Fresh Understandings and Challenges for Youth Studies Research

After 3 years, this is our last issue as Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Youth Studies (JAYS). We want to take this opportunity to make some reflections of the journey that JAYS has undergone in this time.

Since 2020, we have published 14 issues, 74 research articles, and 14 book review articles. We have received submissions from every corner of the world, and we have published the work of household names in youth studies scholarship, such as Carles Feixa, Ken Roberts, Judith Bessant, Johanna Wyn, Sharlene Swartz, Lucas Walsh, Ana Miranda, and Airi-Alina Allaste, to name a few. But we are as proud to have been a publishing outlet for several early career and postgraduate researchers and scholars from the Global South and non-English speaking countries. Such scholars sometimes can face additional challenges to place their fine research work in journals that are dominated by giant publishing companies in the Global North and by the English language as the medium and gatekeeper of academic communication. In that vein, 43% of our published research articles were authored by early career and postgraduate researchers. And 29% of research articles came from researchers working in higher education institutions located in the Global South (e.g. Nepal, Mexico, South Africa, India, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Peru, China, and Nigeria). This broad-reaching production of high standard scholarship has provided us with the unique possibility to learn more about the state of youth studies research and the lives of young people around the world, rather than a youth studies derived almost entirely from the Global North.

Contributors to JAYS have enabled us to gain a vantage point from which to view global youth research. In the journal’s pages, authors reaffirmed the relevance of some of the major theoretical and empirical themes in the field. For example, traditional debates around transitions (Andres & Wyn 2010; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Roberts 2003), including the problematic of NEET and the relationship between youth and the state (Furlong 2006; Mizen 2004; Roberts 2011); ideas and practices of belonging (Habib and Ward 2019; Harris et al. 2021; Wood and Black 2018); youth citizenship and participation (Black et al. 2011; Chevalier 2016; Wood 2014); issues of wellbeing (Hanckel 2016; Hendry 2020; Wright and McLeod 2014); young people’s representations of the future (Cook 2016; Honwana 2012; Leccardi 2005); and the relevance of decentring the metrocentric perspectives (Cuervo 2014; Farrugia 2016); and Eurocentric approaches (Cuervo and Miranda 2019; Swartz 2022) entrenched in youth sociology were discussed in the journal.

Many of these debates have been enriched and expanded in JAYS through, for example, the treatment of the challenges faced by youth in situation of NEET, including their invisibility to public policies (Assmann and Broschinski 2021; Vieira et al. 2021). In this case, researchers pointed out at the homogenisation that the category of NEET produces on youth in this context, where heterogenous transitions and situations are represented as a common experience. Further, colleagues have extended discussions around youth citizenship and participation by placing the emphasis on the role of new media on youth engagement (Chen and Stilinovic 2020), by looking at everyday practices that shape youth wellbeing (Fu and Li 2022), and by generating new debates around which should be the age limit for young people to have a say in electoral matters that affect their present and future (Bessant 2020). Scholars also took to the task of opening dialogues around youth work and youth workers practices, as a way of engaging with those at the forefront of supporting those most vulnerable in society. We were fortunate to receive articles conceptualising the intersection of Derrida’s theorisation of the gift as a deconstruction of youth work practices (Gee 2020), as well as an analysis the experiences of those undertaking a degree on youth work at higher education institution and how these experiences might impact on those intended to receive their expert support (Tallon et al. 2022).

Scholars contributing to JAYS also reaffirm the unstoppable trend to render visible the lives of others. In this case, youth lives constructed in rural spaces and in the Global South received significant attention in the journal. For example, place was intersected with gender to highlight the challenges and influences imposed by parents on young women in rural Nepal in their transitions to metropolitan areas in the search of constructing futures (Basnet 2022). Similarly, other colleagues concentrated on the intersection of regional places and gender to discuss how vulnerability can be a precondition for resistance and agency in young women’s lives (te Riele and Shelley 2021). Two important contributions sought to provide theoretical and policy guidelines to map the construction of research and debate agendas from the Global South that could help to redress the Eurocentric approach to youth sociology (see Miranda and Alfredo 2022; Swartz 2022).

While it is impossible to encapsulate the variety of debates and agendas that circulate in the 74 research articles published under our tenure in JAYS, it is obviously important to bring to the fore how COVID-19 shape the scholarly work produced in the field and represented in JAYS. Our work in the journal started just a few months before the pandemic came to alter global lives. There has been a variety of analyses on the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of young people—some of these have been played out in JAYS. For example, using intersectionality as a method and an analytical tool, Couch et al. (2021) explored how young people of refugee background in Australia support their families and communities through public health promotion, volunteering, and innovation. Woodrow and Moore (2021) showed how the close of the “night-time economies” during the pandemic in Great Britain, impacted on the leisure of intersectionally disadvantaged young people who were subject to criminalisation, exclusion, and stigmatisation. Finally, in a powerful analysis, O’Keeffe (2022) revealed how young people in Melbourne, Australia, who experienced 262 days in lockdown, challenged adult and official (e.g. council) interpretations of the public space by building DIY dirt jumps across the city. This unstructured construction of public space brought to sharp relief youth agency and participation on issues that matter to their lives.

And there is more to come. The aspects of youth requiring further research are only growing as the world emerges from the pandemic. From health to education, social media to the economy, the world young people are growing up in has accelerated in social change in many different directions. A concerted body of research is needed to explore, analyse, and explain what it means to be young in this world of change.

Some new areas requiring extensive research include:

• The acceleration of time—Harmut Rosa (2014) suggests that changes to the temporal structure of society profoundly influencing modern life. The acceleration of technology, social change, and the pace of life have significant impacts on relationships and how we experience the world—how is this shaping young people’s lives and futures?

• Growing levels of material poverty and struggle for basic goods (fuel, food, and power) are a new phenomenon if the Global North—what can be learnt from youth in the Global South (Swartz 2022) and how will this shape the long-term futures of all youth?

• The pandemic has accelerated educational change and greatly exacerbated inequalities between children of low- and high-income families. Some reports estimate that on average, students globally are 8 months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic, but the impact varies widely, with countries some countries as little as 4 months behind, while others, are 15 months behind (McKinsey Education Practice 2022). Inequalities have also grown in all school systems—for examples Black children in the USA have fallen much further behind in reading and writing than White children. Previously about 50% of the world’s children “learning poor” were unlikely to meet basic literacy and numeracy levels—now a conservative estimate is that 10% more will join that group.

• Young people’s own feelings about the future in times when uncertainty has taken on global proportions. Some researchers note that young people tend to be more optimistic about the future than older people, even in the face of crises such as a global pandemic, but they also highlight the need for a deeper analysis of the role of hope in young people’s lives (see Keating and Melis 2022).

These aspects of social change have very significant implications for young people and many new areas of research and innovation will emerge in response which we hope to see in future issues of JAYS.

To conclude we want to thank the Springer team that has been supporting us in this new endeavour of providing a new outlet to the burgeoning youth research field. In particular we would like to thank Carola Vermeeren, who with dexterity steered the journal to a brilliant launch in the first year, and to Katerina Kalamari, who currently efficiently help us in the production and assemblage of articles and issues. A big thank you to Earl Ritfeld and Catherine Murphy who have so brilliantly supported us and authors in the whole submission and publication process in the past 2 years. And a special thank you to Lawrence Liu who has all along encouraged and supported our ideas in this journey. Thank you to our editorial board and a special thank you to the many reviewers that gifted their time, creativity, and labour to this journal and the youth studies field. We are sure the new editors will continue, and exceed, our project of carving a new space of research, intellectual exchange, and fruitful debate in this rich space that is youth studies research.