Socially Disadvantaged Youth: Forms of Expression and Communication in Social Networks as a Vehicle of Inclusion

Socially disadvantaged youth are a group to which prejudices are attached which question the appropriateness of their participation, communication and language in the digital setting. From this perspective, the aim of the present research proposes to identify the forms and expressions of communication used by socially disadvantaged young people from the city of Madrid in social networks. This will be examined as a tool for the development of interpersonal and social relatedness processes, which will enable inclusion and socialisation in contemporary society. To this end, a qualitative approach was proposed which enabled a set of core memos, codes, networks and categories to be established, through which study data were interpreted. WhatsApp images and interviews conducted with 78 informants were analysed using Atlas.ti 9 software. All participants belonged to a social group characterised by circumstances of social vulnerability. Of the main findings, it should be indicated that these young people exhibit a social network use that is not limited to engagement in digital leisure but, instead, is based on the exchange of communication. For this reason, these individuals have developed their own language, a fact that highlights specific traits of the digital culture to which they belong and contributes to disproving the idea that these young people use the digital setting inappropriately.

Arrested Friendships? Justice Involvement and Interpersonal Exclusion among Rural Youth

Objectives: We examine the impacts of adolescent arrest on friendship networks. In particular, we extend labeling theory by testing hypotheses for three potential mechanisms of interpersonal exclusion related to the stigma of arrest: rejection, withdrawal, and homophily. Method: We use longitudinal data on 48 peer networks from PROSPER, a study of rural youth followed through middle and high school. We test our hypotheses using stochastic actor–based models. Results: Our findings suggest that arrested youth are less likely to receive friendship ties from school peers and are also less likely to extend them. Moreover, these negative associations are attenuated by higher levels of risky behaviors among peers, suggesting that results are driven by exclusion from normative rather than nonnormative friendships. We find evidence of homophily on arrest but it appears to be driven by other selection mechanisms rather than a direct preference for similarity on arrest. Conclusions: Overall, our findings speak to how an arrest may foster social exclusion in rural schools, thereby limiting social capital for already disadvantaged youth.

Measuring and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Active Citizenship Education Programmes to Support Disadvantaged Youth

The current Special Issue has been inspired by the Seventh Annual Conference on Citizenship Education that was held in Roehampton University London, on 26–27 September 2019 [...]

Barriers to Ambition across Class, Race, Ethnicity, and National Origin

This chapter examines barriers to ambition based on class, race, ethnicity, and national origin. It notes that many nations do a better job in delivering on the American Dream than America does. The United States has lower rates of intergenerational mobility than other comparable countries. The public radically underestimates barriers to ambition based on race, class, and ethnicity and the resource disparities in families, schools, and support structures that hobble disadvantaged youth. Americans also fail to address the racial barriers and biases that persist across class. Children of some recent immigrant groups are an exception to these patterns and have higher ambitions and achievements than children of similar backgrounds with American-born parents. But those advantages fade with each generation, and even members of “model minorities” confront disabling stereotypes and marginalization. Society pays a substantial price for the failure to address these inequalities, and the chapter closes with key reform priorities.

Preventing Youth Homelessness through Social Procurement in Construction: A Capability Empowerment Approach

Homelessness is a serious and growing problem in the UK, exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. The latest figures estimate that 160,000 households are at risk of the worst forms of homelessness. Employment is widely recognised as being critical to reducing homelessness, yet there has been no research into the role that the construction industry, as a major UK employer, can play in reducing this problem. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in knowledge and contribute to the emerging social procurement debate in construction by exploring the role that construction employment can play in reducing the risk of homelessness. Mobilising Sen’s and Nussbaum’s capabilities empowerment approach, an in-depth case study is presented of a construction employment program in Wales, UK, which was aimed at supporting young people who had experienced or who were at risk of homelessness. Contributing to the emerging social value and social procurement debate in construction and drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with young people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness who went through the program, findings indicate that these young people became empowered in ways which reduced their risk of homelessness. It is concluded that the capabilities empowerment framework is valuable in explaining how employment in the construction industry can reduce the risks of homelessness for disadvantaged youth with a care-experienced background or who were known to the criminal justice system.

Duality of Humans: The Wish to Learn and Not to Learn

The segregated nature of education for the Hungarian Roma has been well-documented. Solutions to overcoming this segregation are often focusing on adding education interventions tailored to Roma youth. We argue that although education can be empowering, it can also be used as a tool to maintain the status quo. Education is dualistic and paradoxical in that it can both empower and enslave. In this chapter we use a philosophical lens to examine how the dualistic nature of education and humans can cause impediments to equal access to quality education for the Hungarian Roma. We identify some of the real obstacles to providing education to Hungarian Roma and disadvantaged youth, outline the philosophical underpinnings of these obstacles, and propose potential solutions. We use a school that has had success in providing educational tools for Roma and disadvantaged youth, MÁV School in Budapest, as a model to explain both the paradoxes and the solutions to overcome these paradoxes. Our goal is to provide insight into the educational situation for the Hungarian Roma and to make space for the reader to implement different attitudes and strategies to succeed in creating a sustainable model of education for Roma and other marginalized youth.