Introduction
With this issue, the Journal of Youth Studies (JYS) reaches its twenty-first year. This has traditionally been a coming of age milestone in many parts of the world. One of the great contributions of this Journal has been to track the way that transitions to adulthood have become longer, fuzzier and more complex. Twenty-first birthdays are still worth celebrating, even for journals, but twenty-one no longer represents such an important milestone. It does, however, represent a turning point for this Journal, with a new editorial team beginning a five-year term at the helm.
JYS has framed key debates in Youth Studies over the past two decades, including how to conceptualise the profound changes occurring in transitions to adulthood. In taking on the role of curating the research insights and key debates about youth that will set the agenda for the future, we will be building on the legacy of the Journal’s founder Professor Andy Furlong.
Andy Furlong founded the Journal in 1997, with the first issue in January 1998, and as its Editor in Chief was the driving force behind the success of the Journal over two decades. Following Andy’s sudden and untimely death in 2017, we have led JYS in an interim capacity. We were delighted to learn, in September 2018, however that following a competitive proposal process, Taylor and Francis have appointed us to lead the Journal for another five years, through to 2023. In this short editorial introduction, we lay out our plans for our term as editors, particularly how we see the role of JYS in shaping the field of Youth Studies over the coming decade.
The Journal of Youth Studies: Past and Present
Interestingly, looking back at that first issue, some of the core concerns of the Journal remain similar now to then. Volume 1, Issue 1 contained papers about structure and agency in youth transitions, young people’s engagement with education in rural areas, youth and citizenship, young people’s life concepts, consumption and consumer identities, and about the nature of Youth Studies in Australia. It is the nature of social science research that central questions are rarely settled once and for all; JYS publishes research from low consensus disciplines and ‘youth’, and the societies of which young people are part, are moving objects. Yet, progress of a kind is still possible, the empirical evidence base can grow and conceptualisations become more sophisticated. Over the subsequent two decades since Volume 1, the Journal has covered a wide range of subjects and foci but a recurring theme is efforts to understand social change and continuity as it shapes young lives and how this intersects with inequality. Rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances have had important implications for young people: new opportunities have been created, but inequality and marginalisation have increased and taken new forms. The Journal has led the way in tracing these changes – and in extending older theories and building the new conceptual apparatus to understand and address them.
Through mapping these changes, the Journal has undoubtedly become a leading outlet for the study of young lives. It has expanded in size rapidly. We have moved from having three issues per volume (i.e. per year) in 1998, to four issues in 2000, five in 2006, six in 2008, eight in 2011 and then to the current ten issues per year, in 2014. From the 17 articles in our first volume we had over 80 in our most recent one. We have published, at the time of writing (November 2018), in total a little short of one thousand original articles about young people and youth issues (n. 977). In the early years of the Journal we published book reviews, but this petered out, chiefly because they were swamped by the growing number of original research articles that quickly filled the available pages. We have run a small number of special issues (on young people, politics and new technology in 2008; on young people, class and place in 2009; and on youth in East Europe and the ex-Soviet Union in 2010) but in recent years there have been none, despite several requests from potential guest editors, again mainly because finding space for these became harder when the volume of incoming, standard journal articles has kept increasing. In short, we were too ‘busy’ for special issues.
The Journal is performing strongly in relation to a range of measures. It is global in its reach with, in 2017, submissions from authors based in over sixty different countries, including from thirty-three countries in ‘the Global South’. We have a steady increase in the numbers of papers submitted to the Journal each year, with nearly 400 in 2017. Inevitably then, regardless of the increase in the number of issues per year that we have made, a high proportion of papers are not accepted for publication. This means that we have been able to maintain the quality of the content at the same time as increasing its quantity. This is reflected in an increasing global readership and a strong Journal Impact Factor: 1.742 (2017). This impact factor – which is on a steady upward trend – positions us very well against international competitor journals. We are now well established, over a number of years, in the first quartile (Q1) in the SCImago Journal Rankings for Life-span and Life-course Studies, Sociology and Political Science, and Social Sciences (Miscellaneous).
Numerical indicators like this need to be treated with caution – the best papers are not always in the journals with the highest impact factors – but this tallying up of our past twenty years and indicators of our current standing suggest we are going from strength to strength on these widely used measures of impact, which is hopefully of some interest to our readership and contributors. Significantly, these figures are one marker of the role of JYS in creating, defining, establishing and developing Youth Studies as a field of research and scholarship internationally over the past twenty years. Over the coming five years – and building on successes to date – we aim to consolidate the Journal’s position as the major, global journal in the field of Youth Studies.
Our vision for the Journal
The value, remit and proper focus of Youth Studies can be argued over, and we can and should dispute exactly what it is ‘for’ and exactly how it should be ‘done’, as debates in this Journal and elsewhere amply show. And whilst the idea has been expressed in different ways by different authors, we still hold to the proposition as expressed by Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel in their 1997 book Young People and Social Change (p. 2):
‘ … the study of youth provides an ideal opportunity to examine the relevance of new social theories; if the social order has changed and if social structures have weakened we would expect to find evidence of these changes among young people who are at the crossroads of the processes of social reproduction’.
Aims and scope
Journal of Youth Studies is an international scholarly journal devoted to the theoretical and empirical understanding of young people’s experiences and life contexts. Rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances have important implications for young people: new opportunities have been created but inequality and marginalisation have increased and taken new forms. Launched in 1998, JYS has established itself as the leading multidisciplinary journal for academics who are interested in youth and young adulthood.
As the leading journal in the field, JYS brings together social scientists from all regions of the world and working in a range of disciplines. These include sociology, education, social policy, cultural studies, political science, economics, anthropology, criminology and social geography. Ours is not a journal of adolescent psychology but we do accept papers that take a critical psychological perspective.
The papers we publish investigate young people’s lives in a range of contexts (such as education, the family, the labour market) and in respect of numerous research themes (such as sub-culture, identity, politics, citizenship, consumption, leisure, media, crime etc.) The Journal does not wish to publish papers that incidentally have used young people as the research sample or that repeat dated, narrow or normative approaches to understanding young people’s lives. Although the scope cannot be defined chronologically, the core interest of the Journal is on young people in their teens and twenties.
We are open to all methodological approaches. As well as empirically based, theoretically informed papers we also welcome contributions that are primarily conceptual, particularly if they add to contemporary intellectual debates in the field. JYS publishes papers that grapple with questions of youth policy and practice, but these must go beyond programme reports and evaluations and have clear value for an international readership. As well as analyses of the changing situations, experiences and opportunities of young people, the Journal encourages papers that take a critical perspective on the way that social, economic and political processes and institutions shape the meaning of, and narratives about, youth.
Three key changes
We have not made radical changes to this aims and scope statement, but the changes we have made help us to emphasise the critical nature of JYS. There are three specific, substantive developments in relation to the scope of the Journal we would like to see over the next five years.
Firstly, we want to encourage critical and innovative contributions to key debates. This involves emphasising the importance of innovation and to encourage papers with a critical stance on dominant constructions of youth. We prefer papers that progress our understandings of youth rather to ones that repeat dated, narrow, or normative approaches to young people’s lives. It is important that the articles we publish move forward key theoretical and conceptual debates in the field and appeal to a global readership. Studies that draw empirically on youth policy programmes or evaluation studies can sometimes be limited in these respects and, therefore, of narrow interest.
Secondly, we seek better targeted papers from psychology. The field of Youth Studies has always drawn from several disciplines. Accordingly, JYS is a multi-disciplinary journal, with a sociological core, and we receive papers from across the social sciences, including psychology. However, in the past and in general the papers we receive that use a psychological framing tend to be weaker than average, often appearing to have been prepared first for another outlet. Those that make it to publication are strong enough to make it through our review process and are often important contributions. Nevertheless, in general the psychology-based papers that we have published have tended not to feature amongst those that most engage our readership as measured by downloads and citations. Instead of directly competing with successful journals like the Journal of Adolescence, we seek to encourage papers from psychology that take a social and critical stance, aiming to become the outlet of choice for psychology papers ‘talking back’ to the mainstream of psychology; papers, for instance, that emphasise the importance of social structures and networks to ‘adolescence’ and which challenge biological framings of this period of life.
Finally, we strive for even more of a global focus and reach. There is a USA/ rest of the world divide in Youth Studies, with US-based scholars often showing a preference for the USA based and focused journals, such as Youth and Society. We believe JYS is the most truly global journal in the field (as represented by submissions, readership, conference participation etc). There is capacity, however, to expand our presence in some parts of the world, particularly the Asia Pacific, which is now home to a majority of the world’s young people. Related to this, there is an emergent argument in the field that Youth Studies has been too dominated by research and theory from the anglophone countries of the ‘Global North’. We will explicitly encourage quality scholarship from the Asia-Pacific region and across the ‘South’, particularly co-authored publications drawing on authors from multiple countries and across regions. An international mix of authors on a publication tends to increase quality and reader engagement, and comparative studies of young people across different societies, economies and welfare regimes can help further a global, cosmopolitan Youth Studies.
Some organisational changes to the way that we run the Journal
Over the next five years, starting very soon, we aim to reorganise and rejuvenate the editorial team for the Journal.
This will include the establishment of a new International Advisory Board. This will be a small group (six to eight people) of eminent scholars from the global Youth Studies community who will add significant wisdom and connect their large academic networks to the Journal. They will be expected to advise the Editors in Chief and Associate Editors on the direction of the Journal and the selection of special issues, to champion the Journal and adjudicate the forthcoming Andy Furlong Prize (see below). We are pleased to announce that Professor John Goodwin, Professor Henrietta O’Connor (both University of Leicester, UK) and Professor Kate Tilleczek (York University, Canada) have agreed to be the first members of this International Advisory Board, moving up from the role of Associate Editor and after making outstanding contributions to the Journal over many years.
A second development is that we will expand and revise the team of Associate Editors who are the engine room of the journal. The role of Associate Editor carries significant responsibility and workload in respect of the Journal’s systems for peer review. We are pleased to say that five colleagues have agreed to continue in this role (Prof Shane Blackman, Canterbury Christchurch University, UK; Dr David Farrugia, University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr Steven Roberts, Monash University, Australia; Dr Signe Ravn, University of Melbourne, Australia; Dr Steven Threadgold, University of Newcastle, Australia). Four of those continuing are mid-career scholars who have recently joined the team, selected for the impact of their recent publications in the Journal and their contribution as reviewers. In the coming months, we will add at least four additional Associate Editors to the team. Australia and the UK, both hubs of contemporary Youth Studies, are already well represented across the Associate Editors and Editors in Chief. In making new appointments to this role in the Journal we will explicitly seek to recruit editors that reflect the possibilities of a global Youth Studies and increase representation from parts of the world where there are also strong or developing communities of Youth Studies.
Thirdly, we will rejuvenate the Editorial Review Board. Those included here are established Youth Studies scholars who have committed to reviewing papers on a regular basis and to generally promoting the Journal. We have not revisited this Board for some time and it is likely that some will seek to retire from their current role. We will probably reduce the overall size of this Board, but we are also likely to appoint new members and, again, to expand geographical coverage, with an eye to including greater numbers from Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe Beyond the UK.
Finally, we will expand our editorial pool by setting up an Associate Editorial Review Board for early career scholars. This will help spread opportunities to emerging scholars (approximately thirty) in the Youth Studies field, through a nomination process. Ours is a vibrant field globally with many recent graduates and post-doctoral researchers. These positions will involve some reviewing of papers, guided and tutored in this process by the Associate Editors and Editors in Chief.
Four new (or returned to) activities for the Journal
As we noted earlier, we have published only three Special Issues in the twenty-year history of the Journal. We regularly receive impressive proposals for special issues. More broadly, the most engaged with pieces in JYS are often key contributions to major conceptual debates in the field, the kind that can be curated through special issues. We plan to facilitate the publication of these pieces through thematic special issues, published at least once a year. We will run a competitive process to select the theme and editors for each, with the breadth and importance of the theme addressed and its contribution to key debates as the major criteria. We intend the first of these special issues to be published in January 2020. It will focus on the legacy of Andy Furlong’s work for the future direction of the field of Youth Studies.
Secondly, we will revive the Journal of Youth Studies Conference (following conferences in Glasgow in 2013 and another in Denmark in 2015). These have been highly successful and popular, and we frequently receive questions about arrangements for the next one. They have helped to develop an international community of youth scholars. For instance, the Copenhagen conference attracted almost 400 delegates from 40 countries. The conferences will facilitate engagement with the Journal, specifically by inviting prominent scholars within social science broadly (whose work has relevance for Youth Studies) to deliver keynotes and be part of plenary sessions. We are also planning a series of events for ‘early career’ scholars. We are pleased to report that a consortium of colleagues from Australia will be hosting a third Journal of Youth Studies conference at the University of Newcastle, Australia in December 2019. International conferences like these are significant endeavours and consuming of time and resources. We hope to hold our next conferences in North America or Asia but will be open to receiving proposals from Youth Studies scholars wherever they are based, for these or more focused, smaller events.
Thirdly, we will endeavour to have a greater social media presence for the Journal. Our Journal’s research lends itself to wider engagement, with our articles often relevant to local and global events and media interests. A recent example was ‘Sleepless in Schools’ (Power et al, issue 8, 2017) which was one of our publisher’s most successful media campaigns last year, generating an alt-metric score of 327.
Finally, it is with great pleasure we announce the establishment of the Andy Furlong Prize. This will be a prestigious, annual prize for the best paper published in the Journal over the previous year, named to honour the legacy of the Journal’s founding Editor-in-Chief. The International Advisory Board will play a key role in shortlisting and then selecting the best paper. We will seek to have this winning and short-list of papers well-publicised and available as open-access for a period. Our plan is that winners will receive a small honorarium and be invited to present in a plenary at the subsequent JYS conference.
Building on a great legacy
The need for an active Youth Studies field, and vibrant outlets for the work being produced, is becoming even more pressing. Young people’s lives are being reshaped and upended at an ever-greater pace. Young people (and the idea of ‘youth’) are at the centre of new political struggles and social movements trying to create alternative futures. Tracing these changes and efforts is the role of the Journal. In this brief editorial statement, we have described where we have come from and our plans to build on this legacy into the future, to consolidate our place as the central outlet for the best Youth Studies scholarship. To conclude, we record our thanks to all those who work, and have worked, so hard to make the Journal a success so far and who will work with us in achieving these aims over the next five years: to the authors who write for us for free and then put up with our rejections, or criticisms of their papers, or occasional lapses in our administrative procedures, with good grace (most often); to the generous reviewers who toil for us unpaid, and often under university managerial audit cultures that pay little if any regard to this scholarly commitment; to the support of our publishers, and the professionalism of their editorial support and production teams, that turn what we do into something tangible and lasting; and to the Editorial Review Board and, particularly, the Associate Editors who take much of the weight of the Journal’s work. Finally, we thank our friend, colleague and founding editor, Andy Furlong, for getting this all going in the first place; the success of Youth Studies and this Journal, into the future, will be one of his lasting legacies.