Our member, Prof. Judith Bessant (RMIT University, Australia), along with her co-editors, Prof. Philippa Collin (Western Sydney University, Australia) and Dr. Patrick O’Keeffe (RMIT University, Australia), talk about their edited collection, Research Handbook on the Sociology of Youth (Edward Elgar, 2024).
The Research Handbook for the Sociology of Youth is an invitation to explore and think freshly about the diverse and ever-changing fields that make up what is variously called the Sociology of Youth and-or Youth Studies. The book has 27 chapters presenting research on significant issues like politics, justice, work and livelihoods, wellbeing and health, disruptions (such as technology, climate change, and mass migration and the refugee crisis), and the ethics and modalities of research and knowledge production.
Significantly, young people directly contributed to the book as authors or co-authors of chapters, as co-researchers, while seven young people wrote commentaries. Those young commentators were asked to reflect on research they had done or they had found helpful, and to point to areas they thought needed further work. This feature of the handbook owes much to the recognition that young people have long been, and often continue to be, the ‘objects’ of various research enterprises.
Importantly, all the chapters and commentaries don’t just report on ‘what is happening out there.’ Instead, they offer significant insights and ask what researchers, policy makers, business, community and young people themselves can do to address some of the significant issues that are shaping the experience of being young in our time.
We saw this edited collection as an invitation to join with colleagues and young people to reflect on the ways the sociology of youth has changed over the last few decades. As researchers and advocates who have worked with young people, we were inspired to create a book that asked how the big challenges of our time are shaping young lives – and what we, collectively, can do to respond.
Ours is a time marked by seismic political, socio-economic, technological and ecological disruptions, to which young people are subject, and in relation to which they are important actors. They are variously dealing with such problems as global warming, carbon capitalism, neoliberal politics, colonialism, growing inequality, persistent anti-democratic and authoritarian movements, and racism and gender politics. We wanted to highlight some of the things young people are telling us about what needs to change.
We wanted to create a space for international – and intergenerational – dialogue with, and about, young people and their experiences. One of the wonderful things about edited collections is that they can bring together many voices to explore many aspects of and approaches to a particular phenomenon. We knew that one collection wouldn’t be able to ‘do it all,’ but we did want to bring together a group of people – young and old – that would challenge thinking, prompt new ideas and debates, and reveal areas where much more work is needed.
In the last few decades, the Sociology of Youth has grown in exciting and important ways, partly in response to a confluence of ecological, economic, social and political disruptions impinging on young people’s lives. Not surprisingly, young people have responded by mobilizing significant social movements committed to challenging inequality, state violence, various forms of discrimination, and climate change.
This Handbook on the Sociology of Youth brings together new research and young people’s perspectives to the fore as we struggle across the planet to respond to intersecting crises and make a better world. The Handbook draws on the work of dozens of people, to help paint vivid and complex pictures that help to untangle and provide insights into how young people across the globe are experiencing life, acting in and shaping the world. .
The Handbook was also a great opportunity to work collaboratively, to encourage relative ‘new-comers’ to the field to work alongside more established writers and researchers, teachers and advocates.
As editors we were committed to having contributors from both the Global South and the Global North. The book has contributions from over 50 authors, from every continent and from countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Chile, Canada, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Ukraine, the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and other places.
Authors also wrote from a diverse range of perspectives, experiences and sites. As editors we invited people working or studying in universities from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives as well as people working in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community agencies and young people.
We sought to traversed a range of topics and theoretical positions and methods that fall under the umbrella of what has come to be called the ‘Sociology of Youth’. There are of course, topics that this book has not addressed, a failing mostly to do with the practical constraints of one volume. While acknowledging this limitation, we nonetheless hope the Handbook serves as a catalyst for further inquiry, new questions and dialogue in the Sociology of Youth.
The experience of designing and editing this book was rich and rewarding: it gave us insights into some of the new work now being done; and, importantly, it provided opportunities to think about and reflect on the Sociology of Youth as a field. It was an exercise that also raised basic questions like: What is the Sociology of Youth? How should we answer such a question?
The Handbook dispels the idea that the Sociology of Youth is – or should be – a coherent, neatly bounded field of inquiry characterised by consensus about its identity. This book foregrounds the diversity and debates between advocates of different kinds of ‘empirical’, theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political practices in this field of study.
We recognize how sociologists have described Sociology over the years reveal the diversity of intellectual traditions or modes of inquiry. Not surprisingly, the Sociology of Youth displays the same complexity. With that in mind we also consider some of the typological and analytic attempts to establish what Sociology refers to and the pay attention to how the Sociology of Youth, in all its diversity, has often been a tributary that flows from that mother discipline.
We also argue that Bourdieu’s work on reflexivity is an important ethical exercise that can help secure a conceptually rigorous, analytically coherent way of thinking about and doing Sociology and the Sociology of Youth. We recognize the value of asking how our positions grounded in relations shapes our understanding and experience of the world, of class, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality and so on.
This kind of reflexivity also requires us to think about our relations with other humans, as well as non-human life forms and abiotic entities all of which make up the ecosystems in which we live. This also entails researchers thinking about how we are enabled or constrained by our positions in multiple relationships in the making of knowledge and claims, while also being mindful of the flow of power and how it is exercised. This is what we attempted to do in this handbook.