Figures of youth: on the very object of Youth Studies

ABSTRACT

‘Youth’ as a social category is used and abused in all manner of ways across an array of fields, platforms, discourses and spaces, Youth Studies notwithstanding. When we talk about ‘young people’ sometimes we seem to be referring to different phenomena, depending upon our political interests, theoretical perspectives and research methods. This article interrogates how the concept of ‘youth’ is figuratively put to work. By suggesting different figures of youth, and inviting suggestions for more, I propose that tracing how they are situated in different ontological spaces can develop a clearer conception of our research object(s) and help reduce confusion and the possibility that we are talking past each other. The incomplete picture I want to paint of figures of youth, in quite broad-brush strokes, all inter-relate in something of a feedback loop, a material-semiotic assemblage that forms powerful affects for the ways that ‘youth’ is brought into being, how youth are researched, governed, co-opted and exploited.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth Studies
• figures
• moral panic
• governmentality
• reflexive methods

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Farrugia who read over an early draft. Particular thanks to the three anonymous reviewers and Rob MacDonald whose advice greatly improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Colloquial symbolically violent Australian term for a person receiving welfare payments, with ‘dole’ itself meaning welfare support.

2 See Evershed (2016) and Roberts and France (2016) for further comments. Eating avocados has become a major point of satire and memes for young people in Australia pointing out the absurdity of this argument. As one housing affordability report showed, in 2016, the national price to income ratio was recorded at 6.9x, in 2001 it was 4.3x. In 2016, 36.8% of a household's income was required to service an 80% LVR mortgage, in 2001 it was only 26.8% of household income (CoreLogic 2016).

3 This term broadly refers to non-academic NGOs, government funded organisations, charities and other social and youth work organisations and institutions.