The Role of Religion in Young Muslims’ and Christians’ Self-presentation on Social Media

This article examines how young Muslims and Christians with ethnic minority backgrounds in Oslo reflect on their use of social media as a way to present themselves and their religiosity. The study draws upon Arlie Hochschild’s concepts of feeling rules and emotional labour and Erving Goffman’s typology of frontstage and backstage behaviour to analyse how young Muslims and Christian informants present themselves on social media. For minority groups, these strategies can be used to negotiate religion and create a different image. This study shows that both Christian and Muslim youth with minority backgrounds use different strategies to present their religiosity. Even though all the informants want to portray themselves as religious, they carefully consider what type of religious content they share to avoid social exclusion, conflict and religious discussions.

Radically Ordinary Lives: Young Rural Stayers and the Ingredients of the Good Life in Finnish Lapland

This article focuses on young people who, despite the general tendency towards youth outmigration in rural areas, have decided to stay in their home town. We explore the agency of young, conscious stayers, as well as the process of staying in the northern Finnish town of Kemijärvi. The stayers’ values and perceptions of the constituents of a good life could be taken as an alternative to the prevailing Western ideal that emphasizes mobility and ambitious educational and career plans, and is, in part, driving young people to leave their rural hometowns. The stayers in this study are active participants in their own fate and are content with their choice of staying. Applying ethnographic methods, we undertake to learn what rural stayers consider the building blocks of a good life in a small-town setting, one offering comparatively limited options in terms of jobs, education and leisure activities.

Book Review: V. Cuzzocrea, B. G. Bello, & Y. Kazepov (eds.) (2020). Italian Youth in International Context: Belonging, Constraints and Opportunities

V. Cuzzocrea, B. G. Bello, & Y. Kazepov (eds.) (2020). Italian Youth in International Context: Belonging, Constraints and Opportunities. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. xiii + 244 pp., £120 (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-138-48857-1.

‘Democracy and Active Citizenship Are Not Just About the Elections’: Youth Civic and Political Participation During and Beyond Singapore’s Nine-day Pandemic Election (GE2020)

Youths have responded to the unprecedented socio-economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic through civic and political participation. However, knowledge gaps exist with documenting specific motivations and forms involved in participation, as well as the implications for subsequent engagement. Using public podcast episodes produced by the author during Singapore’s nine-day election campaign held under lockdown, youth perspectives were analysed thematically to understand youth motivations, participation forms and how participation shapes future sociopolitical engagement. Findings suggest that Singaporean youth were motivated to build awareness and activism and take action between elections and during GE2020. Youth participation was a mix of conventional and non-conventional activities with seamless digital transitions. That any form of participation during the election resulted in youth resolve to continue or expand their engagement beyond GE2020, with awareness and activism and action perceived as mutually reinforcing motivations, has implications for future political behaviours and activities and issues in which youth are engaged.

Outsiders Looking in. The Re-enrolment Struggles of Early School Leavers in Norway

Despite a vast literature on the causes and consequences of leaving school prematurely, little scholarly and policy attention has been paid to those who re-enter education after a temporary withdrawal. Re-enrolment is often portrayed in the literature as an active act of agency requiring inner drive. Based on 18 interviews with young early school leavers and re-enrolees in Norway, we construct two empirically founded re-enrolment narratives: ‘opposing otherness through dreams of ordinariness’ and ‘accepting the rules of the game—re-enrolment as a fragile opportunity’. Although embracing and reproducing the discourse about educational credentials as being the key to a happy life, the narratives do not support the idea of a re-enrolment drive as being vital to succeed within educational institutions. While they aspire for normality and believe normality is achieved through educational credentials, they are in need of a support system that either accommodates their individual needs, or nudges them back ‘on right track’.

‘A Couple of These Videos Is All You Really Needed to Get Pumped to Skate’: Subcultural Media, Nostalgia and Re-Viewing 1990s Skate Media on YouTube

The reappearance of VHS skateboarding movies produced during the 1990s on YouTube presents a timely opportunity to examine how the subcultural identities of former skateboarders are reassessed in later life. Drawing on subcultural studies and theories of mediated memory, this article analyses comments made by viewers of YouTube re-postings of 411 Video Magazine, an era-defining skateboard movie series of the 1990s. The analysis suggests that re-viewing content of once cherished VHS tapes affords former skaters a nostalgic moment of reconnection with their youth involving a combination of three forms of nostalgia: subcultural nostalgia, biographical nostalgia, and format nostalgia. For many viewers, re-viewing skate videos retrospectively recognizes the formative role skateboarding played in shaping their identity and also allows an appraisal of both the past subcultural formation and the media format through which its values were expressed and communicated.

On the Pathway to an Unforeseeable Future: An Actantial Analysis of Career Designs of Young People

The process of life design in contemporary adolescence is of increasing interest in times of lifelong learning and the knowledge society. The aim of this article was to increase the comprehension of career designs by analysing the two-phase interviews of 31 young people at the ages of 15 and 18. Drawing on actantial analysis, we modelled the plurality of the career designs, analysed who the main actors are in those career designs, and how young people express, exercise, and adjust their designs. We conclude that both the subjects and the objects of the young people’s career designs included multiple actors. People, issues, and circumstances are integral components of the narratives on the career designs of young people. These components bound their agency and are integrated with their orientations to education and work.

The Jack-Roller and the Life History Method: Notes on the Chicago School’s Clifford Shaw and Howard Becker’s Humanistic Narrative of Young Male and Female Delinquents in Different Ages

Clifford Shaw’s (1930) The Jack-Roller is a landmark study of naturalism, ethnography and crime. It is the ‘own story’ of Stanley—a young delinquent in Chicago. Shaw’s series of ethnographic studies on delinquency sought to humanize deviance in opposition to pathological understandings of delinquency. The article looks on the representation of crimes committed and punishment received by young male and female delinquents. Shaw’s argument focuses on structural inequalities and poverty as the cause of deviance; as a result, female delinquency was not explained by sexual promiscuity, although he failed to recognize young women’s vulnerabilities. The second edition of The Jack-Roller introduced by Howard Becker (1966, Introduction. The Jack-Roller: A delinquent boy’s own story, pp. v–xviii) redefined Shaw’s study within the symbolic interactionist tradition. From the 1950s, Shaw and Becker disagreed over the writing of the deviant’s ‘own story,’ the control of the narrative and the authorial voice. The article adds to the literature on narrative, female deviance and youth delinquency.

Young People’s Rights and Mental Health During a Pandemic: An Analysis of the Impact of Emergency Legislation in Scotland

Emerging evidence indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic and government measures put in place in response to this have had a detrimental impact on young people’s mental health. A children’s human rights-based approach was taken to examine the impact of the legislative and policy measures that were implemented in Scotland in response to the pandemic on children’s rights related to their mental health. Key concerns were identified around children’s rights to access mental health services and information, participation in decision-making and non-discrimination of vulnerable groups. Although the analysis focussed on Scotland, recommendations to protect these rights are likely to be relevant to other countries following similar approaches as lockdown restrictions are eased, or in the event that stricter local or national measures are required again to curb rising infection rates or subsequent wave(s).