The book starts from the premise that ‘youth’ is first and foremost a social category (Bourdieu, 1993) whose boundaries and contents are continuously defined and redefined in the evolving interactions between structural forces and individual agency (Archer, 2003). Further, ‘being young’ is conceptualised as a status that entails specific opportunities, constraints and expectations of behaviour that emerge from and are negotiated in the interactions between young individuals and their surrounding social contexts (Furlong, 2009; Kelly and Kamp, 2014).
Social sciences have analysed youth through different theoretical frameworks. The transition perspective (Furlong, 2009) has understood youth as a life stage traditionally meant to prepare young individuals to acquire adult roles in society through a series of ‘modern’ rites of passage that young people have to face: namely – for Western societies – completing education, finding a job, moving out of the family home and starting a family of their own (Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Transition analyses have highlighted how growing social mobility has increased the transitions young people go through and the speed by which they take place (Furlong et al, 2011; Rosa, 2013). A generational perspective recognises certain similarities across young people in different societies but also how individual young people can experience these differently in their particular contexts (Woodman and Wyn, 2015). Lastly, the cultural perspective highlights not only the variety of youth cultures, but also the cultural practices and strategies through which young people cope with and make sense of their positions in society (Hall and Jefferson, 1975; Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Despite their differences, these three perspectives within youth studies point out how youth must be understood in relation to the young person’s specific life conditions and surrounding social contexts. With that in mind, the book has sought to give space to diversity among young people. Contributions depict an array of different youth conditions: for example, young people with disabilities, young asylum seekers, and young people living in rural areas. The stories consider the multifaceted and differentiated meanings that ‘being young’ can have to young people and how differences in conditions can affect young people’s participation.
The ‘adult world’ intervenes to shape youth through definitions and discourses. Legal definitions can define the passages from youth to adulthood, with implications for young people’s participation opportunities: for example, a minimum age for voting rights. Adults’ understandings of youth can define the appropriateness of a young person’s participation. Such definitions are part of an intergenerational struggle, where young people and their expressions are often portrayed in negative terms, such as being passive, unengaged and self-centred or dangerous and threatening (Pickard and Bessant, 2019; Walther et al, 2020). The book therefore pays attention to how youth participation is formed in the interactions between young people, adults and institutions. Chapters consider how particular understandings and discourses of ‘youth’ shape what counts and is discounted as young people’s participation. They consider what spaces young people are invited to engage with, which ones they are excluded from, and which ones young people carve out for themselves.
Inequality
The third concept scaffolding this book is inequality. A long tradition in social sciences and related studies has grappled with the concept and manifestations of inequality (Castel, 2003; Dorling, 2015). For this book, inequality is the structuring of advantaged and disadvantaged life chances and is the effect of an uneven distribution of opportunities among the members of a given society (Rawls, 1971; Nussbaum, 1995). The unequal distribution of life chances within a given society produces social hierarchies and different degrees of integration for its members, who can occupy more ‘central’ or more ‘peripheral’ positions in relation to civil, political and social spheres (Castel, 2003). When it comes to youth, social sciences have analysed structural disparities in young people’s possibilities to meet basic needs such as food and housing (Green, 2017), in access to education (Heathfield and Fusco, 2016), and in health and other services (Alemán-Díaz et al, 2016). Research shows how dimensions of class (Threadgold, 2017), gender (Thompson, 2011), ethnicity (Harris, 2012) and place (Cuervo and Miranda, 2019) interact with age in creating more or less ‘marginal youths’.
When studying youth and participation, the intergenerational dimension is central (Bates and Riseborough, 1993; Furlong, 2009; Woodman and Leccardi, 2015) and underlines the unequal distribution of resources between co-existing adult and youth generations. Indeed, studies indicate that in Western contexts young people born after 1980 might become the first generation who can expect to attain lower economic living standards than previous generations (Bessant et al, 2018). Thus, the intergenerational perspective recognises the systematic disparities in the distribution of economic resources and political power between generations (Pickard and Bessant, 2019).
While the distribution of material resources represents the most visible form of inequality, disparities also occur in relation to the different possibilities that individuals and groups have to participate – both to take part in and being part of their societies. From this perspective, inequality refers to a set of systematic disparities in an individual’s or group’s abilities: to receive recognition; to influence others’ behaviours in order to produce advantages for themselves and the groups they belong to; and to have control of the choices concerning their present and their future (Saraceno, 2006). Adopting this perspective of inequality facilitates consideration of both ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ disparities in young people’s participation.
The perduring effect that factors such as class, education and gender have in structuring young people’s possibilities of participation have been extensively demonstrated by literature. Young people with lower-class backgrounds systematically show lower levels of participation in both institutional and unconventional forms of participation (Marien et al, 2010) and experience difficulties in obtaining recognition based on their modes of expression (Pitti et al, 2020). This also seems to be the case for young people from ethnic minorities (Harris, 2008). Many of the chapters included in this book contribute to the analysis of these traditional effects of social inequalities on youth participation. However, attention is also given to less explored forms of inequalities in the participatory sphere. Literature has shown how spatial dimensions are relevant in shaping young