Bringing Together Forms of Collective Engagement in Youth Transitions

Abstract

Since the 1990s, individualisation theories have strongly influenced discussions about youth transitions. Faced with apprehending increased complexity, and how young people handle it, much scholarly research on transitions has thus depicted youth as ‘sole travellers’. This insight holds some truth for lives lived in neoliberalised, financialised capitalist societies – and the resulting uncertainty that is widely felt and documented among people in such societies. Bauman was surely right to notice that ‘uncertainty is a powerful individualising force’ today (2001: 24). This issue is pronounced in studies of precarity, itself a dominant theme in understanding how young people today navigate uncertain pathways towards adulthood (Biggart and Walther 2006, Côté 2002). For Beck, individuals work to find ‘biographic solutions to systemic contradictions’ (1992: 137, see also Beck and BeckGernsheim 2002, Bauman 2001). Further, developments of the individualisation thesis have fuelled a debate on the priority of agency versus structure in the study of youth and beyond (see for instance Brannen and Nilsen 2002 and 2005). This debate also encompasses arguments related to a possible misreading of the work by Ulrich Beck (Woodman 2009 plus Woodman 2010, Roberts 2010, 2012 and Threadgold 2011). Individualisation has pertained to both the risk associated with transitions as well as managing the risks themselves (Kelly and Furlong 2005: 212). In the last resort, the individual bears the risks. As a result, policy goals can also be individualistic in that ‘they place responsibility for seeking, gaining and maintaining employment on the individual’ (McDonald et al 2020: 449). However, we argue that there is more to this story. This set of approaches to individualisation, for all its necessity and acuity, is not conducive to engagement