There is currently much discourse about generations in the public sphere. A sequence of letters conflates generations and age cohorts born in the last few decades (generation “X”, “Y” or “Z”) as well as multiple categories are used to describe today’s young people as a generation that is distinct from its predecessors. Despite the popularity of generational labels in media, politics, or even academia, the use of generation as a conceptual tool in youth studies has been controversial. This Special Issue allows readers to better understand the key issues regarding the use of generation as a theoretical concept and/or as a social category in the field of youth studies, shedding light on the controversies, trends, and cautions that go through it.

Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions is a close examination of the lives of marginalized young people in schools. Essays by scholars and educators provide international insights grounded in educational and community practice and policy. They cover the range and intersections of marginalization: poverty, Aboriginal cultures, immigrants and newcomers, gay/lesbian youth, rural—urban divides, mental health, and so forth. Presenting challenges faced by marginalized youth alongside initiatives for mitigating their impact, the contributors critique existing systems and engage in a dialogue about where to go from here. Youth poetry, prose, and visual art complement the essays.

This book explores and celebrates imaginative and creative approaches to youth research, showcasing a wide range of innovative methods including music elicitation, mental mapping, blog analysis and mobile methods.

This book explores the everyday ways in which time marks the experience of education as well as the concerns and methods of education and youth research. It asks: what do we notice afresh and what comes into sharper view when temporality becomes a focal point? What theories and ways of seeing offer new angles onto temporality in interaction with space and place? In responding to these questions, the book engages with approaches from sociology, history, and cultural and policy studies. It brings critical attention to the movement and layers of time in the memories, aspirations and orientations of educational actors – across lives, generations and diverse places. Informed by the politics of local/global relations and new transnational formations, the chapters feature case studies located in Australia, the UK, India, South Africa, the Philippines and Finland. Topics examined include processes of social and educational differentiation in disruptive times, affective practices, intergenerational dynamics, collective memory, archiving, mobilities and migration, school spaces and difficult histories. The authors grapple with what is involved methodologically in interrogating the times and places of education – including the construction of educational ideas, problems and policy solutions – and in historicising the time and places from which we research, write and work.

Youth, Education, and Islamic Radicalism offers groundbreaking analysis of religious intolerance and radicalization among high school and university students in modern-day Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the most diverse countries in the world in terms of religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, but also in the complexity of its education system. Youth, Education, and Islamic Radicalism examines the roots of religious intolerance among young Indonesians and explores the various ways in which educated youth navigate radical ideologies amid growing religious conservatism. The book presents nuanced explanations as to why one person becomes radicalized while another does not, calling into question the common assumption that religious radicalism is directly connected to terrorism. It problematizes the notion that the university is a significant hub, trigger, or birthplace of radicalization by asking: What makes education attractive for extremist recruitment? What shapes students’ views? Under what circumstances do radicalization and deradicalization processes of educated youth take place? Youth, Education, and Islamic Radicalism identifies a constellation of factors that shape young people’s views of religious diversity in Indonesia, demonstrating the ways in which they become radicalized in the first place, and how, in some cases, they deradicalize themselves.

The school-to-work transition is a critical part of the human life-span for young adults, their families, and society. The timing of the transition varies greatly and its co-occurrence with a number of other life transitions make it challenging to summarize or generalize. Individual differences and normative developmental factors, as well as external contextual factors such as global pandemics, changing economic circumstances, workplace demands, and cultural shifts, intersect to create a range of challenges and opportunities for those navigating this transition. Written by internationally renowned scholars in developmental psychology, applied psychology, counseling, and sociology, the chapters in this book highlight the trends, issues, and actions that researchers, academics, practitioners, and policy makers need to consider in order to effectively support young adults' transition to work pathways. This volume provides an explicitly international perspective on this area, broad coverage of psychological topics on the school-to-work transition, and an inclusive focus on sub-groups and minority groups, making it a must-read for those who support young adults as they move from school to work.

Increasingly youth practitioners need to be able to develop, review and evidence their work using a variety of research and assessment tools. This text equips students and practitioners with a thorough understanding of research design, practice and dissemination, as well as approaches to evidence-based practice.

This title was first published in 2002: Loosely divided into two sections, this book's first part includes chapters which explore young people's identities and youth cultures in relation to issues such as drug use, education and dance music. In various ways, the authors examine whether there is a need to rethink the existing theories and concepts which have informed the study of youth cultures and identities. The second part to the volume is concerned with how young people experience "transtitions", in relation to such topics as employment, sexuality, and household formation. The chapters also raise theoretical questions on the usefulness of the transition concept in late modernity, illustrating how the reshaping of key institutions in late modernity has had a profound effect on the sorts of transitions young people make today. In addressing such issues the authors examine the potential contribution that concepts around risk and risk society and new Third Way social policy initiatives can have to contemporary youth studies.

Though they tend to get less attention than other disadvantaged groups, huge numbers of young people today in Britain are marginalized, experiencing isolation, social hardship, gender and ethnic discrimination, and overall social stigma--a situation that has been exacerbated by the combination of austerity measures and a weak job market that has all too often cut young people off from support and employment. This book sets that marginalization in the broader context of austerity, poverty, and inequality to show both recent changes and long-term continuity in the position of young people, with a special emphasis on the voice of youth and the forms of resistance they adopt.