A sociology of youth: Defining the field

This is an introduction to a virtual special issue, to view the papers in this collection please follow this link. The link for virtual issue is: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/jos/youth. All articles in this virtual special issue have been made free to access for six months following publication.

In 2020 the field of youth sociology is one of the most vibrant sections in The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and members of the TASA Youth Section are respected internationally for their leadership in the field. However, this is a relatively recent development. Interest in youth sociology, and its development as a critical and inclusive intellectual space within TASA has developed gradually over the last 20 years. This special issue looks into the archive to trace some key moments in the development of the field through the Journal of Sociology (which began in 1965 as the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology).

While articles on young people feature in the early issues of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology (ANZJS) from time to time, it is not until 1971 that there is recognition of a ‘field’ of youth sociology, of sorts. David Hickman’s article (1971), titled ‘Issues in the Interpretation of Adolescents in Society’ provides a comprehensive review of existing literature in the UK, the US and in Australia on the idea of adolescent cultures, subcultures and the significance of peer groups. Hickman sought to ‘make analytical distinctions which may be tools for future studies’, expressing dissatisfaction with contemporary studies which emphasised what he saw as stereotypes of ‘adolescent hedonism’, pitched against ‘adult conservatism’. While I have not featured this article in the special issue due to a need to be economical, it is worth reading as a documentation of the influence of adolescent psychology on thinking about youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Hickman presents a critical view of the standard and dominant psychological thinking about youth under the category of ‘adolescent’.

Articles on young people appear in the ANZJS fairly regularly over the next ten years, providing small snapshots of youth. For example, Smith (1975) reports on a participant observation study of a ‘delinquent group’ (mainly young men) in Brisbane, focusing on their relationship with the police. Millicent Poole (1975) published an article exploring the views of young Australians to migrants ‘Learning More about Migrants: Some Adolescent Views’ which, while revealing prejudice about migrants, also suggested that some groups of young people were more open-minded than older Australians. Omodei (1979) analyses ‘Delinquency in Girls in South Australia’, which raises questions about biases and prejudices in decision-making by authorities that criminalise sexual behaviour by girls. For the next twelve years however, there is little uptake, because, as for Hickman, there was no appetite to move beyond the a priori category of youth to frame age as a sociological process. It was not until 1983 that Carolyn Baker put a sociology of youth on the agenda.

The six articles featured in this special issue all seek to advance the field of youth sociology, and together they offer a chronological insight into key ideas and concepts that continue to drive the sociology of youth. Each is worth reading in detail, because all of them contain arguments for more productive research methodologies; for new research directions; and for conceptual frameworks that promote understanding of the complex and changing nature of youth and the diversity of young people’s lives. There are common themes discernible across several of the articles, including: the production and constitution of youth as a social process; the intersection of youth with the processes and social relations of age, class and gender; and the new conceptual tools required to meet the challenge of recognising the situation of young Indigenous people in Australia and in New Zealand.

Carolyn Baker’s (1983) article identifies youth as a form of social practice, that should be conceptualised, she argues, as a social relation, not an a priori category. Drawing on the contemporary controversy over the age of consent that raged in the early 1980s in New South Wales, Baker argues that analysis of competing adult discourses about youth should be part of a comprehensive sociology of youth. Her detailed analysis of submissions put forward to influence the debate about age of consent legislation reveals the assembly and description of ‘competent adulthood’, and of highly gendered conceptions of youth. Young women are invariably seen as needing protection: ‘vulnerable, exploitable and impregnable’. She argues that a comprehensive sociology of youth would include the study of how youth are constituted by adults in support of different conceptions of adult culture. In the case of the debate over the age of consent, she shows the intersecting processes of age and gender as social practices and as political method. Her article illustrates how age can be shifted as the ‘central axis’ for the study of youth, to a relational framework in which the intersections between the trinity of age, class and gender are understood. Importantly, Baker notes that young people were not invited to offer their views on the age of consent.

Ten years later, Gordon Tait’s (1993) article also explicitly sets out an agenda for a sociology of youth, with suggestions that align with those made by Baker, especially as he employs the empirical example of sexual conduct, referring to human sexuality education programs in secondary schools. He argues that the concept of youth is best understood as a form of governmentality involving the production of acceptable forms of self by young people. Human sexuality programs, Tait argues, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, invite young people to do ‘certain kinds of work on the self’ (fashioning a kind of habitus) that constitutes youth. Tait reflects on the tendency for sociologists to treat youth as a ‘stable, descriptive classification’ despite awareness that the concept of youth is ‘both piecemeal and historically contingent’. Drawing on the example of youth subcultural theories, Tait notes the tendency to reproduce the binaries of ‘domination versus subordination, resistance versus conformity and young versus old’, creating normative categories. He argues that youth is constructed – as an object of knowledge – at the intersection of ‘problematisations’ such as sexual conduct.

In 1995, Judith Bessant takes up the tricky but central relationship between youth and class. Her article, focusing on the ‘discovery’ of a juvenile underclass, is important because it asks youth sociologists to be critical about the use of taken-for-granted categories, and to take account of ‘what is out there’. Bessant, like Baker and Tait, is interested in the production of youth through ‘agencies of governance’. Bessant locates the sociology of youth within wider debates about class and her analysis of the use of neoliberal ideology to represent the failure of the economy to provide enough jobs for young people as the responsibility of the poor sounds quite contemporary. She argues that at the intersection of youth and poverty is a willingness on the side of both the political left and right to ‘blame the victim’ and, in ‘discovering’ the existence of an underclass, to ‘see the poor and the adolescent-as-delinquent’ become the repository of collective fears.

I have included the 2011 article by Andy Furlong, Dan Woodman and myself in the collection because it also explicitly addresses debates in the sociology of youth, seeking to identify approaches that will move beyond the disjuncture between cultural and subcultural studies of young people and transitions approaches. This article alludes to the decades of youth sociology from the 1990s through to 2011, during which, against the backdrop of neoliberal policies that Bessant refers to, the failing nexus between education and work fuelled an interest in youth transitions. At the same time, the field of youth cultural and subcultural studies highlighted the diversity of young people’s expression and the changing nature of cultural identifications. This article argues that research that taps into and recognises young people’s subjective understandings and expressions of their situation is important. Furlong et al., argue that acknowledging young people’s subjectivities enables the synergies between cultural and youth transitions approaches to be mobilised. The authors suggest that the use of a social generations framework provides a mechanism for drawing on these synergies, recognising the complex and intersecting processes of social change and continuity.

In 2018, Alan France, Steve Roberts and Bronwyn Wood addressed many of the themes presented in the previous papers. Their article explicitly addresses the question of a research agenda for ‘the Antipodes’. Social class is at the centre of their analysis, and earlier concerns that an uncritical focus on young disadvantaged people alone can obscure the processes that create poverty. Their analysis of young people in New Zealand and Australia, drawing on the insights of Bourdieu, highlight the continuities across time in the operation of privilege. They set out a ‘new’ agenda (revisiting the earlier focus on youth and social class), to focus on class relations, on ways of measuring class relations and on the intersections between class and Indigenous populations in both countries. They argue for a youth sociology that does not shy away from researching the ‘invisible’ actions of the privileged.

Lilly Brown, in her 2019 article outlines a distinctive and urgent agenda for the sociology of youth within TASA: the situation of Indigenous young people. Her analysis of young Indigenous Australians reveals the ongoing, daily process of colonialism in the dismissal of young Indigenous people’s histories, knowledge and perspectives. Brown argues that ‘the gap’ between Indigenous young people’s educational achievement and their non-Indigenous peers is not amenable to being ‘closed’ as long as educational curricula fail to acknowledge the past as Indigenous young people know it to be. Drawing on the insights of colonial-settler theorists, Brown raises important methodological and ethical questions about conceptions of Indigenous youth. Drawing on the insights of peace scholar Johan Galtung, Brown argues that the insistence on obscuring the violence of the past and its relationship to the ‘essence of the Australian nation’ inhibits a nuanced and appropriate way of creating a generative learning space for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners, and allows structural inequality and violence to be perpetuated.