The price of belonging: social citizenship and avenues of recognition for disadvantaged young people

© 2017 Dr. Maja Lindegaard MoenstedThis study is concerned with the question of how youth policy and programs can better support and care for young people who face disadvantage. It poses the question of whether there is a disjunction between disadvantaged young people’s priorities and life experiences, and the assumptions made about young people in policies and programs relating to youth education and employment. Further, this study asked if youth policies and programs have lost sight of what disadvantaged young people need. To gain a better understanding of processes of preferences and aspirations, three contrasting case studies were conducted with groups of young people as well as workers from the youth programs frequented by these young people. This study first explores what young people say about how they create meaningful lives, and how they hope to engage in society in the future. Secondly, the arenas where these aspirations become developed, shaped and stunted are analysed. Finally, the study investigates how these aspects were engaged with and recognised, within youth work settings. The study examines the difference disadvantage makes to the development of social citizenship aspirations. I argue in this thesis that the ways people long to be a part of society (social citizenship aspirations) is developed through feelings of belonging and recognition. Through this framework, it becomes possible to conduct a different type of social criticism, where the focus is not only on the material conditions structuring aspirations, but also the mental conditions that facilitate self‐realisation and the fostering of social citizenship aspirations. Further, the study maintains that aspirations are more than cognitive, but instead embedded in the material and social context, and made up of young people’s embodied and emotional longing to find a valorised place among their peers. The concepts of recognition and belonging allow for a richer understanding of young people’s lives that go beyond their transitions and their cultural embeddedness. This thesis starts by arguing that the ways young people’s aspirations are conceptualised in both government policy and some academic research often rely on restrictive, individualistic definitions. Instead, by situating young people’s social citizenship aspirations, empirically represented as young people’s longing for safety, connection, respect and visibility, within processes of marginalisation across different arenas (i.e. school, local communities and youth programs) a type of ‘de‐objectification’ results, which broadens our understanding of disadvantaged young people’s agency and capabilities in several ways. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates that the possibilities for exercising agency are always in relation to the specific local and social context and the broader socio-structural factors, which determine that environment. This understanding of aspirations breaks with the habitual way of understanding aspirations for disadvantaged groups; as the enactment of preference within constraint. Instead, I argue that recognition and belonging both enable and constrain aspirational horizons. Secondly, I suggest that analyses that seek to comprehend the structures that delimit and define horizons for actions such as gender, class and place should best be contextualised within young people’s active labour to find a valorised role for themselves. Thirdly, the focus on relationships and belonging in young people’s lives may provide a more holistic and sensitive account of the social and cultural reproduction of problematic social practices, so often avoided due to its ambivalent and uncomfortable connotations. Seen from this perspective, the type of social citizenship subjectivities encouraged within youth programs, or how young people are encouraged to see their place in society, becomes a matter of social justice. This study argues that narrowly designed youth programs aimed purely at educational transitions are in danger of reproducing further misrecognition and social exclusion. By neglecting to address young people’s social embeddedness and the foundation upon which young people create their social citizenship aspirations, low expectations are in danger of being reinforced. The concept of social citizenship provides a lens which may assist the sector to direct activities towards addressing this, by providing a holistic understanding of what creates young people’s self-understanding, values and attitudes, and how these go on to shape aspirations in all facets of life, including education, employment, personal relationships and social citizenship aspirations