Horizons of Possibility: Young People’s Encounters with Nature and Their Qualities in Social Programs

This article presents an analysis of young people’s encounters with nature within a context of social programs. In the intersection between nature and social initiatives, nature is often defined as something that contains a range of inherent properties that can have a positive impact on various aspects of young people’s lives—such as their well-being, development and learning. However, there is a lack of analyses that focus on the manifold, diverse and divergent exchanges and liaisons that young people’s encounters with nature can give rise to. Based on an approach, where humans and nature are considered so intertwined that one cannot be meaningfully understood without the other (Haraway 2021, Latour 2005), the aim of the article is to shed light on the many different types of entanglements and interconnections that unfold in young people’s encounters with nature, as well as on the processes of becoming they are associated with. Drawing on a qualitative study, the article develops a typology of six significant types of entanglements and interconnections between young people and nature. It is a characteristic of these entanglements and interconnections that they unfold depending on how the encounters between young people and nature are framed by the social programs. They are thus not defined by already known outcomes, but can be understood as ‘figurations’ (Braidotti 1994), that contain both a lived here and now and an ‘imagined elsewhere’ (Haraway 1991). The article shows how this perspective confronts deficit discourses, where young people in social programs are seen as either lacking resources and agency or whose resources and agency are going in the wrong direction, as well as those contemporary discourses that position and problematize the overall present youth generation as fragile, hypersensitive and disoriented.