth studies in Australia have identified rural young people perceptions of metropolitan areas as a ‘glamorous’ option and rural towns as ‘uncool’ and lacking options; thus, positioning migratory actions as the individual success and failure (Cuervo, 2011; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Geldens, 2007). Further, the fear of being stigmatised as a ‘failure’ to migrate or being left behind becomes an important factor for young people to migrate to metropolitan areas. Analysing the pathways of young Aboriginal Australian people, Parkes et al. (2015) assert that the problem with a ‘failure’ to aspire is that normative mobility oriented to educational and employment opportunities is constructed ‘around dominant cultural assumptions’ (p. 764). They considered these mobilities as quantifying youth experiences by reifying career and work, and valorising independence as a marker of adulthood, to the detriment of family, place and land. In a similar vein, Harris and Prout Quicke (2019) highlight how policies such as the Federal Government’s Indigenous Youth Mobility Pathways Project (COAG, 2009) were designed to ‘engineer various kinds of Indigenous population flows’ under the premise of appropriate pathways to adulthood (p. 4). This policy mobility imperative has worked towards undermining the identity of those Indigenous youth that migrated; as ‘contemporary Australian mainstream public views’ can consider them ‘culturally assimilated’ and ‘forfeiting or having lost any claim to Indigeneity’ (Harris & Prout Quicke, 2019, p. 4). Finally, a less trodden research path in research on rural youth belonging in times of high mobility is reverse migration, urban to rural, with its subsequent original forms of place-making. There are some exceptions in the youth studies literature though. One of them is provided by Cuervo and Wyn (2012) who showed how young adults in Australia use their tertiary educational credentials to return to rural places to people and landscapes that matter to them. A belonging frame in this case sheds light on the relational nature of youth lives by placing at the centre how people and material objects shape young adults’ decisions on place-making.

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Henderson (2009) also problematises the traditional rural-urban migration by focusing on young families that migrate to rural areas in search of work. This type of mobility is not always welcomed by local residents, revealing the strong divisions in many rural communities between traditional residents and newcomers or farmers and non-farmers. In a similar vein, Cuervo (2016) reveals how urban migrants searching for affordable cost of living and housing move into a small town only to find resistance by local members of the community. This tension is passed onto the younger members of the ‘newcomers’ group who, despite the good intentions of school staff, leave school early and enter a path of welfare dependence that replicates their parents’ pathway. At play in these studies is a stigmatisation of ‘newcomers’ through the moralisation of class which serves to further stigmatise rural places as disadvantaged (see also Bryant & Pini, 2009). Other studies have focused on ethnicity and the move of migrants to rural places to shed light on rural reverse mobilities and relationships between locals and new members of the communities (see McAreavey, 2017). While in some instances moves by immigrants to rural places is welcomed and encouraged as a policy strategy to repopulate and sustain declining rural towns, in other times ethnic and religious differences surface undermining this project. Butler (2020) makes the important point that a more race-critical view is required to address a homogenous depiction  of rural youth mobilities. This would enable youth studies  to  better  account for  in-migration among young people from migrant  backgrounds as well as the  Indigenous histories and mobilities that shape local rural towns. Despite the important issues that these reverse mobility studies showcase, we note that a belonging frame initiates a process of dismantling the notion that moving away from rural places is the normative subjectivity youth need to embrace to take advantage of the global opportunities in education, labour and lifestyle. And while it has not been common for youth researchers to use a belonging frame to analyse ‘reverse’ mobility, the studies mentioned here bring into sharper relief the efforts that young people and their families go through to find spaces where they can belong. Reverse mobility is an important emerging trend in young people’s life choices that demands greater attention from youth studies. Ultimately, a belonging frame to examine rural youth (im)mobility can serve to de-­ centre the field of youth studies by expanding the research focus from a temporal analysis supported by the over-emphasis on youth transitions to more spatial accounts that re-locate youth experiences and practices.

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Migration, Identity and Belonging The literature that we have canvassed so far is focused on the role of mobility and belonging in normative youth transitions processes, particularly those supported by institutional structures, such as education systems and labour market, that aim to increase the flow of labour, capital and ideas. We have argued that these constitute valorised youth mobilities in an era of heightened movement and migration. However, not all youth mobilities are valorised, promoted and supported through powerful institutional structures. Young people on the move as a product of political violence and social and economic crises can be positioned as undesirable by the institutional frameworks that regulate global human migration. While youth sociologists have recently affirmed, that mobility is becoming a marker and maker of youth transitions, there is also a broad body of work on the production of mobility of young people in the margins and in search for economic, political and social security (Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2018). In this section we discuss how a belonging frame has been predominantly brought to bear in such scholarship to highlight the work that migrant and refugee youth do through everyday practices (including by making use of the affordances of digital technologies), to navigate intercultural relations and institutional spaces to emplace themselves, to actively produce and negotiate a new sense of ‘ethnic’, hybrid, local, diasporic or transnational identity to belong to, and to remain connected across local, national and transnational domains. As discussed in Chap. 6 (Citizenship), a belonging framework is sometimes drawn upon to apprehend such youth as ‘inbetween’ subjects who face, but usually overcome, belonging challenges through everyday practices to manage their ‘split’ (or, if more productively imagined, ‘hybrid’) identities across home/host contexts. This scholarship tends to frame the question of divided or problematised belonging as a primary challenge for these youth, and can take ethnicity, race or culture as a pre-given social identity. Other work engages with belonging as a contested concept and political process and sees cultural identities (including ethnicity, community affiliations, national imaginaries and so on) not as pre-existent but as socially produced and enacted at the level of the mundane as well as the institutional. The research presented in this section focuses on questions of identity, often constructing belonging as a key challenge for young people that live simultaneously in different cultures, from whom it is routinely demanded

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that they assimilate into one culture. It shows how young people navigate multiple scales of belonging and unbelonging. For example, in her analysis of everyday mobilities, migration and place-making in the suburbs of Sydney, Williamson’s (2016) narratives of participants from migrant backgrounds reveal the disjuncture between their imagined and actual new homeland; thus, producing an ambivalent sense of belonging. While participants increasingly felt at ease in their new community due to its multicultural composition and strong levels of intercultural conviviality, they also experienced barriers in access to the labour market which produced a sense of un-belongingness at an institutional level. Similarly, the Somali refugees living in the United States in Marlowe’s (2017) research also reveal an everyday sense of belonging in their intercultural experiences, while at the same time feeling that they do not belong at a political level due to their problematic interaction with migration officers. These accounts of transnational settlement highlight the possibility of experiencing different registers of belonging that are mediated by everyday civilities and socio-political settings and migration policies. In other words, the work that the concept of belonging does in these studies of transnational settlement is rendering visible how micro and macro experiences and different social forces shape what is possible for migrants and refugees in terms of social, economic, cultural and political participation. Youth researchers have also pointed out that a sense of belonging and the production of boundary work can present at a multi-spatial scale, where registers of belonging can be felt within their neighbourhood, at a local level, but not the broader society. Visser (2017) shows that this is the case of young migrants living in the neighbourhood of Tottenham (London), who felt included and safe in this local space but not within the broader society – even despite policy efforts to celebrate diversity and after being granted political recognition. In Australia, studies have revealed that migrant and refugee youth present strong feelings of belonging to the nation and/or local community even while they may feel excluded from and discriminated against by society more broadly. Research focusing on migrants in regional towns shows how their participation in the community is based on social relations and shared cultural affiliations, as well as local efforts to retain migrants to redress population decline (Boese & Phillips, 2017). Other studies, however, offer a more nuanced picture. For example, while migrant and refugee youth can experience a sense of belonging they also often are subject to racism and discrimination in

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public spaces, social institutions and through the circulation of media discourses that support an integrationist agenda (Khan et al., 2019). Youth researchers have also addressed youth everyday practices of sociality, both convivial and conflictual, that serve to negotiate new forms of local and national belonging (Harris, 2013; Harris & Herron, 2017). These include efforts by Anglo, Christian, white young people to re-­centre whiteness and demands on migrant youth to perform a desire for and efforts of belonging. In this sense, an unacknowledged belonging frame actually shapes settlement and social cohesion policy in ways that makes this their key task: a legitimation of white versions of multiculturalism and the nation to which such youth should seek to belong. Further, racialised expressions or practices of belonging to local place have long been explored in youth studies, including efforts by white youth to assert entitlement to neighbourhood space and places in the face of demographic change and cultural diversification (see for example Johns, 2015; Nayak, 2003). In Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads) we noted that, conceptually, the belonging turn has been underpinned by Yuval-Davis’ (2006, p.  199) observation that ‘people can ‘belong’ in many ways and to many different objects of attachments’. While some conceptual approaches have focused on boundary-making and social differentiation, other researchers argue that place-making is constructed through repetitive, ordinary, everyday practices and rituals. This highlights the practice of belonging as a process, a performance that is constructed and sustained over time through conscious but also unreflexive processes of performativity that connect people to norms and values that form the basis of their identity. In youth studies, an example of the way in which this has been taken up is provided by Archambault and Haugen (2017) through their analysis of the negotiation of belonging through cultural practices by young Muslim refugees in Norway who make selective use of the hijab in schools and public spaces. These young people comment on their decision to use the hijab depending on the social milieu they are mixing in and on the impact it will have in their inclusion/exclusion in that environment. Another example is the analysis of forms of belonging by different generations of Greek Cypriot migrants in the United Kingdom, in which Kallis et al. (2018) illustrate how Greek school offered the younger generation a translocal space where, through language activities, they could perform their ethnic identity. While these studies reveal how everyday practices and rituals sustain a sense of belonging, they also have some weaknesses. One of these is the

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tendency to view young migrants through a generational frame, where the fate of the second generation is closely tied to that of the first generation. That is, as Harris (2017, p. 222) explains, there is ‘an adult-centrist and institutionalist dimension’ to the categorisation of second generation; which tends ‘to displace young people’s agency by positioning them as those whose fate is to simply embody the process of assimilation that their migrating parent/s have initiated’. This project of assimilation is always ‘closely regulated through this nomination as second generation by social institutions’ (e.g. welfare services, education systems) (p. 223). In many instances, the conceptual problem lies in the constructions, from the outside, of migrant and refugee communities by media, social institutions and political representations, as well as researchers, that aim to understand but also control their societal participation (Benhabib, 2002; Marlowe, 2017) and that regulate and surveil the belonging of young people of migrant or refugee background, as discussed in Chap. 6 (Citizenship). To counter this view from outside, a focus on everyday practices and performances of belonging can provide a more nuanced way to understand challenges and opportunities for place-making and participation for migrant and refugee youth. Another problem is the tendency to construct migrant identity and ethnicity as fixed and a priori, treated as pre-existent cultural material that is then expressed or suppressed in the host society. To counter this, from a different perspective, work by Noble et al. (1999), and Idriss (2018), shows how youthful ethnic identities such as ‘Leb’ (Lebanese Australian) are actively constituted and performed through routinised practices in social contexts such as family homes, schools, workplaces, and taste cultures. These scholars show how belonging to an ethnic identity is performatively managed and how ethnicity itself is situationally produced and can be a form of belonging capital rather than a fixed cultural essence that young people seek to express or try to ‘balance’ through hybridity. Furthermore, some scholarship explores how belonging to ethnicity is regulated in different spheres of young people’s lives and the ways its articulation is limited to traditional and often stereotypical practices that can be easily recognised, ‘appreciated’ and used by white Anglo society. For example, Idriss (2018) investigates the ways Arab Australian young men working in the creative industries are only able to enact and mobilise their ethnic identities through narrow frames of ‘multicultural arts’, which limits their capacity to belong to this professional sector even while ethnicity

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is purportedly acknowledged and celebrated through such policy and programme approaches. A belonging frame has also been applied to the mobility of migrant and refugee youth in the burgeoning field of youth digital diaspora studies. Research focusing on digital interaction through social media and other technological affordances reveals the possibility of sustaining an idea of home transnationally (Gifford & Wilding, 2013; Robertson et al., 2016). These scholars show the multiple ways that young people work through digital spaces to remain simultaneously connected to the ‘here’ and ‘there’ (i.e. host and home society). In so doing, this kind of youth research on the digital, (see also Chap. 8 (Researching Belonging in Youth Studies)), reveals the entanglement of practices of mobility and belonging; counterbalancing views in mobility theory that presents mobility and belonging as opposed to each other. Raffaetá et  al. (2016) illustrate this point and further complicate the conceptualisation of home/host as separate spaces of belonging by examining the dynamic forms of belonging and unbelonging for second generation Chinese youth in Prato, Italy. Within a local context that does not support discourses and practices of multiple identities and hybridity, they show how Chinese youth while experiencing discrimination manage to construct a sense of belonging through digital connections but also in institutional spaces such as the school. This social participation and identification is in many instances constructed through the development of ‘multiple and mobile identities’ and by imagining that they are part of a ‘community of global youth’ that through education and the mobile search for ‘elite job opportunities’ overseas can transcend ethnic and national identifications’ (pp. 432–434). Similarly, Leurs (2015) has explored the digitalisation of ‘key identity-formation processes’ for Moroccan migrant youth in The Netherlands, including how they negotiate ‘their politicized identities’ in an environment of increasing Islamophobia and anti-immigration public attitudes. Central to Leurs’ analysis is Diminescu’s (2008) concept of ‘connected migrants’, in which digital affordances produce a shift from the idea of migrants and refugees as being uprooted from the home country to being able to simultaneously connect with pre-existing social networks, as well as construct new communities of belonging in their host countries. The relational affordances of a belonging frame enable an understanding of young migrants’ and refugees’ lives through processes of boundary work and the construction of identity (in many instances hybrid identity), including through digital media. Here, however, theories of hybridity of youth migrants move beyond assimilationist approaches connecting first

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and second generation to highlight how being “in-between” identities can be ‘an asset rather than a liability’ (Harris, 2017, p.  224). As Marotta (2017, p. 194) argues, the concept of hybrid identity captures ‘the ambiguity and power of living in multiple words’, an ‘inbetweenness’, as Harris puts it, that moves the agenda from challenges of assimilation and cultural adjusting to the host country to the opportunities offer by ‘borrowing cultural beliefs and practices… and thus employing their hybridity strategically’. At the same time, hybridity continues to evoke fixed concepts of home/host, and may not adequately capture the processual, performative and constructed nature of cultural identity, nor the multiple resources that young people bring to bear on their identity work. In Chap. 6 (Citizenship) we argue that the nation-state continues to be a critical actor in the regulation of political recognition that enables citizenship and a formal sense of belonging. In this section we identify a belonging frame that moves beyond belonging-as-citizenship to focus on belonging as dynamic process that is not achieved but constantly fluctuating and that can be multi-scale and encompass a sense of identifications with the local, national and transnational. The tapestry of migrant and refugee youth experiences highlighted here shows that an individual ‘does not simply or ontologically “belong” to a place or a community but it is constantly recreated through rituals, practices and everyday routines’ (Bell, 1999, p. 3). A belonging frame has also been used in youth sociology to show that to belong is not just spatial or locational but profoundly temporal in so far one is not tied only to a past, that one might (be)long to/for, but it has a future-oriented component in so far young migrants daily negotiate and strategise their construction of belonging in a new space. (See for example Chap. 4 (Policy Frames) where we discuss ontologies of belonging for Indigenous young people). The work that the concept of belonging also does, that these and other studies aptly show,  is to unpack the significant efforts that migrant and refugee youth must expend in order to participate in society in more equitable ways. And while the notion of hybrid, and hyphenated identities shifts the discourse from challenge to opportunity for young people, studies that connect youth through a ‘generational cohort framework’ tend to focus excessively on the ‘problematic of assimilation and personal identity resolution’ (Harris, 2017, p.  226). As Colombo and Rebughini (2012) state, what is instead at play here is not recognition of identities and social differences but the possibility to be included or excluded from spaces that can provide relevant material, affective, symbolic and ludic opportunities.

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A belonging frame enables a relational approach that sees ethnicity as a process by which youth can accrue and utilise resources to construct spaces of inclusion (Harris, 2017). A final point to make is what Harris views as a contradiction, at least in Australia, where within an exceptionally culturally diverse society, ‘there still remains a paucity of Australian youth studies scholarship that addresses the processual nature of ethnicity for young people’ (p. 229). This should not be surprising as youth studies despite its prolific growth in the last few decades continues to reveal important research gaps. An example is the lack of research on transnational mobility, intraregional migration and belonging in the Global South. In the next section, we address this gap.

Youth Mobilities in the Global South Recently, youth studies has seen demands for a decolonisation and democratisation of the field by rendering visible the rich research emanating from the Global South (Cooper et al., 2019; Cuervo & Miranda, 2019). Other researchers have argued that the focus on transnational youth mobility has overwhelmingly been centred on the Euro-American context at the expense of other regions (Robertson, Cheng, & Yeoh, 2018). Research on young people in the Global South often focusses on their mobilities and migration patterns to the Global North. (The implicit valorisation of the ‘North’ as a desirable destination for young people echoes the valorisation of urban over rural destinations). This is the ‘recognised’ trope of youth mobility for young people in the Global South. In this regard, young people’s sense of belonging as attachment to their local community is transformed into being mobile as a sense of identification and as an engagement with process of self-capitalisation by looking to professional opportunities in the Global North. Less attention has been paid to the mobility of youth within regions of the Global South, including intraregional mobility supported by higher education infrastructures and youth restricted independent mobility in urban spaces due to violence, crime and commercialisation of urban places. Some of the scholarship that renders visible intraregional mobility has been based on the migration of higher education students between Asian countries. For example, Yang and Cheng (2018) have documented the rise of Indian youth migration to undertake higher education studies in China. This phenomenon has been aided by an ever more expensive and selective higher education in India that serves to entangle an aspirational

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Indian middle-class with the development of higher education infrastructures in China. Elsewhere, Yang (2016) has researched the attraction by the Singaporean government of ‘foreign talent’, in this case Chinese students, as a policy approach to population management and skill formation. The policy strategy includes attracting young people from other East Asian countries, but particularly from China, by targeting secondary school students with incentives that include financial assistance to undertake secondary and tertiary education, and ultimately settle, in the country. A less well-known scholarship in youth studies is the rich research emanating from the Global South around issues of spatial mobility, immobility, social inclusion and exclusion. In Latin America, for example, youth researchers have rendered visible the intersection of class, mobility and spatial exclusion. For example, Saraví (2014, p.  505) shows how, while youth of socio-economic advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds live in the same urban space (Mexico Distrito Federal), they occupy different parts of the city. In this way, they construct different spaces of exclusion and belonging. Increasing levels of urban violence, with its subsequent permanent fear of being subject to physical violence, generates a ‘spatial habitus’ built on ‘the identification of prohibited areas’ and ‘the rejection of strangers’ in young people from privileged backgrounds. The rapid growth of gated communities and the privatisation of spaces of entertainment and consumption in which they can socialise creates for the upper-­ middle classes a ‘network of places’ disconnected from the city. Through this spatial segregation, socio-economically advantaged youth generate their own ‘urban normality’ and spaces of belonging based on a restricted mobility. Infrastructure, such as the gated communities, work as a crucial factor in enhancing or inhibiting mobility and has the capacity to materialise structural violence by connecting or disconnecting different individuals and social groups (Winton, 2017). For the poor, the streets of the city continue to be an important space of socialisation, albeit one that has been abandoned by the middle and upper classes (Saraví, 2014). Nevertheless, it is not only the privileged classes that feel threaten by street violence but the popular sectors too. In particular, as Saraví argues, women are concerned with violence and insecurity, but for those who are poor, restriction of urban mobility is not such a clear option as for their privileged counterparts. Similarly, in Cape Town, van Blerk (2013, p. 556) also shows how policies deployed to strengthen urban governance serve to make youth street life ‘hidden and marginalised, pushed into less wealthy parts of urban landscape’. The

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development of ‘security measures’ against violence and crime is central to the displacement of youth from street life. In Saraví’s Mexico, young people are pushed to the margins of the city away from the places that offer production and consumption opportunities. Other research, such as Langevang and Gough’s (2009) study of urban places in Ghana, show how being able ‘to traverse urban space is also vital for satisfying daily material needs and for long-term social mobility’ (p.  753). And while young people value mobility, they are also constrained by gender and generational relations, as well as lack of material resources such as infrastructure and transport. Researchers in the Global South have also highlighted the power of policing and ‘othering’ of social groups through the production of borders and regulations that enhance immobility. For example, Fernandes (2013) shows how the police presence, including illegal procedures, in Rio de Janerio’s favelas (slums) works towards stigmatising and marginalising young people in drug gangs (and also those not in gangs) living in these places. These young people living in ‘a social and symbolical shade’, kept separated from society’s gaze, suffer a restriction to their mobility but also violent police-military incursions into their own spatial realm of belonging (Fernandes, 2013, p. 210). In a sense, these borders, as well as the infrastructure created by policies and their enforcement, serve to police and regulate the mobility of certain social groups by sorting bodies and determining who occupies each space. As Winton (2017, p.  143) argues, borders ‘are quintessential sites of embodied, material, and politicized mobilities of harm’ and they ‘function as nodes to filter and distribute (im)mobility’. Boundaries and borders also serve to differentiate between those seeking belonging and those in the position to grant it. Structural and symbolical barriers for youth are also present in Del Valle and Winton’s (2012) study of the mobility of young people with low vision in a high density urban metropolis as Mexico City (México Distrito Federal). In relation to the existent physical (including physical violence) and visual obstacles offered by an ableist-designed over-populated and chaotic metropolis, the researchers show that these young people were subject to physical violence, including robbery and threat of sexual violence, but also ‘social disablement’ through shame in their encounters with others (physically able individuals) in the streets. This led to the internalisation of personal responsibility (‘it is my fault’) and resignation (‘I can’t expect anyone else to help’) as a response to their everyday mobility practice. Ultimately, and similarly to Fernandes’s and Saraví’s studies,

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youth with impaired vision were discriminated against and experienced symbolic and physical violence for ‘being out of place’. The studies presented in this section are just a few of the fertile research emanating from Global South youth scholars. They illuminate the interconnection of (im)mobility and (un)belonging and bring to sharp relief the lives of young people in this region beyond the well-trodden path of youth mobilities to the Global North.

What Do Concepts of Belonging Do in Youth Mobility Studies? In this chapter we have interrogated how a belonging frame has been applied to youth mobilities in contemporary youth research. This belonging frame has highlighted several issues which are useful to briefly recap. Earlier in the book (Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation)) we show how transnational mobilities are central to the dynamics of neoliberal globalisation that seek to open new economic and labour spaces. In this sense, this highlights how through policy infrastructures (e.g. higher education systems) governments can discipline, normalise and form contemporary youthfulness around notions and practices of mobility. In turn, these infrastructures have generated a valorisation of international students and professional mobility that has been viewed as a new maker and marker of youth transitions (Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2018). Here a belonging frame sheds light on the persistent problem of youth transitions with its narrowing of individuals to economic units with its overemphasis on education and employment participation as spaces of belonging and identity. However, the transnational and valorised mobility of students and professionals has a strong relational component; that is, decisions to move are socially embedded through the influence of significant others. This presupposes the mobilisation of different forms of capital, which some young people cannot enact. It also reveals that notions such as cosmopolitanism, mobility, localism and immobility, render power and inequalities visible (Thomson & Taylor, 2005). Mobility has become a force for social stratification, as the ‘mobility of some groups rests on the immobility of other groups’ (Fallov et al., 2013, p. 482). The inequalities of who moves and who does not, debunk notions that equate mobility with freedom by asking questions of unequal access to mobility, motility, place-making and

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dwelling. But most importantly, if mobility is an imperative for youth today (Corbett, 2005; Farrugia, 2016), if it represents a new space of youth identification and belonging (Dolby & Rizvi, 2008), it also presupposes that being immobile is viewed as the wrong kind of belonging. A belonging frame also reveals shortcomings in the contemporary youth research agenda. An example is the calls for youth in ‘peripheral’ societies to develop a spatial reflexivity to access the global opportunities offered by the mobility of labour and capital that dissociates youth from its relational self. In other words, the relational affordances of belonging frameworks expose the valorisation of the urban, the Global North and central rather than ‘peripheral’ spaces. Further, these calls neglect the relational constitution of young people to the people and places that matter to them; particularly to family, that historically has been understood as a space youth need to transcend to successfully transition to adulthood. This also ignores inequalities at the interior of economically developed societies, while stigmatising life in peripherical societies, where it appears that young people’s only hope is to migrate. A similar approach portrays rural communities as places of disadvantage and backwardness. As Allen and Hollingworth (2013) put it, ‘narratives of loss and failure’ are not only the exclusive property of rural places but can be found in many deindustrialised cities of the Global North (p.  504). However, what a belonging frame does in youth mobility studies is to reveal how urban spaces are commonly seen as sites where successful, normative youth subjectivities can most easily be forged. Rural places, then, are viewed as residual spaces, as places where youth are stuck. The eclectic multi-scalar geographies of (im)mobilities we presented in this chapter also serve to show how youth can be located not just through an emphasis on time (e.g. transition from youth to adulthood) but through political, economic and cultural spaces. This involves de-centring the epistemological bias that youth studies has had in favour of studies and conceptual analyses from and of the Global North to make space for a democratisation of the field by incorporating the voices and experiences of (im)mobility, and its subsequent production of inequalities, of young people in the Global South. The Global South is often presented as a space of immobility, stasis and unbelonging for young people. Thus, in addition to acknowledging the role of family and the dynamics of youth lives in rural places, the recognition of narratives of intra-regional mobility and opportunities, as well as violence and inequality in the Global South are timely.

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The increasing forced migration of people has brought to the fore questions of belonging, boundaries, borders, integration and assimilation. Here belonging is certainly a relational, precarious and uncertain process rather than an outcome. Efforts to frame migrant youth through a belonging framework often rely on a fixed notion of cultural identity and tie them to their parents’ generation’s goal of assimilation, seeing belonging as a response to political agendas rather than young people’s lives. This positions second generation migrant youth as ‘categorically and monolithically’, a generation tied to their parents’ dreams (Harris, 2017). And while seeing young migrants through their everyday productions and performances of culture or their development of hyphenated identities helps to see their lives for what they are rather than for what they can achieve; it also serves to position integrated hybrid belonging as an ultimate ideal and idea, a term and a practice with ‘a life of its own’ (McLeod, 2018, p. 305). That is, it essentialises a particular model of belonging as a normative expectation; a keyword such as ‘community’, that denotes a feel-good feeling (Bauman, 2001). As Kelly (2018, p. 325) argues, what happens ‘to the ‘outsiders’, the ‘out-riders’, the ‘non-joiners’, the ‘misfits’, the ‘fringe dwellers’, the ‘loners, if we valorise “belonging”, if we essentialise “belonging”?’. Kelly posits the idea that there is a ‘normative, moral dimension to belonging that is about conforming to existing practices and relations, rather than disrupting or unsettling them’ (p. 326). In a similar vein, the idea of belonging as ‘being at ease’, ‘feeling at home’ (Antonsich, 2010) presupposes that homes are safe and comfortable havens for all youth. Skeggs (2004, p.  49), amongst other scholars, show how home can be mostly understood as a bourgeoise concept obsessed with establishing fixity through ‘domesticity, privacy, comfort as a way to “display a respectable self, known through its being in place”’. This comfort and ease is not attainable for many young people who are poor, from refugee and migrant backgrounds or for those where domestic violence is an everyday reality at home. Forms of unbelonging need to be taken seriously as they can enable possibilities for seeking social change. Questioning dominant forms of belonging in society, such as heterosexual norms of marriage, reveal that ‘not belonging does not have to have purely negative consequences’ but can actually develop forms of political action that seek to redress structural injustices (May, 2013, p. 88). A belonging frame in youth mobility enables researchers to question the construction and reproduction of inequalities as well as opening up new agendas of youth research. A belonging frame

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also serves to make intelligible the often complex life for example of migrant, transnational or refugee youth. The temptation, however, is to essentialise and individualise belonging as a goal to achieve for (im)mobile youth, without taking into account systemic processes and social forces that shape the parameters of what is possible for young people to be and do. In youth mobility research the concept of belonging has often been used to ask where and how young people belong. However, when belonging is framed in this way, it often takes on an implicit normative dimension that assumes that belonging is a ‘good’ thing. There is also an assumption that different individuals and groups, regardless of their social, economic and political circumstances, agree on the meaning and value of belonging; a demand to belong for young people, that just as the concept of transitions (see Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation)), makes individuals rather than social institutions or socio-political projects responsible for its achievement. This potential essentialism of belonging within the youth mobility literature is what we have interrogated in this chapter. There is a danger in youth mobility research of replicating transitions approaches that place the responsibility to be ‘on track’ on the individual; to invest in the self, to belong, to be understood and recognised; rather than focusing on the role of social institutions and socio-political projects in the recognition of those that are constantly othered, such as non-­ heterosexual youth or migrant and refugee youth identities. If we simply normalise belonging as a ‘good’ thing, as a normative expectation, we condemn those young people that do not follow this expectation, to be sanctioned ‘from above’, by institutions, deemed at risk, to become unintelligible, immobile, stuck and unbelonging. Ultimately, essentialising belonging within a youth mobility approach risks limiting the recognition of the plurality of contemporary youth experiences.

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CHAPTER 8

Researching Belonging in Youth Studies

Introduction In this chapter we reflect on the ways that belonging is ‘put to work’ (Habib & Ward, 2020, p. 9; Noble, 2020) in youth research, focusing on both empirical and conceptual aspects of studies of youth belonging. A central problem with the belonging turn that we have highlighted throughout this book is that it can mean everything and nothing. A certain enchantment with belonging as a concept or catchword has resulted in a proliferation of belonging-focused youth research, policy and programs, often with little attempt to define its meaning or clarify its purpose. As Noble (2020, p. xvii) amongst others has observed, belonging is ‘used more as a descriptor to gesture towards a raft of issues rather than an analytical framework to systematically engage with them’. Similarly, Wright (2015, p. 391) notes that ‘belonging somehow seems to have escaped the level of rigorous theorization applied to many other foundational terms’. The recent interest in centring belonging in research with young people and the emergence of studies that explicitly aim to investigate belonging amongst young people invite reflection on what a belonging framework specifically allows researchers to do conceptually and methodologically that other approaches do not, and why this might be seen as compelling right now. In addition to exploring these questions, we also consider here how, why and with what effects research that starts from the standpoint of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_8

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belonging employs some particular methodological approaches and research techniques. For example, studies of belonging can purport to capture youth experience in more innovative, wholistic, rich and youth-­ centred ways than more traditional research, but how is this achieved, and with what challenges and drawbacks? We first look at broader methodological, epistemological and conceptual aspects of belonging research. We consider arguments and illustrations of belonging as an approach that productively attends to relationality, overcomes some limiting framing in youth research and policy (such as ‘transitions’, as well as common identity categories for interrogating youth), and that takes seriously the study of micro productions of social processes in young people’s lives. We then discuss some specific methods in belonging research to consider how the turn to belonging has animated debates about empirical techniques and prompted the use of and connection to a range of old and new methods that bring vibrancy to the field. Overall, we offer a critical reflection on methodology and methods in youth belonging research, asking what opportunities, complexities and limitations these might bring?

Bringing in the Relational One of the strongest methodological claims about a belonging frame is that it lends itself to a relational approach to understanding young people’s lives. Without a relational framework, mapping and categorising occur in a vacuum, often focusing on single dimensions of life in isolation from others. By contrast, concepts of belonging make the connections between aspects of life visible, and bring the relationships between individual lives and their social, economic and political context into view. In an increasingly complex (and connected) world, understanding ‘relationality’ – how things connect – is crucial to addressing pressing issues such as poverty, inequality and poor mental health. A relational framework also focuses on the quality of connections and relationships, forged by young people, and enabled by institutional processes, that constitute what is possible for young people. As outlined in Chap. 3 (Conceptual Threads), performative and new materialist theorisations of belonging have become particularly popular ways to bring a relational dimension to studies of youth.

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Increasing regard for the politics of youth research and engagement with the project of decolonising methodologies (Smith, 1999) has also oriented some youth studies towards belonging as an integrative and fundamentally relationality-focused approach informed by a range of Indigenous knowledge systems and critiques. There is of course enormous diversity in Indigenous epistemologies and we are mindful of a simplistic notion of a ‘pan Indigenous’ model (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016; de Finney, 2017; Paradies, 2006; Smith, 1999). We also do not wish to imply that all Indigenous knowledge systems necessarily centre belonging. However, a regard for relationality and connection in some youth research has been shaped by some Indigenous conceptual frameworks and political resistance to colonial knowledge/power-making practices. This work demonstrates the political and intellectual stakes of understanding Indigenous young people’s lives in relational terms, and especially through an appreciation of interdependencies and responsibilities to people and place. Research about/with Indigenous youth, often by Indigenous researchers, demonstrates how a relational approach can better capture and address key issues for young people than siloed investigations of single topics such as ‘education’ or ‘health’. These are not only informed by limited Western knowledge systems, but in their perpetuation and legitimation as core knowledge-making practices can constitute ongoing mechanisms of colonial oppression. As de Finney (2017, p.11) notes, quoting Amnesty International definitions, a key feature often considered to be shared by First Peoples is the interconnection between identity, way of life and land (see also Uluru Statement from the Heart, 2017). This may be interpreted in spiritual and/or what Smith (1999, p. 12) describes as more ‘grounded’ ways of knowing context and environment: her point is important because it centres belonging to people and place not simply in terms of spirituality or history but in the ongoing political struggles by Indigenous peoples to survive and thrive and have their sovereign rights recognised. Alfred and Corntassel (2005, p. 608) also argue for a balance between cultural and political notions of being Indigenous, foregrounding that ‘Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicised context of contemporary colonialism’ (Alfred and Corntassel, p.  597). Paradies (2006, p. 363) similarly cautions against trapping Indigeneity in a ‘prison of romanticism’ shaped by stereotypes of cultural alterity regarding spirituality or relationship to land, noting that this denies complexity and processes of change.

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Rameka’s (2018, p. 372) work on contemporary Māori perspectives on belonging illustrates how even when connections to family, genealogy, history, culture, spirituality, environment and land may be not be regularly enacted in a day to day sense, owing to a colonial history and continuing colonial practices of land theft and assimilationist policies and ideology, and as people become more mobile and urbanised, relational processes of belonging still remain strong and continue to evolve. For young people in urban contexts, she notes the flourishing of their own urban social networks and new forms of social institutions, including pan-­ tribal voluntary associations, church groups, clubs, youth groups and urban marae (‘gathering complexes’) … that support the development and retention of a sense of connectedness to people, place, and the wider physical and spiritual worlds

She makes the important argument that such contemporary proliferation of sites of belonging does not diminish Māori identities, but rather enables multiple points of connection and modes of engagement that maintain and strengthen, rather than dilute, relationality. And as Kidman (2015, p. 636) elaborates, also writing about Māori: collective tribal memories and narratives about land, place, and history shape the way that indigenous childhoods and adolescence are experienced as a set of intersecting spatial and cultural relationships in the present, whether these experiences are rural or urban, provincial or suburban, and tribal or, in cases where the tribal land base has been taken or whittled away, diasporic and migratory

Such an awareness of the way young people are positioned at the intersections of these relationships can be used to better understand their experiences and conditions because it can capture the ways different dimensions of life relate to one another to produce opportunities and outcomes. For example, Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2016, p.  792) compare Eurocentric educational research that uses Western indicators of ‘self-­ esteem’ and ‘self-concept’ to measure and improve school engagement and achievement for Australian Indigenous youth with research that is informed by diverse Indigenous perceptions and experiences of self. The latter research, framed by Indigenous epistemologies, identifies much more extensive and diverse indicators of self-concept shaped by a sense of

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self as belonging to an Indigenous identity and community, and including many relational dimensions such as connection to family/kin, country and mob, community support, respect for protocols and elders, and participation in culture. These were found to be critical factors in positive selfconcept and significantly related to better educational and other outcomes, including buffering the impact of racism. Similarly, Kickett-­ Tucker’s (2009) review of a range of studies of Indigenous youth in North America and Scandinavia, and her own research in the Australian context, finds that continuity of cultural identity and sense of belonging to culture are strongly linked to wellbeing (see also Snowshoe et al., 2017). Writing from the Canadian perspective, de Finney (2017, p.  15) observes that other Western diagnoses and conceptions such as ‘trauma’ and ‘resilience’, commonly used in child and youth policy and research, rely predominantly on ‘individualised, psycho-medical’ conceptualisations of young people’s experiences. Associated initiatives are then often translated into ‘positivist outcomes-focused agendas of Eurocentric, neoliberal settler systems’ that construct Indigenous youth in deficit terms. She contrasts this with political, collective notions of resilience, as demonstrated by Indigenous peoples’ protection of language, culture, and relationships to land, kinship systems and spiritual worldviews under the ongoing impacts of colonial violence. Her point is twofold: first, that collective, political (rather than individualised and medicalised) notions of resilience are already well-established in Indigenous communities. And second, that some systems of Indigenous kinship- and environment-belonging, including networks amongst humans and the natural world, ‘clearly exceed the boundaries of Western notions of psycho-social resilience. Here, true connectedness represents a connection to “all relations”’ (de Finney, 2017, p. 18, quoting Little Bear, 2000; and Wagamese, 2013). Accordingly, she advocates for what she calls ‘resilience as sovereignty’, which is rooted in Indigenous young people’s belonging to family, community and land. As she says (de Finney, 2017, p. 19), ‘This conceptual shift takes resilience out of its individualised definition and places it instead in a broader social-­ political context that accounts for transgenerational kinship networks, in relationship with ancestors, lands, and all our relations’. This kind of work demonstrates that youth research that focuses on single domains of young people’s lives split off from others (for example ‘education’ or ‘health’) and that fails to see its own epistemological biases (such as exclusively Western concepts of self-esteem, positivity, agency and resilience) will almost inevitably reproduce deficit models and remain

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complicit in the very problems it aims to redress. As Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2016, p. 792) outline, Often cited inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians must not be considered as due to the ‘Aboriginal problem’, but rather… such inequalities must more carefully understood by moving beyond culturally incomplete Western-based perspectives and focusing on the perceptions and voices of Indigenous Australians and their ways of knowing, understanding and being. (see also Moreton-Robinson, 2011; Walter & Andersen, 2013)

If, as Smith (1999, p. 173) argues, ‘research is an important part of the colonisation process because it is concerned with defining legitimate knowledge’, the benefit of a relationally oriented belonging approach in efforts for de-colonising youth research is to both centre diverse kinds of Indigenous ways of knowing and being in studies of Indigenous youth (without romanticising or foreclosing what these may consist of), and to understand and work against the tendency in many kinds of youth research work to perpetuate knowledge-legitimising practices of occlusion and oppression.

Beyond Chronologies and Taxonomies in Youth Research In addition to enabling connections between different aspects of life to be captured and contributing to the project of decolonisation of methodologies, a belonging approach also encourages work that moves beyond common and limiting tropes, categorisations and orthodoxies in youth research and policy. One of the most enduring of these has been the framework of transitions, as we have outlined in Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation). Attention to the relational dimensions of youth experience that a belonging approach offers is particularly important in the context of the dominance of this transitions agenda in youth research and policy, and especially transitions from education to employment. Transitions approaches construct a narrow lens on how young people engage in education and/or employment, whereas belonging approaches interrogate these as just two of many interconnected domains within which young people work to put their lives together, in the process negotiating identity, aspirations, social relations, wellbeing and capacity to act. As Cuervo and Wyn (2014, p. 913) have argued elsewhere,

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The idea of belonging refers to but transcends the policy focus … on participation in education and employment. The pragmatic uses of education, the struggle to achieve a balance between work and personal relationships, the relevance of family support and the significance of social generation, are different elements of young people’s lives that gain traction when we use a belonging metaphor. A metaphor of belonging opens up the possibility of understanding how young people build their life across time and in different locations.

In this respect, a belonging approach can move beyond a partial focus on a single domain of life, but also beyond a snapshot focus on a single period in life, common to transitions research as necessarily a phase-based framework. Transitions research has struggled to effectively analyse youth experience because of these constraints, caught in its own normative parameters of chronology, and turning to questions of definition and terminology (transitions now characterised as ‘yo yo’, ‘destandardised’, ‘extended’, ‘protracted’, ‘fragmented’, ‘frozen’ and so on) rather than a larger interrogation of the limits of an approach based on normative conceptions of life stage. The concept of belonging does not disregard the problematic of sequencing or the concept of life course, but provides insight into the connections and chains of events and decisions that make up young people’s trajectories beyond a simplistic or siloed notion of a (common normatively viewed) pathway from school to work. It can also reveal how biographies are constituted through matrixes and ‘sideways’ connections across domains of life, and the ways young people ‘transition’ via multiple, multi-­ directional movements in their relationships to people, places and institutions, rather than assuming a linear path and sequential shifts towards adulthood. Such attention also enables a regard for young people’s ‘continuing movement (through life, today) rather than any point of orientation or destination’ (Hall et al., 2009, p. 556). This focus makes visible the dynamic, multidimensional and embedded aspects of what can remain otherwise rather technical and decontextualised notions of transition (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014, p. 912). Thus a belonging frame also offers a picture of what occurs in the spaces between transition points (Hall et al., 2009; Wyn, 2015) to gain a better insight into exactly how transitions, in all their complexity, take place. This point is illustrated by the Life Patterns research program, which draws on qualitative and quantitative data across two generations of Australians from their late teens on (Cuervo & Cook, 2020). The

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longitudinal data from this study, which records the complexity of lives across the so-called ‘transition years’ from formal education into work, produces a picture of the work that young people do to ‘belong’ – to their generation, to workplaces, in families and to society that bears little resemblance to the institutional markers of ‘school to work’ transitions. Longitudinal research of this nature makes visible the ‘spaces between transition points’, showing how various institutionalised outcomes, such as educational success, employment and housing security are achieved incrementally, supported by a complex web of social and material resources. The work that young people do across time is captured in Cuervo and Wyn’s (2012) analysis of the work that young people do to ‘stay’ in place in rural areas, highlighting the importance of connections to people and place in decisions about education, work, family formation and housing. Similarly, focusing on young people who choose to ‘remain’ living in rural places, Cook and Romei (2020) show how attachment to place can be seen as an integral part of the formation of occupational identities, developing a personal ‘brand’ that gives them an ‘edge’. An example from Cook and Romei’s analysis is ‘Jason’, who developed a brand as a real estate agent specialising in rural properties, capitalising on his knowledge as a local. A focus on belonging also encourages a perspective beyond identity categories or sociological classifications conventionally produced and used in youth research and policy, such as ethnicity, gender and class. For example, Noble (2009, p. 876) considers how some groups of young people are often apprehended by research and policy through the frames of ethnic and/or gender identity, constructed through a reductive and narrow array of analytical categories. In his appraisal of work on young men of ethnic minorities he finds that ‘the emphasis given to ethnicity and masculinity— as central as these categories are—is often at the expense of more complex facets of subjectivity’. Similarly, Valdez and Golash-Boza’s (2020, p.  1) research on the academic progress of undocumented students in the US finds that research and policy typically attribute a ‘master status’ to the (il) legal aspect of their identity, but the students themselves reveal ‘a sense of belonging rooted in multiple dimensions of identity’. They demonstrate how an intersectional analysis of youth belonging, rather than an overemphasis on their status as undocumented, can be a more fruitful research approach to understanding their educational trajectories. Intersectional analysis is increasingly taken up in youth belonging research, however Noble (2009) cautions that even this can remain locked

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within categorical thinking and a sense of fixed reference points that is insensitive to the dynamic complexity or the ‘everyday messiness’ of the ways subjectivities are assembled in particular moments and places. He argues (2009, p. 876) that while these categories of social experience are important, rather than focusing on and ‘freezing’ them, researchers should become more attentive to critical moments in the research process when we are forced to evaluate the ordering of our research data into stable categories of analysis’. These moments are important because within them, such ‘“categorial” understandings of identity give way to different kinds of recognition that revolve around legitimacy and competence, temporality and situatedness that relate to the contingencies of participation in a specific domain or setting

Noble’s interest is in what it takes and what is at stake in different contexts for young people to be recognised as entitled, included, legitimate and competent. In other words, questions of belonging are foregrounded over conventional classificatory tendencies in youth research and policy. His argument is that an emphasis on categorical identities such as ethnicity and gender does not capture the extent of the resources utilised or the nature of the work that is done through processes of recognition. Social actors produce networks and practices in particular times and places, engaging with others in those social settings to be recognised (to be seen, and to be seen as legitimate), deploying different resources relevant to those settings which involve a plurality of identifications. These practices go beyond the discrete frames of gender, class and ethnicity, and for young people include a wide array of expressions and practices of identification and connection (for example, high school student, sports player, music fan, YouTuber, sibling, worker and volunteer) that become more or less intense depending on context. Consequently, Noble (2009, p. 888) argues for ‘a more nuanced articulation of their lived experiences that engages with the complex sociability of their lives, involving a more diverse array of facets of identification’. This focus on sociability and recognition directly invites an engagement with processes of belonging and the situated subjectivities that these processes produce. Similarly, previous work by Harris (2013, 2015) on young people and social inclusion in the multicultural city has centred questions of youth belonging (and related notions of citizenship, social inclusion, participation, recognition) in places of cultural diversity and conditions of mobility

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and immobility, against a more conventional focus on either identity resolution or social and economic integration or marginalisation of migrant background, transnationally active or ‘ethnic’ youth. In her work, a belonging frame allows a different starting point than traditional youth sociology issues of expressions of cultural identity or transition pathways, instead asking: what are the practices, processes and resources that build connections (and disconnections) for culturally diverse, including white, young people across a range of domains (from the personal to the institutional; the local to the global) in their everyday lives in multicultural cities? What are their struggles to situate themselves in families, neighbourhoods, schools, communities, friendships, workplaces, the nation in conditions of super-diversity? How do they imagine and experience positioning themselves in their social, economic and civic worlds as these become more culturally complex, more dispersed spatially and less predictable temporally? Highlighting the belonging work evident in culturally diverse young people’s biographies enables researchers to understand, connect and extend old issues of transition and integration, identity, community and cultures; and to see the various dimensions of young people’s lives as intersecting in ordinary and complex ways  – as an overlapping and ongoing process of moorings and unmoorings, rather than a set of layered variables. The register of belonging opens up the processual and ‘assembled’ (Noble, 2015) character of ethnicity and other dimensions of social identifications. A longstanding problem in both migration and youth policy (and to some extent, research) is that they work within the logic of a ‘rigid discursive system’ that demands a foundational identity (Fortier, 2008, p. 83). A belonging frame allows instead greater attunement to ‘the plural and provisional associations that reflect the diverse circuits of recognition typifying the lives of many young people’ (Noble, 2015, p. 70). It also opens up a critical analysis of assumptions about linear and bordered processes of integration and transition embedded within both youth studies and migration studies that may no longer be relevant to young people. It can engage with the ways migrant and mobile young people act and are produced within new forms of global power that operate in complex ways beyond old categories of identity and old modes of passaging towards citizenship and adulthood (Harris, 2017). A conceptual framework of belonging thus helpfully characterises migrant and mobile young people’s efforts to situate themselves simultaneously in the local and ‘transnational social fields’ (Glick Schiller, 2009, p. 5) within which they must now operate, as we have outlined in Chap. 7 (Mobilities). It offers a

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shift in thinking about the unit of analysis beyond a traditional focus on youth ethnic identity and integration within or across fixed borders of home and host. It still invites consideration of key issues in youth studies, such as how young people are managing identity and life chances, but approaches this from a regard for the interconnected and complex context of ever-diversifying patterns of diversity, the collapse of traditional pathways to and possibilities for conventional citizenship, the opportunities and demands of mobility and new, globalised and/or transnational practices, networks and fields of power. A focus on belonging has also enabled researchers to nuance conceptual framing around analyses of class identities, often traditionally based in structural frameworks of class systems and categories and/or cultural theories of taste, distinction and capital (often influenced by some of the work of Bourdieu). Some have argued that these are less relevant to young people by virtue of their embeddedness in certain age and generational conditions. For example, Pugh (2009, 2011, p. 2) argues that while adults may use their cultural capital to assert distinction and reinforce class hierarchies, younger people negotiate different social imperatives and may rather attempt to use culture to manage inequality and forge connections with others. Relatedly, Butler (2019, p. 28) argues that young people’s agency in shaping their own social environments can be overlooked in Bourdieusian analyses that assume the primacy of parents’ socialisation of children in the (re)production of class structures. Youth researchers who centre belonging in their work on class thus have developed a greater appreciation of the ways young people negotiate inclusion as well as exclusion through their own class-making (and unmaking) practices. Many studies of youth and class that start from a belonging register thus aim to uncover the everyday experience of the work, contestations and struggles for and of dignity, legitimacy, moral worth, recognition and respect in which young people are engaged. This provides insight into felt, practised and embodied dimensions of economic inequality rather than remain at the more abstract level of theorising concepts such as status or systems such as late capitalism. For example, Butler (2019, 2020) explores the social labour of belonging undertaken by children and young people in a rural Australian community as a lens through which to understand how class is produced, how economic insecurity is managed, and how inequality is constructed and contested. By focusing on mechanisms of belonging, she investigates their processes for achieving self-worth, inclusion and dignity, and thereby captures a range of ‘locally constructed,

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racialized and gendered sources of morality’ (Butler, 2019, p. 2) that animate the class order. Relatedly, Threadgold (2018, p. 21), who argues that we need theories of class that deepen our ‘understanding of the affective intensities around experiences of contemporary inequality faced by young people’, investigates young people’s belonging to a DIY scene to illustrate modalities of everyday class struggles.

Processual and Everyday Productions of Structural Conditions The productive dimensions of a relational and anti-categorical lens in belonging research is also evident in the tendency to focus on the unfolding of social processes rather than single issues or institutions in young people’s lives. In particular, such approaches take seriously the study of micro productions of social processes in order to understand how subjectivities and social structures are produced in concert with one another. Centring belonging encourages a relational focus on the suture points between structure and agency. It also allows insight into the less formal and more everyday aspects of young people’s lives, such as their social and familial networks and their connections with places. The purpose is not merely to gain a close insight into lived experience, but to explore how structural conditions operate through everyday practice. For example, Swartz et al. (2012) demonstrate how a deep understanding of the structural issues of poverty and inequality in post-Apartheid South Africa can be gleaned by investigating the everyday belonging projects of black township youth. Structural and systemic issues that relate to a history of entrenched racism, enduring injustice and unequal life chances, and a new narrative of meritocracy, opportunity and social mobility for those who aspire, are made visible as lived and embodied processes in the contradictory and complex belonging work of impoverished youth. Their research into young people in townships shows how these youth produce a sense of belonging to the new South Africa by dreaming and aspiring to upward mobility, and also simultaneously enact a sense of belonging to their township through expressions of ‘ikasi style’; involving sometimes anti-social behaviours and participation in practices such as criminal activities to achieve inclusion when promised pathways to their dreams fail them. By investigating these overlapping and incongruous modes of belonging, and the social practices through which they are expressed and performed, Swartz et al. (2012, p. 29) are able to reveal how the larger systemic problem of poverty and inequality  works at the level of the

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everyday, ‘as a form of structural and symbolic violence which both excludes but paradoxically also includes young people within the national citizenship project’. Other kinds of youth research focus on the social processes by which inequality is reproduced by looking at privileged young people’s practices of belonging, for example, to elite schools. Rather than applying a purely structural analysis to the conditions that enable wealth and resources to be unevenly distributed, held and withheld, such research drills down into the day to day processes by which privilege is produced and enacted through belonging projects within prestigious educational institutions. These various studies, often ethnographic in design, explore students’ everyday practices of belonging in elite schools that forge a sense of entitlement and exclusivity and reveal the processes by which class inequality is legitimised and perpetuated. For example, Goh (2015, p. 137) examines the production of elite non-western masculine membership in prestigious schools in Singapore. He demonstrates how, in this post-colonial context, class, ethnic and gender privilege is inculcated through the development of a global-oriented masculine disposition based less on traditional measures such as sporting prowess and more on capacity for cosmopolitanism and global leadership. Such schools produce ‘a middle class Chineseness primed for the leadership of men’ by cultivating student belonging to the school via a sense of membership in an exclusive global, transcultural elite (see also Fernández, 2009; Gessaghi & Méndez, 2015; Kenway & Langmead, 2017; Tarc & Tarc, 2015).

Researching Belonging: Methods and Empirical Techniques Thus far we have considered some key ways that research on youth belonging has attempted to harness an alternative framework and series of inquiries into youth experiences and conditions to design more wholistic, relational, interconnected and meaningful studies of young people’s lives. There are several underlying objectives that drive this methodological and epistemological effort: one is to move away from limiting, singular and often problematising foci in youth research such as ‘school to work transitions’ or ‘Indigenous disadvantage’. Another is to develop more processual, intertwined and critical understandings of the everyday production and contestation of what sociological theory has told us are key categories and identities organised around concepts such as class, ethnicity, gender and race. A related aim is to move beyond the mechanical application of a range of sociological concepts typically used to analyse relationships and

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hierarchies in the social order (for example, status, capital, taste, and distinction), in order to instead explore how young people on the ground might negotiate their social worlds in ways that complicate or bring life to these framings. This in turn leads to a deeper understanding of the feedback loop between social structures and social actors, generating insights into how larger socioeconomic conditions are made real in the everyday. In this discussion so far we have focused on research with young people that has used belonging as a conceptual frame, either explicitly or implicitly, to then inform research aims and questions along these other lines of inquiry. We next move to a consideration of specific techniques for researching belonging in youth research, that is, research methods that are employed to capture processes, forces and experiences of belonging/not belonging. It is perhaps in exploring the interplay between the theoretical and applied dimensions of belonging as a research approach that its affordances and limitations can be best brought into relief. As Noble (2020, p. xvii) has argued, conceptualising belonging ‘should not be separated from the investigation of its experiential forms and intensities. Holding the theoretical and the empirical together ensures the most productive way… of “putting belonging to work” in examining the lives of young people’. Our aim here is not to provide an exhaustive inventory of methods that are better or worse examples of how belonging could or should be investigated. We also do not intend this to be a comprehensive overview and critical appraisal of methods in youth research: a topic which has its own dedicated set of scholarship and debates (see Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Heath & Walker, 2012; Helve & Holm, 2005; te Riele & Brooks, 2013). Rather, we explore a range of ways that some youth researchers are attempting to operationalise this conceptual framework, in order to more deeply explore the drivers for the belonging turn in empirical work. Does ‘putting it to work’ or mobilising it through specific methodological applications help to clarify its uses or further muddy its meaning and perhaps reveal its weakness as a sociological concept?

From Talk to Practice: Ethnographies of Belonging One of the commonest forms of doing belonging research in youth studies has been traditional interview techniques that allow young people to speak about their experiences or feelings of belonging/exclusion in various domains and contexts. There has been a proliferation of these kinds of

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studies, typically small-scale qualitative research using interview methods, in youth studies. The usefulness of these studies as stand-alone reports on narratives of not belonging or conversely, statements of attachment, is increasingly coming into question. More recently, this approach has been expanded and even rejected in favour of methods that go beyond talk. This is in order to get at practices, dispositions and experiences that are either less mediated by narrative (for example through ethnography or go-­alongs), or highly and intentionally (co-) constructed (such as via participatory action research or some forms of photo-voice). As Noble (2020, p. xvii) notes, while the dominant focus in youth studies literature has been on belonging in terms of representation and identity, which relies primarily on research through discursive methods, there has been a shift towards exploring belonging instead as a set of practices. This is in wider recognition that belonging is not so much a status or something that people have, but rather a process, or something that people do (see also Antonsich, 2010). Further, as Noble (2020, p. xvii) argues, a focus on practices is necessary because those categories to which we belong are not given nor primordial but are the result of processes of mobilization of which practices of belonging are constitutive. In other words, belonging, like any practice, is a form of labour which produces and reproduces the worlds in which they function

He and others argue for empirical research that goes beyond the collection of young people’s narratives of belonging/not-belonging and even by extension beyond documentation of interaction or encounters amongst social actors or between actors and institutions, as these cannot fully capture the extent of the situated, embodied, emplaced and temporal elements of belonging practices and processes. He (2020, p. xvii) suggests instead that, coming to belong entails a pedagogical ensemble involving not only relations with others but relations with the spatial and non-human elements of one’s environment. This poses difficult methodological as well as conceptual questions for researchers: how do we study belonging as a process over time beyond simple statements of attachment? Does ethnography provide clearer insight because it draws attention to practices of belonging that are not always present in people’s accounts of their worlds?

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The limits of narrative account-based methods are similarly noted by Bennett (2013), who also observes that it is particularly difficult to get at the more ‘everyday’ and fleeting experiences of belonging by asking people how they feel and where/when they feel comfortable or ‘at home’ in certain contexts, as is common with much sociological research. She suggests that interviewing people about their feelings of belonging does not get at a much more quotidian experience of comfortably engaging with the world, which is rarely reflected on consciously. Indeed, belonging research that uses discursive methods has tended to document expressions of feelings and stories of not belonging and exclusion, which can be easier to narrativise, rather than processes and practices of belonging and connection, which are often taken for granted and hard to articulate. Various ethnographic approaches have been promoted in youth belonging research to address the issues associated with an over-reliance on discursive methods. For example, Butler’s (2020, p.  148) ethnography of multicultural belonging in a rural community deliberately aims to move away from ‘fly in fly out’ interviews, phone interviews or quantitative approaches, as ‘such methods on their own can obscure the complexities and ground up orientation of children’s and young people’s intercultural lives in context’ and how Australian rural communities are shaped by Indigenous, settler-colonial and culturally diverse histories. As she (2020, p.  149) argues, ‘recognising these longstanding, situated multicultural histories is crucial in how we conceptualise the reciprocal work of belonging among young people from local and refugee backgrounds in rural places’. Kidman et al. (2020, p. 2) implement the ethnographic technique of ‘walk-along’ interviews to explore how Māori youth navigate their way through urban spaces, negotiate access to neighbourhoods and establish ‘a complicated sense of place-belonging in settler-colonial city-space’. By investigating young people’s articulations of emplaced and transcendent multigenerational kin relations as they move through urban environments, the walk-along method in this research brings to light how these Māori youth can situate themselves in networks that underscore their right to place and ‘provide a series of interconnected pathways and corridors across Anglo-settler urban environments which allow them to counteract the hegemonic and highly racialised border narratives that contain or exclude Māori people’ (Kidman et al., 2020, p. 10). Other belonging research has attempted to capture the affective and embodied dimensions of belonging practices through an appreciation of the socio-spatial dimensions of belonging processes that involve both

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subjects shaping spaces and spaces shaping subjects. For example, Idriss and Atie (2020) draw on participant observation of slam poetry events (that involve implicit as well as explicit embodied practices of inclusion/ exclusion, such as cheering, scoring and booing) to explore racialisation in youth leisure scenes in Sydney. They reveal how young people of migrant background are constructed as ‘out of place’ in the creative cultural spaces of the inner city unless they are prepared to ‘be the diversity’. These young people invert racialised geographies of taste and innovation by forging a more political and collectivist slam scene in the suburbs; a space where a white inner-city performer may be positioned as the outsider who is judged as inauthentic. Marchbank and Muller Myrdahl (2020, p.  40) utilise Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to research the ways a group of young people in Surrey, Canada, physically and emotionally occupy the space of a chain café, such that it temporarily becomes a place of queer belonging. They demonstrate the processes by which queer youth come to feel ‘at home’ or ‘oriented to certain physical and imagined spaces’ through embodied practices and feelings. On the other side, the affective and embodied practices of exclusion are captured by Walton’s (2018, 2019) ethnography of young people’s negotiations of multiculturalism and national identity in primary schools in South Korea, which highlights the ways young people create an affective sense of not-belonging through mundane embodied practices in the classroom and playground. In her research these included small gestures and practices such as not exchanging school supplies or failing to be sufficiently physically proximate when undertaking group work. She (2019, p. 13) demonstrates how a ‘racialised hierarchy of exclusion’ is enacted through the mono-ethnic students’ physical and affective non-engagement with students who are positioned as racially other ‘by turning their bodies away from [them], frowning at [their] efforts and completely ignoring [their] presence’.

Digital and Mobile Methods At the same time, researchers are challenged to find effective ways to investigate practices of belonging beyond the conventional in situ ethnography, as young people are increasingly ‘on the move’ in terms of physical mobility as well as through their engagement in digital worlds that are not easily captured via traditional ethnographic research in local place. Social geographers have led new approaches to the study of belonging in conditions of mobility. One important tool for youth belonging research

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influenced by geography is mapping, especially techniques that enable the mapping of young people’s social networks and/or their physical movement to understand how their belonging practices change in conditions of mobility. For example, Prout and Hill’s (2012) research maps the complex systems of connection that are developed and sustained by mobile Indigenous Australian students. As they have noted (Prout & Hill, 2012, p.  64), a socially-oriented and culturally sensitive approach to mapping ‘can move beyond simple statistical mapping exercises. … Researching the interdependence of communities that might be separated spatially, but connected through cultural ties, may provide different insights’. They demonstrate Indigenous Australian young people’s sophisticated capacities to maintain multiple networks of belonging in conditions of mobility, for example, moving between urban centres for study and remote home communities, and especially their capacity to balance frequent mobility with deep connection to place and people (see also Harris & Prout Quicke, 2019). Other researchers have used social network mapping techniques to identify the belonging work of young people of migrant background, demonstrating the overlapping nature of their social worlds across local, translocal and transnational domains (Leurs, 2014; Leurs & Georgiou, 2016) and their strategies for making a place for themselves in a multicultural city. For example, by visually mapping and plotting young people’s social networks through digital tools, Leurs (2014, p. 253) ascertains the extent to which diverse young Londoners network and identify with one another across difference to create a sense of shared belonging to the city. The spatial and temporal stretching of young people’s sites of belonging means that digital methods are developing to capture processes of identification and connection that are not in physical place. Research on mobile youth, from international students to migrant workers, has employed digital methods such as digital ethnographies, social media capture, data scraping and platform analysis, in order to explore these mobile and digital spaces and practices of belonging. For example, as Martin and Rizvi (2014) demonstrate, international students use digital media to facilitate networks and places of belonging not simply in ‘home’ and ‘host’ contexts, but in a ‘diasporic mediasphere’ that connects them with other diasporic youth living elsewhere, as we have outlined in Chap. 7 (Mobilities). Diasporic youth communities are sharpening their sense of collective identity, both cultural and at times political, through platforms such as Facebook, as illustrated by NurMuhammad et  al.’s (2016) study of the mediated development of collective belonging to a young Uyghur

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diasporic identity. Wong and Hjorth (2016, p. 57) argue that spaces within this mediasphere constitute new kinds of ‘home communities’, forged through engagement in not only overtly identity-focused practices but everyday digital activities such as online gaming (see also Nilan, 2017). Digital methods can explore processes of belonging that unfold in these spaces and through these media and communications technologies. For example, digital ethnography reveals the way transnationally mobile youth may use different digital platforms to create multiple communities and networks of belonging. For example, Chinese youth studying abroad in English speaking countries may use Facebook to engage with some groups of people and activities in the cities where they are studying and working, and WeChat or Weibo to connect with, for example, other Chinese speaking international students and other Chinese youth abroad to create belonging to a diasporic community as well as maintain social circles ‘back home’ (see Gomes, 2018; Martin, 2016; Wong & Hjorth, 2016; Zhao, 2019). Transnationally mobile youth are not the only subjects of digital methods for belonging research. Digital ethnography and other kinds of digital methods have become an important aspect of youth belonging research more generally in acknowledgement that young people do much of their belonging work online, and that this is not experienced as a separate sphere from the ‘offline’ world. As Fu (2018, p. 140) demonstrates in his work on young urban Chinese performing identity and belonging on social media, ‘in a networked era when young people are connected to the internet at any given time, the binary between online and offline is no longer helpful’. Dobson et al. (2018, p. xx), drawing on Berlant, demonstrate how what they have coined ‘intimate digital publics’ are profound and everyday sites of belonging for young people, and may be especially important to ‘non-dominant’ youth who find safe spaces of expression, identification, connection and community-building. For example, Chuang and Müller (2016, p. 164) demonstrate that as ‘social media has become the space to construct, consolidate, strengthen and define collective identities’, new narratives and communities of belonging are emerging for ethnic minorities who can engage in the process of shared identity construction via social media platforms. In their research analysing materials on Facebook groups established by ethnic minorities in Malaysia, they find that young people who know little about their cultural identity engage in intergenerational learning, debate, and resource sharing to produce a new sense of belonging and collective desire for recognition within the national

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discourse. Digital ethnographies and other specifically digital methods such as ‘scrollback’ (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) and screen capture are utilised to understand digital practices of belonging through investigation of young people’s everyday engagement with social and digital media.

Image-Based Methods Alongside a turn to ethnography, and consistent with this regard for digital media in the lives of youth, image-based methods and related arts practices have been an important form for conducting belonging research in ways that get beyond the discursive. Tinkler (2008, p.  261) makes the point that research concerned with youth and media has often overlooked young people’s engagement with photographic technologies in particular, and especially the belonging rather than self-representation/identity functions of photographs. She notes that photographic practices are fundamentally about belonging, used as they are to represent, establish and maintain relationships between people (and we would add, to place). She thus argues for photography as method to enable researchers to gain insights into young people’s representations of their communities of belonging. A plethora of photograph-based research has emerged that aims to uncover visual representation and curation of belonging by inviting young people to make screenshots of their social media, take pictures in place, or undertake ‘photovoice’ or digital storytelling activities (Delgado, 2015; Gubrium & DiFulvio, 2011; Marston, 2019; Volpe, 2019). As noted by Liebenberg et  al. (2019), image-based methods such as photovoice projects have been particularly important and effective in belonging research with Indigenous youth, aligning with the decolonisation of research and Indigenous ways of knowing. They argue that while interview methods may also be included in image-based research, for example, elicitation interviews incorporating participant-made photographs, these should be undertaken to encourage ownership and reflexivity with the aim of ‘centering youth voices in a broader discussion of their social ecologies’ (Liebenberg et  al., 2019, p.  4). The key aim of their research was to establish ‘what spaces and places are available for rural and remote Indigenous youth that foster sense of belonging?’ This question was investigated through a method involving participants’ creation and interpretation of visual material, which in turn allowed them to maintain authority and control over the process of representation of their lives, the

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revelation and explication of obscured processes in their lives, and the engagement of youth as knowledge mobilisers who could return findings to their communities through culturally appropriate transfer mechanisms (see also Wexler et al., 2014). Photovoice and other arts based methods are often considered to be more participatory (Coyne & Carter, 2018; Freytes Frey & Cross, 2011; Harris, A.M, 2017; Hickey-Moody, 2017), but also productive because of their capacity to move beyond narratives and talk about belonging. While ethnographic techniques are able to get at practices rather than simply record discourse, arts-based methods can enable young people to find other creative forms of their own to represent belonging that are not text or narrative based. This can be particularly valuable for transnational, multilingual participatory research (Gallagher et al., 2013) or for projects in which researchers and the researched do not share the same language proficiencies (see Robertson et  al., 2016). More than this, however, many youth researchers advocate for arts-based methods less because they enable non-discursive expressions of belonging to be gathered, and more because of their capacity to enhance youth agency in the research process. Such approaches can better allow youth to co-produce, self-consciously, a more detached or distanced and critical commentary on belonging and enable young people to be intrinsically engaged with design and analysis. In the process, youth are better positioned to explore the politics of belonging projects, rather than simply be taken as their objects.

The Endurance and Evolution of Talk-Based Methods Thus far we have highlighted methods that seek to move beyond the limits of the discursive in researching youth belonging. However, there continues to be a rich vein of talk-based methods in the field that creatively responds to some of these constraints. For example, an interesting development in talk-based belonging research is Positive Discourse Analysis, a linguistic analytical technique that uses spoken or written text as data. For example, in a project on Australian Indigenous youth belonging, Cominos et  al. (2020, p.  100) collected audio-recordings of the on-field talk of young men playing football to identify how they create, moderate and use new discourses of solidarity and belonging. They note that in addition to producing important findings about the ways inclusion and connection are created in casual spaces of discourse production such as the football field, ‘the process of documentation, informed by PDA, also provided a

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means to recognise and valorise Aboriginal social interactions, privileging Aboriginal voices and within that the even less represented voices of Aboriginal youth’. Another talk-based method that continues to gain traction is qualitative longitudinal research, which comes out of a biographical narrative tradition. Qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has become one of the best developed talk-based methods that centres belonging. QLR as characterised by Thomson et  al. (2014) is not a fixed technique but more of a ‘disposition’, meaning ‘research that is attentive to temporal processes and durational phenomena’ (Thomson et  al., 2014, p.  2) and involving ‘an empirical and analytic ‘scaling up’ in order to understand micro-level changes and continuities across the lifecourse’ (Thomson et  al., 2014, p.  4). The UK project Inventing Adulthoods, which has pioneered this approach to youth transitions, illustrates how this method works to understand how young people experience adulthood from the perspective of the shifting fields within which they feel competent, recognised and invested. In other words, by using a method of biographical interviewing over a long period of time, the researchers demonstrate how questions of belonging inform how and where young people pursue an adult identity (Thomson et  al., 2004, p.  227). Understanding how their investments, decisions and circumstances change over time reveals the dynamic nature of transition as a belonging process and a series of practices, constituted by ‘young people’s labours to be socially included and recognised as competent adults’ (Thomson et al., 2004, p. 237). Another project that engages a frame of belonging by employing a QLR method is Young Lives: a study of poverty and life chances amongst children and youth in Peru, India, Ethiopia and Vietnam (Morrow & Crivello, 2015). This project employs QLR to capture the temporally variable pathways of young people and the complexity of social lives, and especially to show ‘the intersections between structural factors and individual lives over time’ (Morrow & Crivello, 2015, p. 269). QLR allows these researchers to uncover the links between different aspects of young people’s lives in wholistic perspective, ‘to demonstrate how individual biographies take shape within the context of wider familial and social processes’ (2015, p. 275); something that they argue is often missed in development studies research and policy models that take a more siloed approach. They demonstrate that an individual young person’s biography must be made sense of over time in terms of that person’s evolving family and community context; that is, the people, places and cultures that they

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belong to and the changes and continuities in these networks of belonging. For example, they argue that conventional development studies methods such as survey research cannot easily capture the complexity of or range of drivers for mobility experiences for families in poor communities. QLR, by contrast, ‘deepens understanding of the way migration decisions are made within the context of young people’s relationships and networks, and in response to changing household circumstances and opportunity structures’ (Morrow & Crivello, 2015, p. 276). It also allows the researchers to examine over time the relationships between young people’s migration aspirations and outcomes, and their belonging to social networks.

What Does the Concept of Belonging Do in Youth Research? Why research youth through a belonging frame? Within youth studies and beyond, there is a sense in which conditions of rapid social, economic and environmental change, especially economic and cultural globalisation; transformations of economies, labour markets, media and communications; mass migration and global mobilities; new configurations of post/ neo-colonial and geopolitical systems of power; the rise of populism, hate and deepening divisions within various bodies politic, and the very precarity of human and non-human life in the context of climate catastrophe and global health crises such as COVID-19, are pushing concepts of belonging to the fore of social inquiry. Belonging has taken a prominent place across the social sciences but has a particularly strong presence (and contested conceptual history) in youth studies, as we have demonstrated here. As at other moments of crisis or perceived rapid social change, a sense of urgency created by conditions of instability and risk has certainly driven the latest interest in youth belonging. Against this backdrop, key questions for youth researchers have become how, to what, and with what effects can young people belong in uncertain times? For example, in their introduction to their edited book on youth and belonging, Habib and Ward (2020, p. 8) write that ‘Arguably, now more than ever the experience of young adulthood is increasingly fragmented and precarious. We feel that in studies of youth today, taking belonging and the theorising of belonging seriously is critical’. But what does it really mean to take belonging seriously as a research approach in youth studies now? How do we avoid simply making general reference to a concept or experience that remains so ill-defined, poorly theorised, and disengaged from its intellectual history, such that many investigations of

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belonging in youth studies fail to even explain the term or propose an analytical framework for its appraisal in the first place? We would argue that there are some sound and important reasons to work within this frame, and that it is necessary for these to be articulated and held up to critical scrutiny. It is this close engagement and critique that we have started to open up here by looking carefully at what it means to research youth belonging. We have demonstrated some specific methodological and epistemological affordances that such a frame enables. It certainly lends itself to a relational approach, allowing connections between different aspects of young people’s lives to be more deeply understood. It pushes back against limiting tropes in youth research and policy, such as transitions, and reveals the paucity and sometimes violence of research and policy agendas built around stand-alone issues (such as education or health) and politically loaded concepts (for example, resilience or self-esteem). It encourages a more critical engagement with often taken-­ for-­granted identity categories and sociological classifications, and draws attention to the everyday production of subjectivities, social processes and systems, and the structure/agency loop. It has also generated, and been generated by, an interest in research methods that are more youth-centred and that go beyond talk. We can see here why there has been a turn to belonging in youth research as a response to the failure of a narrow and normative approach to youth issues, and especially one primarily concerned with monitoring youth identities and transitions in classificatory ways that are moreover out of step with contemporary life pathways and self-making and the diversity of youth identifications and experience. At the same time, simply operationalising belonging through empirical investigation does not solve the problems that beleaguer this approach, as we have identified throughout this book. It has in many cases resulted in the production of rather thin, under-theorised reportage of young people’s narratives of experiences of being excluded or (less commonly) included. As Turner (2013, pp.  14–15) has written in relation to other kinds of research that focuses on inclusion and exclusion, this approach has sometimes resulted in ‘the proliferation of descriptive studies that have become repetitive and predictable’, and do not move debates forward. Similarly, youth research that seeks to centre belonging does not fulfil the promise of this approach by merely perpetuating minor ‘descriptive studies’ that reprise findings that are already well-established. We would suggest that what is warranted is a deeper, critical engagement with belonging as both a theoretical and analytical framework if it is to be productively applied.

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Researching youth through a belonging frame has contributed to some problematic tendencies that we have identified throughout this book, and it is these larger concerns that require closer interrogation. We have shown how it can individualise and depoliticise youth experience, and lead to research tools and design narrowly focused on youth agency, voice and identity in ways that are too easily disconnected from social, economic and political systems. Although it lends itself to more qualitative, wholistic and practice-focused approaches to young people’s lives, an overly micro focus on belonging/not belonging as a core problematic for youth research can overemphasise questions of personal capacity for social and civic connection and sidestep larger issues of economic and political processes and structures. As we have demonstrated particularly in relation to youth policy informed by belonging research and paradigms, it can serve to regulate and/or responsibilise young people for their social inclusion. Further, as much of the most productive theoretical work on belonging has been undertaken within Indigenous scholarship, there is also a risk that mainstream youth belonging research does not turn its attention to how it has become ‘mainstream’, but more ardently pursues the take up (and potential essentialising and appropriation of) Indigenous knowledge systems and methodologies rather than a reckoning with the contested intellectual history of belonging in youth studies, and how and with what effects this concept operates politically both within and against a system of Eurocentric colonial knowledge-making about young people. Relatedly, there is a risk that if the concept of belonging is used too loosely, for example, as a metaphor, or by romanticising or overly ‘spiritualising’ its meaning, its very specific, practical role in the lives of Indigenous people, for whom belonging to people and land may be a fundamental existential, political and legal matter, is disregarded. A sense of urgency and possibility has produced momentum around belonging as a key issue for young people and as a core line of inquiry for contemporary youth research. However, with this enthusiasm can also come an underlying assumption that it is good to belong, that young people have a problem with belonging right now, and that research and policy should better investigate and support youth belonging in order to improve this experience. As we have identified throughout this book, the normative framing of belonging as positive has been put to work as a way of apprehending and constructing (some) young people as a population to be managed and a problem to be fixed, and to rationalise their regulation into and out of particular institutions, communities and places. Critical

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youth research has often been in tension with these kinds of governmental tendencies, and we argue, should remain consciously so in the trend towards belonging as a research frame. To maintain a critical perspective, it may be more productive to hold together investigations into young people’s processes of and desires for belonging with inquiries into the larger politics of the belonging imperative. This may mean expanding empirical focus from investigating (and seeking to solve) the issue of where and how young people can belong today to exploring what it means for youth policy and research to be seeking to answer that question in the first place. Only then can we move to developing a critical framework of relationality in youth studies. In an innovative conceptualisation of the relationship between belonging and becoming in the context of young people negotiating racialisation, Zwangobani (2016, p.  1) offers the provocation that ‘if we take the question “how do I belong?” as a productive impetus rather than a problem to be solved, we may be able to better attune to the openness and unpredictability of what is to come’. We would argue that reflection on how this question operates as a basis for a research and policy agenda is also a productive impetus for youth studies. Thus it is not a matter of declaring belonging to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as a way to research youth, but rather to be critically attuned to not only the work of belonging processes in young people’s lives, but the work of belonging frameworks in the field that studies them.

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Index

A Activism, 4, 62, 133, 146, 152, 153, 159 Adolescence, 21, 23, 27, 204 Affective, 3, 48, 53, 54, 56, 58, 64, 134, 141, 155, 156, 186, 212, 216, 217 Agency, 11–13, 22, 76, 107, 113, 115, 122, 135, 141, 184, 205, 211, 212, 221, 224, 225 Aspiration, 28, 36, 38, 58, 80, 82, 85, 93, 112, 123, 157, 176, 177, 206, 223 At-risk, 3, 12, 34, 36, 76, 85–89, 94, 110, 115, 137, 138, 155, 193

Closing the Gap, 72, 91, 92 Colonisation, 12, 60, 61, 92, 111, 116, 142, 206 Community, 2–4, 7, 12, 20, 22, 23, 31, 51, 53, 65, 74, 89, 94, 96–98, 114, 131–135, 137–139, 142–146, 149, 150, 153–158, 160, 171–173, 175, 176, 178, 180–182, 184–188, 191, 192, 205, 210, 211, 216, 218–223, 225 Cosmopolitanism, 124, 131, 150, 190, 213

C Capitalism, 7, 31, 37, 96, 97, 211 Civil society, 140, 152, 153 Class, 3, 23, 27, 29–35, 38, 40, 56, 58, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 124, 144, 153, 158, 174, 180, 188, 208, 209, 211–213

D Delinquency, 74 Diaspora, 5, 139, 173, 185 Digital, 4, 5, 11, 12, 38, 40, 46, 95, 131, 135, 136, 143–144, 146, 148–154, 158, 173, 181, 185, 217–220

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7

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INDEX

E Ecology, 3, 116, 220 Education, 4, 5, 9–11, 19–22, 24–27, 29–34, 36, 40, 56, 57, 61, 65, 72–91, 94–97, 99, 108–111, 115–122, 124–126, 137, 151, 170–172, 174–176, 178, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 203, 205–208, 224 Emotions, 47, 49, 113, 172, 175 Employment, 4, 6, 10, 33, 34, 36, 39, 56, 59, 72, 76, 79–86, 88, 89, 93, 95, 96, 99, 107, 109–111, 117–119, 122, 124–126, 137, 174, 178, 179, 190, 206–208 Entrepreneurial, 56, 79, 80, 111, 120, 178 Environment, 3, 54, 62, 65, 85, 89, 94, 113, 115, 120, 151, 152, 175, 183, 185, 203, 204, 211, 215, 216 Ethnicity, 88, 180, 181, 184, 187, 208–210, 213 Everyday, 9, 10, 12, 32, 47, 49, 51–55, 57, 59, 61–65, 93, 94, 131, 133, 140, 141, 146, 149, 150, 153, 155, 170, 181–184, 186, 189, 192, 209–214, 216, 219, 220, 224 F Family, 3, 4, 9, 18, 20, 22–24, 26, 29, 34, 35, 49, 51–53, 63, 73–76, 80, 84, 85, 92–94, 96, 98, 99, 108, 110, 115, 119, 137, 139, 140, 144, 171–173, 176, 178–180, 184, 191, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 222, 223 G Gangs, 22, 26, 52, 85, 189 Gender, 3, 11, 23, 32, 40, 85, 109, 119, 133, 151, 189, 208, 209, 213

Generation, 3, 6, 7, 19, 20, 24, 28, 29, 35–38, 54, 71, 80, 96, 114, 123, 137–139, 145, 150–153, 155, 159, 183–186, 192, 207, 208 Globalisation, 88, 143, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 190, 223 Global South, 12, 170, 187–191 H Health, 18, 77, 83, 86, 87, 90, 202, 203, 205, 223, 224 Housing, 4, 83, 90, 98, 137, 180, 208 Hybridity, 140, 160, 184–186 I Immigration/migration, 5, 9, 11, 12, 19, 48, 135, 136, 138, 140–142, 157, 159, 170–172, 175, 179–187, 192, 210, 223 Indigenous, 10–12, 25, 26, 59–63, 65, 72, 82, 89–94, 98, 108, 109, 114–117, 125, 126, 131, 135, 137, 142, 159, 176, 179, 186, 203–206, 213, 218, 220, 221, 225 Inequality, 12, 19, 23, 29, 31, 36, 38, 40, 49, 83–86, 117, 119, 124, 125, 142, 156, 174, 177, 190–192, 202, 206, 211–213 Integration, 10, 71, 72, 84, 89–98, 138, 139, 157, 192, 210, 211 Intergenerational, 84, 85, 98, 219 Internet, 52, 149, 219 Intersectional, 49, 208 Islamophobia, 5, 185 L Labour market, 6, 19, 29, 31–34, 37–39, 56, 72, 76, 78–82, 84, 86, 95, 96, 98, 111, 118, 120–122, 125, 170, 171, 174, 181, 182, 223

 INDEX 

Land, 7, 25, 26, 47, 60–62, 65, 73, 93, 94, 98, 135, 142, 159, 179, 203–205, 225 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ), 175 M Māori, 60, 61, 82, 93, 94, 204, 216 Media, 4, 5, 22, 37, 74–76, 84, 86, 93, 145, 146, 149, 150, 153, 173, 183, 184, 219, 220, 223 Migrant, 7, 12, 31, 50–52, 58, 60, 91, 126, 131, 135, 138–141, 147, 153, 155, 157, 159, 170–172, 180–186, 192, 193, 210, 217, 218 Music, 5, 32, 35, 94, 145, 146, 209 Muslim, 5, 139, 146, 157, 183 N Nation, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 20, 25, 29, 48, 50, 59, 74, 77, 78, 81–83, 92, 115, 132, 135–140, 142, 143, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 171, 182, 183, 186, 210 NEET, 88, 97, 110, 125 Neighbourhood, 4, 23, 85, 147, 148, 182, 183, 210, 216 Neoliberalism, 19, 38, 79 New materialism, 18, 62 P Pandemic, 4, 19, 46, 96, 99, 110, 119, 122, 172, 174 Participation, 4, 8, 10–13, 20, 25–30, 33, 50, 52, 72, 74–77, 79–85, 88, 89, 93, 95, 98, 99, 107–127, 132–135, 143–145, 147, 149,

235

150, 152, 154–156, 158, 160, 174, 182, 184, 185, 190, 205, 207, 209, 212 Performativity, 51, 108, 113, 183 Political economy, 3, 6, 18, 33, 37, 38, 96, 97 Popular culture, 53, 144–146 Poverty, 78, 83–85, 95, 135, 147, 151, 174, 202, 212, 222 Psychology, 21, 23, 27, 87, 110 Q Queer, 149, 175, 217 R Race, 3, 11, 40, 88, 90, 181, 213 Racism, 5, 93, 155, 160, 182, 205, 212 Recognition, 3, 12, 17, 23, 25, 31, 49, 51–53, 55, 58, 62, 85, 88, 90, 91, 94, 97, 116, 132, 134, 139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 154–158, 160, 175, 176, 182, 186, 191, 193, 209–211, 215, 219 Refugee, 12, 19, 50, 113, 138, 139, 141, 159, 170, 171, 181–186, 192, 193, 216 Relational, 2, 6, 11–13, 18, 22, 28, 37, 38, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 62, 64, 72, 78, 89, 92, 98, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118, 119, 122, 123, 126, 155, 156, 160, 170–173, 175, 179, 185, 187, 190–192, 202–206, 212, 213, 224 Religion, 20, 48, 74 Resilience, 54, 82, 123, 127, 138, 156, 205, 224 Responsibilisation, 56, 79

236 

INDEX

Rights, 3, 4, 12, 26, 30, 48, 60–62, 73, 75, 78, 82, 84, 90, 92, 112, 132–135, 139, 147, 149–152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 203, 216 Rural, 9, 12, 36, 53, 57, 82, 98, 121, 170, 175–180, 187, 191, 204, 208, 211, 216, 220 S School, 5, 21–23, 25–28, 30, 31, 33, 40, 51, 61, 73, 76, 80, 82, 92–94, 107, 112–116, 118, 140, 158, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183–185, 188, 204, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217 Settler-colonial, 7, 18, 61, 62, 93, 135, 137, 142, 216 Sexuality, 30, 85, 159, 189 Social cohesion, 89, 138, 183 Social exclusion, 10, 52, 58, 71, 72, 78, 83–86, 89, 92, 95, 98, 99, 111 Social inclusion, 3, 10, 11, 58, 71, 72, 76–85, 87, 89, 91–92, 95, 98, 99, 170, 188, 209, 225 Social media, 49, 52, 65, 146, 149, 153, 156, 172, 173, 185, 218–220 Social networks, 5, 51, 149, 158, 171, 172, 185, 204, 218, 223 Sovereignty, 4, 87, 88, 91, 131, 138, 142, 146, 159, 205 Students, 31, 61, 82, 91–93, 95, 115, 116, 120–122, 124, 141, 142, 171–176, 187, 188, 190, 208, 209, 213, 217–219 Subculture, 9, 23, 27, 32, 35, 145 T Temporality, 53, 54, 121, 123, 209

Transitions, 3–6, 8, 9, 11–13, 18–20, 26, 28, 29, 32–40, 50, 72, 79, 80, 84, 86–88, 95, 97, 98, 107–127, 143, 169–173, 175–178, 180, 181, 190, 191, 193, 202, 206–208, 210, 213, 222, 224 Transnational, 11, 12, 121, 123, 131, 135, 136, 140, 141, 145, 146, 152, 153, 159, 160, 170–174, 181, 182, 186, 187, 190, 193, 211, 218, 221 U Unemployment, 34, 35, 39, 40, 46, 76, 78, 84, 110 Urban, 12, 21, 22, 24–27, 31, 50, 57, 63, 87, 93, 121, 135, 147, 148, 170, 175–180, 187–189, 191, 204, 216, 218, 219 V Violence, 88, 91, 116, 117, 119, 126, 135, 153, 181, 187–192, 205, 213, 224 Voice, 11, 13, 32, 35, 107, 115, 132, 149, 154, 156, 158, 191, 206, 220, 222, 225 W Wellbeing, 10, 18, 34, 81, 86, 98, 151, 173, 205, 206 White, 28, 53, 63, 65, 136, 137, 157, 183, 184, 210, 217 Work, 46, 71, 107, 169 Y Youth cultures, 3, 5, 9, 32, 144, 145, 147–149