YOUNG

This article details the ways in which young people experiencing homelessness are managing their relationships. Beck’s individualization thesis is used to relate young people’s relationships to social structures and to discourses of homelessness, addressing a tendency in the literature to focus on micro social encounters at the expense of structural processes. Data from qualitative interviews with 20 young people experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia, are analyzed to describe the process of reflexive intersubjectivity as part of the active negotiation of structural inequality. This approach provides insight into the diversity of strat-egies used by young people experiencing homelessness. Three patterns of reflexive intersubjectivity are described: choosing independence, making family, and the process of making home. These are analyzed in terms of the way they reflect the struc-tural and discursive environment of youth homelessness. The article concludes with theoretical reflections on the relationship between homelessness, intersubjectivity and inequality.

The article examines whether parental migration is changing the dynamics of power within families. It is based on in-depth interviews with young people between 14 and 20 years who experience parental migration from Romania. It is argued that despite factors that may facilitate less authoritarian relations in transnational families, migration does not neutralize pre-existing power relations. In different stages of the migration cycle, different levels of authority and freedom occur. The article advises that parents’ migration is simultaneously empowering and burdensome for young people. It increases their ability to negotiate, but may also create discriminatory dynamics of roles among siblings.

This article analyzes the meaning of alcohol in relation to young people’s sexuality, with focus on acquaintance rape. Drinking is a way to stage oneself as mature; it is intentionally used by both male and female youth to make sexual pleasure possible. It is argued that in the context of sexuality among young people, there is a fine line between freedom and gender-specific restrictions. The research on acquaintance rape and alcohol drinking among the youth is traditionally dominated by the concept of risk. This article introduces the concept of chance, along with risk, to grasp the complexities of the grey zone situations of acquaintance rape among the youth. The risk of social stigma within the gender game increases with drinking alcohol simultaneously as the chances of expanding the limitations of gender roles also increase with drinking. These social stigmas, embedded in the gender roles, are central to understanding when a pleasurable situation turns into an acquaintance rape. The article is based on 95 police reports of rape and 37 focus groups on alcohol and sexuality of the Danish youth. The analysis takes it onset in a single case.

In this article, we look into student agency which challenges the existing structures and find that students assume such agency for a purpose: there is something they pursue instead of just resisting something. We raise some critical questions about the concept of resistance in educational thought based upon findings from two dif-ferent qualitative research projects: one in Arctic Finland; and the other in coastal Atlantic Canada. In our research contexts, we have found that students pursue re-storation as a means of self-regulation, relevant knowledge and trust in their own terms, and also pursue dialogue in which they are considered to be relevant actors. We conclude that the concept of resistance should only be used for intentional resistance, and that when there is such resistance, it should be considered to be a sign of seriously dysfunctional school environment which we conclude can best be addressed by place-sensitive, dialogical approaches to pedagogy and curriculum.

Whilst it is one thing to say disablism negatively impacts the lives and well-being of people with impairments, it is another altogether to tease out how this happens in everyday life. This article explores the potential of combining sociological theories and method with a psychosocial framework as an interdisciplinary approach to studying the transitional experiences of people with impairments. Using a single life history case study of Ella, a young woman with a severe physical impairment, it clearly illustrates that the impact of disablism on transition is contextual and mediated by a combination of socio-historical factors. It highlights, in particular, the constant tension between agency and structure—revealing that Ella’s levels of personal agency to challenge or undermine disablism varied from one social con-text to another and from one life phase to the next.