This in-depth interview study explores how Arab-Palestinian adolescents in Israel utilize TikTok to navigate power and identity within their families. Situated within their context as a marginalized minority facing generational tensions and stereotypical media representation, the study theorizes the adolescent role as a 'digital-cultural broker' mediating between conflicting social worlds. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 adolescents (aged 14-17) and their parents, the analysis reveals four key domains of agency: wielding digital expertise as relational power; navigating family honour through 'digital code-switching' and audience segmentation; initiating communication as a form of emotional labour; and co-constructing authority through constant negotiation. The study concludes that TikTok is a critical site where youth perform agency, acting as a catalyst on pre-existing family dynamics. Social media facilitates the forging of a new parent-adolescent 'relational contract' defined by fluidity, negotiation and a youth-managed 'conditional transparency'. In this dynamic, teens act as essential digital-cultural brokers, co-creating a family structure adapted to their hybrid reality and moving beyond a legacy of passive media consumption. This highlights the sophisticated social work young people perform online to manage their complex lives.
This paper examines the meanings of being and becoming an Adivasi youth in present-day central India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bastar, it traces how 'youth' emerges as a social and political category, shaped by socioeconomic deprivation, educational mobility and unequal opportunities. Focusing on Adivasi youth aged 14-19, most of whom are first-generation school-goers who have moved from their villages to urban areas to attend government schools, the paper explores how schooling and hostel life reconfigure generational and class relationships, making the experience of youth simultaneously ambivalent, exhilarating and disorienting. Drawing on participant observation in schools and hostels, along with interviews and group discussions with 12 Adivasi youths, the analysis highlights how structural locations mediate their educational experiences, social relations and a sense of belonging. Employing the lens of a 'social shifter', the paper shows how meanings of youth vary across generational, classed and sociocultural contexts. By foregrounding the perspectives of Adivasi youth, the paper contributes to Adivasi studies and critical youth studies by advancing a relational and situated understanding of youth as a category anchored in lived experience and everyday social life in central India.
The current study aims to build on current understanding of common gambling features within online games and young people's motivations to engage with them, including loot box and gacha. These features mimic traditional gambling and are known to cause behavioural dependence, as well as financial, social psychological harms. We use qualitative interview data from young people aged 18-24 in Australia to describe their engagement with gambling features readily available through videogames that are targeted at children. We analysed the data thematically to answer the following questions: (1) What were the initial reasons for young adults to interact with gambling features in videogames? and (2) What keeps them engaged with gambling features in videogames? We found that initial reasons to engage with gambling features were largely social, as well as the desire to improve the gaming experience. The motivations to continue engaging with gambling features were strongly associated with social and psychological rewards, and to some extent financial rewards. The study findings outline the importance of protecting young people from harmful gaming features through better regulation, education and support that acknowledges the social, psychological and financial motivations and costs of engaging with gambling features in popular online games.
This paper examines how Participatory Infrastructuring (PI) can strengthen youth civic engagement by combining participatory methods with a relational and socio-material theoretical perspective. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and participatory workshops conducted with young people in Sydhavn, Copenhagen, where youths and local stakeholders co-designed initiatives to enhance local engagement. Through design games, mapping exercises and a summer camp, the research explores how temporary 'in-between infrastructures' enable young people to share experiences, build relations and imagine new ways of engaging with their community. The analysis shows that while these infrastructures can open opportunities for building participation, sustaining youth engagement requires continuous facilitation and recognition. The study contributes to youth studies by introducing Participatory Infrastructuring as both a methodological and analytical lens, making visible how participation is shaped by material, relational and institutional conditions. It argues that youth engagement is not only about including young people in existing systems, but about collectively building the infrastructures that make engagement possible. By foregrounding the importance of relational maintenance and facilitation, the paper offers new insights into how youth engagement can be supported as an ongoing, co-design process rather than a one-time event.
This article examines how visual participatory practices can be used to explore everyday sources of conflict in the lives of a group of young people in northern England. Drawing on feminist research that foregrounds care as a political concept, we apply a 'politics of care' (Bartos 2012) framework to explore how creative participation prompts debate about the ways in which conflict affects the lives of a group of care-experienced young people (aged 16-24). We employed a range of visual creative methods to examine notions of conflict initially but found that valuable knowledge about notions of care and belonging also surfaced in the 'emergent process' (Fairey 2018) of our weekly activities. We argue that embracing the messiness and flexibility of visual participatory research highlighted the participants' collaborative skills as caring civic subjects.
This study examines the evolution of Chinese youth subcultures within the broader socio-economic transformations since the 1978 Reform and Opening-Up. Drawing on a historical-sociological perspective, it proposes a five-phase framework that traces how youth subcultural forms have emerged, diversified, and transformed alongside China's modernization. (1) Enlightenment phase (Late 1970s - 1990s), marked by ideological questioning and identity exploration; (2) Pluralization and Consumption (1990s - early 2000s), defined by consumer-driven xiaozhi lifestyles and globalized tastes; (3) Networked Expression (mid-2000s - early 2010s), witnessed the rise of digital creativity in zhai, ACGN, and Shamate subcultures, enabled by early internet communities; (4) Platform-Dominated (2010s), where algorithmic logic and metrics such as traffic and popularity reshape cultural production; and (5) Reflection and Fatigue (2020s), characterized by post-COVID-19 economic stagnation, burnout, and low-desire lifestyles, expressed through neijuan and bailan attitudes. The five-phase model draws selectively on CCCS and post-subcultural perspectives, illustrating how resistance, adaptation, and fatigue intertwine as modes of youth agency. By tracing these shifting dynamics from ideological resistance to digital participation and emotional withdrawal - the model reveals how Chinese youth continuously reconfigure their subjectivities in response to evolving socio-economic and political conditions.
While collaborations between civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Global North and South have been explored, the focus has largely been on the power dynamics and added value in collaborations. Although youth-led CSOs (YLCSOs) in the Global South engage in collaborations with stakeholders, the nature of such collaborations remains under-researched. Drawing on the concepts of transcalar advocacy, collaboration and NGOisation and data from qualitative interviews gathered from 31 representatives of YLCSOs in nine African countries, this article shows that professionalisation associated with NGOisation creates unintended consequences for collaborations by perpetuating the exclusion of grassroots YLCSOs. This reinforces power inequities in decision-making processes with professionalised YLCSOs due to their control over critical resources. It is evident that lack of organisational capacity, low investments in sustainability and closing civic space affect effective collaborations by YLCSOs. Based on these findings, this article highlights the need for creating an enabling environment for the effective functioning of YLCSOs in Africa and their participation in the decision-making processes. The findings of this article contribute to the literature on CSO collaborations by providing key theoretical insights into how transcalar advocacy collaboration and NGOisation may explain the diverse and complex collaborations engaged by YLCOs in Africa at different scales and levels.
This article considers how young people's sense of belonging is shaped by their relationship with place. Our place of interest is English coastal towns. These are unique sites that often embody peripherality (geographical, social, economic, cultural and political), deprivation (individual- and area-level), transience (from tourism and temporary workers) and recent histories of economic decline. As we shall see, these features have eroded the built environment and social infrastructure of coastal places and, we argue, are weakening young coastal residents' sense of belonging to their towns. To make this argument, we draw on interview, workshop and visual data generated with 63 young people (aged 15-20) from two seaside towns in the East of England. These data highlight the lack of safe and youth-friendly spaces for leisure and social connectedness in some coastal towns. Feeling safe and accepted are two key dimensions of belonging. The absence, therefore, of safe and welcoming spaces undermines coastal youths' connectedness to their local area, contributing to their sense of marginalisation, and highlighting the need for investment in youth-friendly social infrastructure which supports belonging. Our findings draw on and contribute to existing work on youth belonging and place-based sociology of youth.
This study examines how Chinese state media reconstruct their symbolic power to define youth when the official ideology's constructed figure of 'struggling for the nation' is challenged by the discourse of 'lying flat'. Building on critical discourse analysis and theories of power and ideology, the research develops an analytical framework that connects micro-level textual constructions with macro-level ideological structures. It reveals discursive strategies-including suppression, selective neglect, and absorption-employed by state media to manage opposition, and identifies three recurring modes of argumentation: Moral-Critical, Social-Problem-Denying, and Problem-Solution-Oriented. Through these modes, the media neutralizes or displaces the resistant meanings of 'lying flat', thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of the dominant ideology. The study finds that these arguments share two core presuppositions: a 'state-meritocratic society' and an 'individual-state developmental teleology'. These presuppositions sacralize and moralize the nation while embedding youth within an imagined relationship with the state. By situating youth subjectivity within the context of China's party-state system, the research highlights the interplay between young people's self-identification and the ideological structure, offering a distinct Chinese perspective to global youth studies.
Despite the increased research into perceptions of gender equality and family life among young adults recently, few studies have compared young adults from Generation Z with earlier generations. This study examines perceptions of gender equality within families and attitudes toward family life among young adults in Israel, comparing Generations X, Y, and Z, and explores how these differences relate to religiosity and gender. The research merged four datasets of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) surveys from 1994, 2002, 2012, and 2022, with young adults aged 18-29 in each (n = 1,288). The findings reveal a differentiated, non-linear pattern of change. Young adults from Gen Z express more egalitarian views of maternal employment and dual-earner family models compared to Gen Y and Gen X, while attitudes toward post-nuclear family forms vary more strongly by religiosity. In particular, secular Gen Z-ers support post-nuclear family life significantly more than their religious peers and older secular cohorts. We highlight a generational differentiation in perceptions of gender roles and family life among young adults, in contrast with findings that emphasize Western-based Gen Z's progressiveness, indicating that some perceptions are increasingly polarized along religious lines.
Despite consistent evidence surrounding the inequalities experienced by disabled young people in early adulthood, youth transitions literature has paid insufficient attention to disability. While several studies have documented different types of structural and interactional stigma experienced by disabled young people in mainstream school settings, there is a lack of longitudinal research on experiences and consequences of stigma over time for this group. Bridging insights from critical disability studies and stigma literature, we argue that stigma is a useful yet overlooked conceptual tool for understanding disabled young people's educational transitions and trajectories. Drawing on data from two waves of a qualitative longitudinal study of disabled young people in England, we examine post-16 educational transitions of study members who experienced stigmatisation in mainstream school settings across childhood and adolescence. We find that earlier experiences of stigmatisation influence the educational pathways of disabled young people through suppression of educational attainment and choice to attend more accommodating post-16 educational settings. For some disabled young people, the removal of structural barriers previously experienced in mainstream school settings marks a fresh start of increased agency. However, findings also indicate processes of psycho-emotional disablism, with some study members rejecting accommodations and disability labels to avoid future stigmatisation.
This article examines how the figure of the maranza, a recurring and controversial character in Italian digital discourse, operates as a symbolic category through which youth, class and masculinity are negotiated. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, the term maranza circulates primarily as a stereotype attributed to others rather than as a self-claimed identity, functioning as a discursive label through which youth deviance, class excess and racialised otherness are condensed. Using a reflexive thematic analysis of Reddit threads and related digital materials, the paper explores how meanings associated with maranza emerge from everyday talk and online humour, functioning as a folk-devil figure that marks the boundaries of respectability, taste and belonging. The maranza is framed as a stigmatised embodiment of working-class masculinity, while the anti-maranza represents its symbolic opposite: a self-appointed guardian of order, taste and civic virtue. Together, these figures reveal how digital publics police identity and class through humour and moralisation. They illuminate how moral hierarchies and gendered distinctions are reproduced through everyday language, irony and affective performances of superiority.
Youth volunteering is often promoted to boost civic engagement. Yet concerns persist about social inequalities in access to and participation in volunteering activities, as well as the exact nature of these social differences. Besides formal volunteering, young people often participate in informal forms of volunteering, that is, they volunteer outside an organisational context, often for friends, family, or the community. Therefore, this study used survey data from Flanders (n = 1258) to study social differences among young informal, formal, and non-volunteers. We find that volunteering remains a prevalent activity among Flemish youth. But the levels vary depending on whether informal volunteering is included. Moreover, the operationalisation of the term 'volunteering' can lead to either overestimating or underestimating the proportion of socially disadvantaged groups among volunteers. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.
Young people growing up in the asylum system do so against a background of institutionalisation, precarity and socio-spatial exclusion. This paper explores how, in this context, asylum-seeker youth assert their place in the city and their right to belong, through everyday practices of inhabitation, including visibility and audibility. It draws on a small-scale ethnographic research project conducted with young asylum-seekers, exploring their identities and belongings through the lens of their music consumption practices. The research was conducted in the context of the young people's participation in an arts-based youth project in an art museum in Cork city, Ireland, involving participant observation and interviews with young participants and adult facilitators. During the research, one young participant described the art museum as 'home' - an unusual term to describe a beautiful but imposing building. We reflect on why this space might have felt like home. Drawing on concepts of home-in-migration, right to the city and thirdspace, we consider how the young participants inhabited the museum space and the wider city through the project, and in so doing, co-created a place of belonging and claimed their right to actively inhabit spaces that are at the centre of social and urban life.
At the transition from school to work, parental support plays a salient role in young people's educational and occupational orientation process (EOOP). However, there is still comparatively little knowledge about how parental involvement shapes adolescents' navigation through this process over time. This paper focuses on the school-to-work-transition of young people who describe their parents as being little involved in their EOOP. This group is particularly at risk and deserves specific attention. We analyse data from a five-year qualitative longitudinal study and employ a case history approach. Initial interviews were conducted with 14-year-old respondents at the end of compulsory schooling, with annual follow-up interviews. The results show that young people who describe their parents as being minimally involved in this transition are nevertheless capable of pursuing a satisfying career. However, low parental involvement can contribute to problematic developmental trajectories when combined with high parental expectations that are not matched by appropriate support. Therefore, low parental involvement is not necessarily connected to adverse outcomes in young people's school-to-work transition. Resources outside the family can make a substantial difference. Young people's agency and their flexibility in seising opportunities are also key factors in shaping their educational and occupational pathways.
