Social communities in youth: Their different forms and impacts on young people’s lives

Research output: Book/ReportBookResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Social communities play a pivotal role in young people’s lives, but there is limited knowledge of the varying functions that different social communities have, and how they are experienced by different groups of young people. The aim of this book is to fill this knowledge gap and, through that, to contribute with important new insights into the social fabric of youth life, the different ways that young people are positioned in the fabric, and how it impacts their everyday lives and pathways through youth. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 14-19-year-old young people in Denmark, the book explores young people’s experiences of social communities from four different analytical perspectives, inspired by different sociological theoretical complexes covering as diverse sociological theorists as Dewey, Bourdieu, Granovetter, Davies & Harré, and Yuval-Davis among others: The first perspective focuses on temporal aspects of young people’s social communities. The second perspective identifies on young people’s ideals of their social communities. The third perspective explores different forms of social communities in youth life, and the fourth perspective focuses on different positions in young people’s social communities. This multifaceted approach allows the book to develop nuanced and specified conceptualizations of social communities in youth life as well as to develop broad and cross-cutting analyses of how social communities shape and impact young people’s lives. The book can be viewed as critical exploration of the role of social communities in youth life after years of theoretically focusing on individualization, singularization, polarization etc. and an attempt to redefine the character of sociality among young people today. It will contribute to contextualizing the empirical studies within youth research and educational studies focusing on social communities in class-rooms, subcultures, leisure time, etc. by presenting an empirically based and theoretically informed framework for sociality in youth life. The book will be relevant for social scientists within different fields of research (e.g. sociology, educational research, youth research), but will also be useful for educators, practitioners and decision makers within the field of youth. There will be plenty of illustrative quotes and examples derived from the interviews with young people, and the book will be written in an accessible and catchy language.
Translated title of the contributionFællesskaber i Ungdomslivet: Når de gør godt og når de gør ondt
Original languageEnglish
PublisherPolicy Press
Number of pages350
Publication statusIn preparation - 9 Sept 2023

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