Interrogating race, unsettling whiteness: concepts of transitions, enterprise and mobilities in Australian youth studies

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates how three key concepts in youth studies – ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’ – have historically centred the experiences of white/Anglo young people in the Australian settler colonial context. A race critical analysis of these major concepts that foregrounds colonialism, racialised migration schemes, multicultural policies and everyday racism has yet to be applied in any substantial way. This approach has the potential to unsettle the colonial and racialised logics inherent within these concepts and examine how they normalise whiteness in Australia. In exploring how these concepts are predominantly applied, critiqued and engaged with, we ask, how does youth studies as a field reproduce Northern colonial systems of knowledge production? We demonstrate the necessity of naming race, racism and processes of racialisation explicitly within the Australian field, not merely to include ‘others’ but to investigate how dominant conceptual paradigms produce racialised and minoritised Others and mainstream whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• whiteness
• transitions
• enterprising self
• mobilities

Introduction

In this paper, we contend that an absence of reckoning with race in Australian youth studies has produced an imaginary of young people that centres white/Anglo youth experience. This, in turn, extends, rather than interrogates, Northern colonial systems of knowledge production. We make this argument through brief analyses of three key youth studies concepts: ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’. Drawing on contemporary approaches to race theorising from critical race theory and post-colonial theory, our aim here is to unsettle the colonial and racialised logics inherent within these concepts and examine how they normalise the experiences of white youth. We argue that without explicitly naming race and processes of racialisation, or attending to how race is operationalised in Australian youth studies, such concepts can continue to centre and reproduce the experiences of white/Anglo youth as the norm.

Our interest in making race more explicit in theorising young people’s lives in the settler colonial state of Australia builds on a legacy of what is broadly and loosely referred to as ‘decolonising’ scholarship across the social sciences. This wide-ranging body of work has long interrogated how racial capitalist logics of the British Empire and its expansive colonial power structures continue to underpin the operation of Western knowledge-making institutions in the present (Asad 1973; Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016; de Finney 2010; Kidman 2020; Moreton-Robinson 2020 [2000]; Nakata 1997; Said 1978; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). This work exposes how Western knowledge naturalises and contributes to the domination of the Other by the West and shows how it has long been incorporated into a ‘post-colonial’ and ‘post-structural turn’ in different fields.

In Australian sociology, such an agenda has only recently been taken up within the mainstream sociological canon. Scholarship which interrogates colonialist/imperialist regimes has long been generated among theorists within ex-colonial nations around the world, including within different domains of Indigenous sociology (Patel 2021). Yet in Australia, it is really with the work of Connell (2007) that such agendas moved to the foreground, despite such interrogations having long been undertaken in Australia within Indigenous studies, cultural studies and post-colonial scholarship (Moreton-Robinson 2020 [2000], 2004a). Connell (2007, 16) shows how the ‘metropole’ (urban, white academic institutions of the post-industrial West) continues to function as the centre for sociological knowledge-making.

Youth studies has made strides in taking up such an agenda. This is seen in calls to democratise, ‘decolonise’ or expand youth studies (Cooper, Swartz, and Mahali 2019); in arguments that youth studies scholars pay greater attention to youth in the global South (Cuervo and Miranda 2019); and in debates about the applicability of Northern theory and the generation of Southern theory (Swartz et al. 2020). Much of the discussion in youth studies has been around the tendency for the experience of (some) youth in the global North to be taken as the norm, and how this imposes inappropriate and sometimes imperial assumptions on analyses of youth in the global South (Nilan 2011; Vandergrift 2015; Cooper, Swartz, and Mahali 2019; Cuervo and Miranda 2019; Swartz et al. 2020). One key intervention to counter this tendency has been the work of ‘producing a Youth Studies for the global South’ (Cooper, Swartz, and Mahali 2019, 43). This involves the centring of scholarship from the global South via greater attention to the experiences of youth in the global South, as well as the recuperation and generation of Southern theory and knowledge (Takayama 2016).

Yet while this project of interrogating knowledge production and power in relation to youth studies has turned to the global South, there remains considerable work to be done to apply a more critical lens to the approaches undertaken in the North. Scholars who work in and ‘on’ the global South have led the effort to make Southern theory and scholars more visible to one another and to the North. However, far less has happened on the other side, in the North, with only marginal attention paid to the production and deployment of youth studies knowledge within such contexts. This includes in Australian youth studies, which still struggles to interrogate the on-going colonial and racialising logics which underpin the field’s construction and representation of youth (see Harris and Idriss 2021). While scholars in other global North contexts have increasingly analysed race, racism and youth in relation to colonialism, capitalism, inequality and power (Nayak 2003, 2017; de Finney 2010; Harries et al. 2016; Hagerman 2018), fewer Australian scholars have pursued similar ends (for exceptions see Noble and Poynting 2000; Majavu 2017; Idriss 2018, 2021).

In this paper, we take up this critical work in the ‘North’ by focusing on race in youth studies in multicultural settler Australia. Drawing on contemporary approaches to theorising race from critical race and post-colonial theory, we contend that an absence of reckoning with race in Australian youth studies has produced an imaginary of young people that centres white/Anglo youth as the norm. This, in turn, extends, rather than interrogates, Northern colonial systems of knowledge production. We explore how colonial and racialising logics operate within the key concepts of ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’ as they are applied in Australia. We argue that the omission of settler colonialism and racialised power structures from the field’s approaches to these concepts can enable a white normative figure of youth to become a trope for all young people. In the following section, we first contextualise our argument through a discussion of how race has come to be under-explored in Australian youth studies. We then turn to examine some of the ways in which race operates within these three core concepts.

Thinking with race in ‘northern’ youth studies

Race has been generally obfuscated in Australian youth studies as a result of several overlapping trends. The first one is that race is not a category that is used in Australian census data or population demographics. Nor is it a term with which the Australian social sciences more broadly, or youth studies in particular, has historically been comfortable. There is a commonly agreed-upon premise within the Northern social sciences that race is socially constructed and/or a myth from a bygone era, and that to engage with the term itself is to inadvertently suggest it has legitimacy as a biological category (Goldberg 2009). This is frequently traced back to outcomes of the Second World War, where revelations of the horror of racial science emerged alongside a growing reckoning with Western Europe’s colonial practices (Brodkin 1998). This was followed over the ensuing decades by critiques of racial categorisation and associated practices of essentialism, primitivism and white supremacism. As colonial powers moved to decolonialise, and as newly independent nations entered variegated movements of decolonisation (Patel 2021), classic modernist distinctions between ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developed’, previously taken for granted, were now being understood as products of colonialism, global capitalism and the unequal distribution of power (Asad 1973). These events underpinned the move away from ‘race’ to that of ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the social sciences. Scholars sought to replace ‘race’ – seen as regressive, fixed and racist – with ‘culture’. The latter was understood to be malleable and politically neutral (Cowlishaw 2004, 59).

However, race continues to matter, although not because of some objective truth about biological determinism across groups. While race is not natural or biological, scholars use the term ‘race’ to refer to socially constructed categories which are deployed to justify hierarchies and inequalities based on perceived physical differences, cultural categories and a host of other interrelated signifiers (Goldberg 2009; Lentin 2015). Race is thus not a fixed unit of analysis that can be pinned down in any precise way. Rather, as Hall (1980) and others have long argued, we need to understand race as a political and ideological project and as a slippery discursive signifier, one which can do many different things within specific contexts. For example, as Valluvan (2016, 2247) explains, ‘certain iconic racial meanings are always already cued through broader, and increasingly digital, global mediations – e.g. the rabid Muslim; the black criminal; the lecherous or scheming, undeserving migrant’. Further, the contemporary socio-economic conditions of people’s lives remain constitutive of race as a category and racialisation as a process, even while ‘race’ is understood to be a myth (Goldberg 2015).

Race continues to matter because it is operationalised as a technology of power that draws on myths of biological hierarchies to advance the rights, freedoms and powers of some vis-a-vis the subjugation of others. To simply state that race is socially constructed and has no basis in objective and universally applicable scientific truth is ineffective for making sense of, and moreover having a language to challenge, the contemporary local and global flows of inequality that continue to be structured by processes of racialisation and racisms (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Lentin 2015).

One consequence of the shift in focus to the social construction of culture and ethnicity in sociological scholarship is that this critical perspective on race, as a political and ideological project with enduring impacts on young people’s lived experiences, has often been elided. The effects of racial thinking and racism, in its multiple forms, on inequalities among young people, have thus tended to go undiagnosed. In this paper, we argue that in order to develop these kinds of race-sensitive approaches in Australian youth studies, it is productive to unpack the ways in which key concepts can operate as racialising ways of knowing young people, and explore the ways they are still often utilised as though they are neutral descriptors of youth conditions and experiences. We argue that Australian youth studies has yet to reckon with how the central concepts of the field are racialised as white. The silence around the white origins and operations of such concepts in settler Australia (Moreton-Robinson 2004b) overlooks the multicultural settler colonial context of young Australians’ lives and produces a mainstreaming of white/Anglo youth experience (Carlson 2016; Huggins 1991; Moreton-Robinson 2004b, 2015). In the following section, we explore these racialising processes in the Australian youth studies context by analysing three key concepts: ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’. Drawing on contemporary approaches to race theorising from critical race and post-colonial theory, we problematise and unsettle the colonial and racialising logics that have informed both these concepts’ development and how they are routinely deployed. As we show, in lieu of attending to how race is operationalised in relation to these concepts, research that draws on them can implicitly centre and reproduce the experiences of white/Anglo youth as the norm.

Unpacking race in Australian youth studies: ‘Transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’

Transitions

‘Transitions’ is one of the most prominent agendas in Australian youth research and policy (Wyn and White 1997). The transitions paradigm, which builds on the stage-based model of adolescent development, is a mode of thinking about the movement from childhood to adulthood and also a technology for managing young people’s lives that produces particular kinds of citizens, students and workers. With its focus on school-to-work pathways, trajectories towards civic participation, labour force integration, and family and household formation, it is concerned with making young people into adults who will contribute to the social and economic life of the nation. Contemporarily, it is primarily attentive to the ways young people move successfully from school to work and establish adult lives, as measured by normative benchmarks such as leaving the family home, forging a career, becoming financially independent and partnering. Youth policy and research frameworks are heavily influenced by (and producers of) this transitions agenda, but it is also frequently critiqued, especially for a failure to respond to changing life patterns and the structural destabilisation of young people’s pathways, casting young people as ‘at risk’ or insufficiently self-actualising when they fail to achieve these milestones (Cuervo and Wyn 2011).

Some work has been done to interrogate the universalising tendencies of Northern assumptions about transition that take white/Anglo experiences as the norm. For example, it is powerfully argued that transition has different meanings in different contexts, and thus it cannot be assumed that all young people can be measured by the same indicators. Key youth studies scholars Wyn and White (1997) and Nilan (2011) have shown that in some cultural contexts, a capacity for family connectedness and responsibility to kin is crucial to the process of becoming adult, while the Northern perspectives that dominate Australian research and policy traditionally emphasise autonomy and separation as a marker of independence. This is despite different indicators of adulthood, such as relationality with family and places, being central to the lives of youth living within these very nation states.

This has also been long argued by scholars in Indigenous studies and policy in Australia, who have demonstrated how family connectedness and networks, community child-rearing practices, and different ways of socialising ‘dependence’ and ‘independence’ may in some contexts differ substantially from white/Anglo normative models (e.g. Walter 2008, 2017; Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2019; Lohoar, Butera, and Kennedy 2014; Biddle 2014). Youth studies scholars have drawn on such research to show how such experiences may shape some Indigenous young people’s aspirations and transitions into adulthood (Parkes, McRae-Willaims, and Tedmanson 2015; Senior and Chenhall 2012; Butler and Muir 2017). Some trouble mainstream assumptions about drivers for school engagement and success that are implicit in white/Anglo normative transitions paradigms. Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2016) and Kickett-Tucker (2009) show how research on educational pathways that starts with a theory of self-concept that embeds sense of self in community belonging and responsibility identifies much more extensive and diverse indicators to measure and improve Indigenous youth school engagement and achievement. Prout and Hill (2012) demonstrate how universalising assumptions about ‘successful’ school-to-work transitions are based on normative understandings of settledness. This means that Indigenous young people’s mobility has been constructed as undermining their capacity for mainstream social and economic inclusion. Such mobility is not recognised as a possible critical dimension of cultural and community belonging or as an alternative indicator of transition to responsibility.

Australian youth studies is increasingly turning to decades of scholarship within Indigenous studies and post-colonial theory that has long questioned the underlying assumptions about ‘successful’ youth transitions and the markers which constitute ‘adulthood’. In doing so, it has also sought to challenge a ‘one size fits all’ approach to transitions (Cuervo, Baraket, and Turnbull 2015, 16), and the need for more expansive frameworks to better include a range of transition experiences and imaginaries of adulthood. However, it is important to note that historically and epistemically, youth studies approaches to transition have not simply inadvertently left out the experiences of Indigenous youth and other non-Anglo, non-white youth, which would mean this approach could be improved by becoming more inclusive. Rather, the transition paradigm has come to define what a successful youth trajectory to adulthood should consist of by producing particular non-white/Anglo youth as ‘other’ and as outside of mainstream pathways. The issue is not so much that the model fits one group better than others, but that it makes these groups meaningful and knowable in racialised ways in the first place. In this respect, transition as a paradigm is implicated in a racialising process of norm-making in youth studies. Thus, it is not sufficient to simply expand the concept of transitions to recognise other alternative trajectories. This kind of approach cannot address the fundamental problem of why and how an idealised white/Anglo experience has been constituted as the unacknowledged measure within a core concept in youth studies, and how this inevitably produces ‘other’ youth in terms of difference, deficit, risk and disadvantage. What is also often left out is accounting for the settler colonial context – both contemporary and historical – in which young Australians craft their biographies, aspirations and life pathways.

To explore this more deeply, we return to how Indigenous youth have been positioned in the transitions framework in the historical context of settler colonialism. It is possible to draw a line from adolescent development models of the nineteenth century through to transition paradigms that gained currency from the mid-to-late twentieth century to understand how youth trajectories to adulthood have been historically framed as risky processes of becoming citizens (Lesko 2001). Critical to the very process of making transition a meaningful concept through which to theorise Australian young people was that Indigenous youth were historically excluded from this kind of adult citizenship and from the imaginary of the future Australian nation as a condition of colonial rule (Nakata 2017). While white youth were cultivated and managed along a developmental and transition pathway in order to produce them as successful adults who would embrace British values and serve the empire (Robinson and Wilson 2008), Indigenous youth were actively excluded from this trajectory in order to ensure the white future of Australian nationhood. Contingent inclusion was permitted, but always required assimilation into whiteness; historically enforced through institutionalisation in missions and removal to white families where young people were stripped of cultural education, language and connection to land, kin and community in order to ‘come up to white standards’ (Huggins 1995; Bamblett and Lewis 2007; Rudolph 2019) and be set on a mainstream pathway, not least because young people’s unpaid and underpaid labour was foundational to the development of the settler colony. Only compliance with colonial laws and regulations, such as applications for permits to move, marry or work (Davis and Langton 2016), allowed some Indigenous youth access to these transition milestones. In this way, enforcement of white transition norms has long operated as a form of colonial power: a mode of simultaneously excluding and then controlling Indigenous youth from and into the service of the colonial state by compelling young people into highly institutionalised pathways, educating them for particular kinds of work, managing their movements and other rights, and demanding practices of disengagement and disavowal of identity to sever youth from communities and land. It extends a framework in which the mainstream Australian family ideal for producing youth remains aligned to white/Anglo family formations, practices and pathways (Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2019, 333).

This kind of critical cultural history of ‘transition’ in Australia’s settler colonial context can reveal what Lesko (2001, 12) describes as the ‘racial, gender and class hierarchies’ that inhere in the concept of normative steps towards adulthood. The issue that becomes central then is not to understand so much how ‘others’ may transition differently, but how othering has operated integrally within the ideal of transition in the first place, and how transition as a paradigm has functioned as a racialised mode of youth regulation, and has done so since the first efforts to establish the settler colony and build the white Australian nation. Endeavours to rethink the Northern bias in contemporary transitions paradigms must be linked with this understanding of its racialised history. To focus simply on ‘difference’ in an a priori sense, even when it is perceived as socially constructed – an approach that is commonly pursued to expand the transitions framework – risks disregarding the ways this framework has been established to produce young people as adults and citizens in racialising ways to engender white privilege and Indigenous disadvantage; which is ‘difference’ politically understood, as a power construct, not a social construct (see Kendi 2019, 201), that produces race effects. This offers a way to interrogate transition as a knowledge system that both relies on normative racialised assumptions about successful adulthood, and produces youth as racialised (non)citizen-subjects. We suggest that it is not adequate to expand theories of transition without a contextualisation of the operationalisation of this paradigm in the settler colonial condition, for this would involve its ‘strategic severance from the colonial process’ (Brown 2019, 3).

Critiquing transition, therefore, is not only about understanding how different young people may move towards adulthood in diverse ways (with ‘adulthood’ itself open to interpretation) depending on their cultural context and identifications. Rather, it involves analysing the work that the transition model itself does to produce and differentiate amongst young people as racialised subjects, to maintain racialised systems of socio-economic disadvantage and privilege, and to attach worth and meaning to their aspirations and pathways in racialising ways. In this section, we have briefly discussed how this has unfolded in the context of Australia’s settler colonial history, and in particular how transition has operated as a mode of colonial power in the lives of Indigenous youth. In recent times, there has been considerable debate about the changing nature of young people’s pathways to adulthood in late modernity and the emerging imperatives to be entrepreneurial and mobile in order to successfully manage transition today. Unlike in the earlier historical context, racialisation does not seem to feature so prominently in contemporary approaches to these aspects of youth transitions. However, we suggest that racialising logics continue to operate in these contemporary conceptualisations of the ways young Australians are obliged to grapple with new transition regimes that increasingly require enterprising and mobile sensibilities.

The enterprising self

Research on young people’s working lives under late modernity has shown that stable and coherent vocational futures are no longer secure and instead become primarily available to those who can access intergenerational wealth (Cook 2020) and to those who reflexively internalise the rhetoric and are resourced to undertake the labour of self-management (Bröckling 2016; Taylor and Luckman 2018). Thus, alongside discussion of the structural changes to education, employment and housing that are disrupting conventional transition pathways, there is a core body of literature that analyses how these changes are interpreted and narrated by young people in their accounts of personal aspiration, self-making and agency (Farrugia, Threadgold, and Coffey 2018; Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Ikonen and Nikunen 2018; Kelly 2006; Oinonen 2018). Precarious labour markets require young people to ‘tread water’ for longer, accumulating a diverse range of life and work experiences before settling on a chosen pathway, while always being ready to shapeshift where necessary (Morgan and Nelligan 2018). These diverse life experiences are not always directly related to vocation and education, but to youth and leisure cultures, which have become an increasingly vital component of a young person’s ability to successfully navigate new life trajectories and biographisation. Because boundaries between work and leisure have all but collapsed (Allen and Hollingworth 2013; McRobbie 2002), young people are told to be reflexive in how they articulate their leisure interests and activities, particularly their digital participation, as feeding into a larger, lifelong project of self-making; a self that is subservient to different markets in contemporary society (Gill and Kanai 2018).

The neoliberal imperative to invent, and indeed sell, the self (Skeggs 2004; Gill and Kanai 2018) has meant that young people’s primary roles are not simply as students or workers but reflexive subjects who can thread together disparate components from schooling, training and employment choices into a coherent and cohesive biography (Taylor and Luckman 2018). In these narratives of the self, life circumstances need to be discursively remade into rational, personal choices rather than fatalistically and passively accepted; a theme that has been explored especially in relation to the demands on young women to be active agents directing their lives through empowerment discourses (Harris 2004). This active figure of youth is one who is held personally accountable for their ability to achieve educational, employment and financial success (Reay, David, and Ball 2001) and in turn the enterprising young person is perceived as the ideal youth citizen. Entrepreneurialism, as a neoliberal sensibility, is characterised in the literature by flexibility and risk-taking. In a fractured and unstable contemporary employment market, this disposition emerges as one of the remaining, and more promising, options for young people to gain a hold of their futures where no clear pathway is said to any longer exist (Ikonen and Nikunen 2018). Indeed, Skeggs (2019, 32) argues that ‘the free liberal possessive individual of propertied personhood has more recently transposed into the enterprising subject or the “subject of value” of neoliberalism’.

This is not a model that can be embodied and performed ‘correctly’ by all young people. Those young people whose life pathways fall outside normative behavioural and educational expectations are often seen as individually failing to make ‘the right choices’; a trope that has been critiqued by youth studies scholars (Roberts 2011). These critiques are embedded in class analysis, showing how the enterprising self is made over time through a combination of material resources and social and cultural capitals (Ikonen and Nikunen 2018). The capacity to exert personal agency over one’s life outcomes and pathways is, therefore, emblematic of a cosmopolitan orientation to seeing and knowing one’s own life world that is fundamentally classed (Prieur and Savage 2013).

Discussions of the enterprising self commonly attribute the kind of resilient, reflexive, self-branding exercises that young people engage in as stemming from post-Fordist ascension of global capitalist forces (Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Farrugia, Threadgold, and Coffey 2018). Changes to young people’s working lives are predominantly framed in relation to ‘loss’ – either of local communities, communities of practice or state-based safety nets (Morgan and Nelligan 2018). Youth studies research has thus far uncovered young people’s displays of agency and resilience in the face of such losses (Kelly 2006). In the process, however, what is typically foregrounded are the experiences of historically local, white working-class communities and especially young men of the global North; as Mitropolous (2005) demonstrates, these particular phenomena were not experienced by migrants and Indigenous populations because of the conditions of colonisation and migration laws. In turn, this means that strategies for responding to precarious employment markets will look vastly different when factors of migration and racism are closely attended to. Class analysis that overlooks these realities, therefore, centres youthful white experiences as the norm under the guise of a constructed landscape in which all youth are assumed to experience the world similarly (Idriss 2021).

We suggest it is valuable to consider an approach that centres the disruptive forces of migration, settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and which situates precarity and flexible working arrangements as occupying a much longer role in the organisation of society (Betti 2016). As Mitropolous (2005) illustrates, the idea that post-Fordism produces the enterprising self as a response to irregular work upholds and extends white hegemonic knowledge production. She argues:

the experience of regular, full-time, long-term employment which characterised the most visible, mediated aspects of Fordism is an exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned the smooth distinction between work and leisure for the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting of what was once contained as the Third World and the affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist, affective ‘humanisation’ and protectionism of what was always a small part of the Fordist working class.

The breadth of this colonial, capitalist and sexist context is taken seriously in other bodies of youth research, for example, in the literature on young women of colour adopting enterprising identities to navigate systemic racism, sexism and classism (Chatman 2015). Within this approach, it is not only that changes to employment markets and schooling necessitate that young people make active life choices. Rather, the structures of racism work to racialise young people in ways, which result in distinct patterns of work and specific ways that minoritised young people imagine working life. Other research has shown how some racialised young people seek out opportunities to be self-sufficient, relying on in-built niche ethnic markets (Idriss 2021) or utilise modes of strategic hybridity in mainstream employment settings (Chatman 2015). It is this dimension that remains overlooked in critiques of the ‘enterprising self’ in contemporary Australian youth studies.

The long-standing experiences of ethnic entrepreneurship in Australia, a phenomenon deeply entangled with the push and pull factors of migration, racism and transformation of gender roles in the diaspora, is altogether absent from contemporary research agendas within youth studies that explore the rise of entrepreneurship in a new world of work for young Australians. Instead, ethnic entrepreneurship and the working lives of young people of migrant minority backgrounds are segmented into parallel research agendas around inclusion, belonging and social cohesion, while altogether missing in critical youth studies analysis of broader economic and social changes to working life in a post-1970s Australian landscape (Idriss 2018). In failing to engage with such scholarship, common uses of ‘enterprising’ selfhood in Australian youth studies continue to centre the experiences of white working-class youth as the norm.

Mobilities

Along with enterprise, also nested within the concept of transitions in Australian youth studies is that of mobilities, a theme which has become central to how such contemporary transition regimes are theorised (Wyn 2018). Mobility has long been employed as a symbolic and material resource by young people to enable their transition to adulthood (Thomson and Taylor 2005). Yet within the current economic and social conditions, the links between young people’s life pathways and their own geographic mobility have altered and significantly intensified (Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018). It is now taken for granted that young people move more than previous generations, are expected to incorporate mobility options into their own life-making plans, and that mobility is to be pursued in order to secure better or different transition outcomes (Cairns 2014). In broaching this concept, we join existing critiques of the dominant representation of mobility in youth studies as well as migration studies as something which does not capture the emergence of more complex and less fixed routes towards adulthood, or indeed towards ‘settlement’ in a new country (Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018). Here, however, we turn more specifically to how particular usages of this concept in Australian youth studies continue to centre and reproduce the experiences of white/Anglo youth as the norm. As we will show, without explicitly interrogating the concept of mobilities in relation to settler colonialism and race, the very racialised processes that shape this knowledge production are obscured. This, in turn, reifies a particular form of mobility which is normalised under ‘youth transitions’.

While there are many in-roads to this argument, we make ours here via the domain of ‘rural youth’ and what has become a sub-theme within Northern youth studies. Mobilities is a term commonly deployed to discuss rural young people’s existential, material and economic relationships to ‘the urban’, and to emplace young people within an evolving urban-rural dynamic, which often positions them at a profound disadvantage (Jamieson 2000; Leyshon 2011; Farrugia 2014). In Australia, such research has usefully highlighted how the very concept of ‘transitions’ has been historically conceptualised at the expense of young people’s coming of age beyond the metropolitan centres. It has interrogated the complexities of the unequal geographic distribution of resources, capital and opportunities that compels many young people to seek education and work beyond the smaller context of regional and rural towns and cities, and has also examined methods by which such capital is accrued (Alston and Kent 2009; Cuervo and Wyn 2012; Farrugia 2014).

This research increasingly addresses the nuances and complexities of leaving and returning to rural areas among young people (Cuervo and Wyn 2012), but overall ‘mobilities’ has become something of an expectation in relation to rural youth experiences, as seen in the emphasis on ‘out-migration’ (Leyshon 2011) and a ‘mobility imperative’ (Farrugia 2016). These economic determinist concepts can take particular capitalist trajectories among young people and their transitions to adulthood for granted, wherein the complexities around leaving or staying are prioritised over the relationality of people and place (Cuervo and Wyn 2012). In deepening this critique here, we would ask, what happens when we also work with race and interrogate how the very concept of mobility has also been produced via settler colonial logics, and how we might contest it as one which privileges the experiences of some young people’s experiences over others? How can we critically address the fact that data collected in rural places in Australia is often drawn from primarily white young people, while this whiteness is unnamed, and scholarship reproduces this norm?

As Butler and Ben (2020) argue, citing the works of Ramzan, Pini, and Bryant (2009), Moreton-Robinson (2015), Carlson (2016) and others, Indigenous histories and mobilities are rarely discussed in analyses of the anonymous rural towns of Australian youth studies. Nor are subsequent ethnic and racial demographics and their complex migration histories. Indeed Australia’s racialising immigration regime shapes the very mobilities available to young people both in terms of who is permitted to enter the country, and the degrees of mobility young people may pursue within it (Robertson 2021). However, as we argue above, this is not to suggest that scholars merely ‘include’ youth from different ethnic backgrounds or migration histories. It has become common in youth studies to offer greater regard to include ‘others’ through the lens of diversity, and to demonstrate an increased awareness of the diversity of youth experience in Australia in the process. While it is vital to acknowledge and remedy exclusions, it is not enough to simply include ‘others’ without a hard look at what they are being included in, or how inclusion strategies can reproduce power relations in the study of youth (Idriss 2021), and within the theoretical canon itself that the theory is being produced within and against. As de Finney (2010, 481) argues in the settler state of Canada, racialised young people are typically investigated separately and then compared only to the dominant white group. This contributes to their diminution into policy silos that are anchored in a white normative figure of youth. This is what Moreton-Robinson (2020 [2000]) calls the inclusion of ‘difference’ within colonial constructions of personhood without grappling with the systems and power structures that produce this very difference as an analytical category. As such scholars contend, we need a closer interrogation of the ways different bodies of knowledge about youth and their conceptual apparatus can conceal, enable, reveal or challenge the ways these systems work to legitimise white colonial power.

In the context of youth rural mobilities research, this does not mean denying the complex circumstances that drive young people to seek and work to obtain the multiple sources of ‘urban’ capital as necessary to construct biographies, pathways and futures, as scholars have long argued. Rather, we propose more critical thinking about the settler colonial context within which we work and apply such concepts. The trope of raceless rural mobility sets up future scholars to expect certain findings, and to frame alternative data as ‘different’. Any such deviation, such as among families with compositions and expectations outside the white nuclear model, will inevitably become the racialised Other. This leaves little room to capture and reflect on identity resources and cultural capitals within rural places that centre around people, lifestyle, histories, intergenerational and familial relationships, memories and social expectations, and that may not encompass the city but in jest and conjecture (Butler 2018). It ignores the significant levels of intra-regional migration undertaken by Indigenous young people (Walter 2008). Without a more race-critical view, we cannot account for the surge in in-migration among young people from migrant and humanitarian backgrounds where economic revival and complex integrational relationships present other worlds not visible in a homogenous depiction of rural youth mobility (Butler 2020). Indeed, for others, the imperative of place-attachment, filial obligation and belonging via cultural identities rooted in place preclude any such notion of a mobility imperative as a primary driver (Ramzan, Pini, and Bryant 2009). It is this persistent absence of naming race and interrogating how racialisation processes are themselves a part of mobility experiences in Australia that works to re-inscribe whiteness and white normativity as the centre of such ‘rural youth’ experience.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have shown how a race interrogation of three core concepts of youth studies in the multicultural settler state of Australia can start to reveal and destabilise the white/Anglo normative figure of youth which, we argue, has become a trope for all young people in the field. Drawing on critical race and post-colonial theory, we have demonstrated how race operates within the origins and on-going use of transitions, the enterprising self and mobilities in Australian youth studies. We insist that without explicitly naming race and critically examining the processes of racialisation inherent within these concepts, their application can continue to centre and reproduce the experiences of white/Anglo youth as the norm and reproduce colonial and racialising logics of the white settler state. We have explored this Australian context where these concepts carry considerable currency and their deployment has significant racialising effects. This may be a result of the governmental technologies of youth that have historically shaped youth research in Australia, and the siloing of migration studies, youth studies and Indigenous studies, among other reasons. Future research could consider connections with how these concepts are used or unsettled in other places.

We have argued that scholars attend both to how race is operationalised in the theoretical and conceptual debates of Australian youth studies, and in the empirical task of making sense of the complex structural and social forces that shape the lives of young people from differently situated backgrounds and experiences. However, we have not advocated for the mere inclusion of ‘difference’ in such work. As we have shown across these three examples, it is not enough to merely recognise other alternative trajectories in contrast to these white normative models in play. Such an endeavour will inevitably produce ‘other’ youth in terms of difference; most commonly figured as deficit, pathology, risk and disadvantage (de Finney 2010; Moreton-Robinson 2020 [2000]). This cannot address the fundamental problem of why and how an idealised white/Anglo experience has been constituted as the unacknowledged measure within these three concepts of Australian youth studies. Rather, as critical race and post-colonial theorists have long discerned, we urge scholars in Australia to reckon with the settler colonial context, in both its contemporary and historical forms, within which such concepts have been developed and continue to be deployed. This involves excavating and making visible the whiteness at the core of the transitions, enterprising self and mobilities concepts in ways which would enable future research to disrupt the claims to normativity they make about some young people’s lives over others (Moreton-Robinson 2004b). Doing so requires that we attend to the settler colonial and racialising logics within such concepts and how they operate, and that we pay heed to their on-going racialising effects within Australian youth studies and its efforts to understand and represent young lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant Numbers DP170100180 and DE190100247].