Risky Stories: Youth Identities, Learning and Everyday Risk

Over the last few years, risk has emerged as a defining feature of contemporary life. While considerable emphasis has been placed upon assessing the effects and consequences of risk in local and global contexts, there is a paucity of research concerned with individual and everyday risk understanding and construction, and with their links with learning and identity. Focusing upon the case studies of two young people as they moved into and through their post-16 careers, I challenge prevailing assumptions about the basis of risk as a rational product. First, I show that the young people interpreted risk relatively and made judgements, decisions and choices in day-to-day contexts pragmatically, rather than in a mechanistic and dehumanized fashion, against some pre-given, external and fixed criteria. Second, I show that risk, identity and learning are mutually constitutive and that there is an iterative relation between them. In the light of this, the challenge facing the two young people was to seam together risk, identity and learning within a coherent narrative, and to do so in the face of competing interests and structural limits in the knowledge that the balance between them might, at any moment, be changed.