Youth homelessness and individualised subjectivity
- Authors: Farrugia, David
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 14, no. 7 (2011), p. 761-775
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- Description: This article aims to contribute to understandings of youth homelessness and subjectivity by analysing identity construction in terms of young people’s negotiation of the structural and institutional environment of youth homelessness. I suggest that while existing literature on this topic concentrates mainly on micro-social encounters, the identities of young people experiencing homelessness can be understood as constructed by structural processes described by Ulrich Beck’s individualisation thesis. Narratives from 20 Australian young people are analysed for how their identities are constructed in their contact with the institutions which govern youth homelessness, and the way these young people make sense of the structural conditions they are facing. Two narrative trajectories are identified. In narratives describing movement into homelessness, young people articulate feelings of failure and shame, consequences of their individualised understanding of their biography. In narratives describing movement out of homelessness into a home, young people articulate feelings of strength and pride, while also describing those who remain homeless in ways which reflect the status of homelessness as a stigmatised difference. This article concludes by discussing the way that structural, institutional and subjective processes interact to produce the identities of young people experiencing homelessness, and reflects on the utility of understanding youth homelessness as a form of individualised social inequality.
Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities
- Authors: Smith, Naomi , Wickes, Rebecca , Underwood, Mair
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Sociology Vol. 51, no. 4 (2015), p. 950-967
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- Description: This study examines how members of pro-anorexia (PA) and fat acceptance (FA) cybercommunities manage their ascribed ‘offline’ socially marginalised identity in an ‘online’ environment. While much of the sociological literature continues to focus on the corporeal or face-to-face practices of socially marginalised groups, we use online non-participant observation to explore how members of these sites use the internet to manage their marginalised identities. We find that cybercommunities provide a safe place for identity management where members come together to understand, negotiate and, at times, reject the marginalised identity ascribed to them in their offline environment. From the accounts of the PA and FA members we studied, we find that online and offline identities are mutually reinforcing and collectively inform and shape identity. However, the online environment provides an anonymised space for identity work, emotional support and an acceptance of their body, whatever their shape or size. © The Author(s) 2013.
Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community : An extraverted sense of place in times of change
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 9 (2014), p. 1152-1167
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- Description: This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community activities and day to day farm life, articulated in the language of the ‘rural idyll’. Narratives about imagined future lives articulate classed and gendered competencies and dispositions acquired in and through place, reflexively mobilised in life planning practices. Therefore, whilst substantial social changes are reshaping youth identities across rural places, young people's responses to these changes are forged in the way that identities are emplaced, as well as articulated in reflexive orientations towards their future lives. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
Education reform makes no sense without social class
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article , Review
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 35, no. 6 (2014), p. 953-962
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- Description: In enlightened and civilised societies we like to think that the blatantly racist eugenics movement that involved social selection based upon genetic traits is a disgraceful notion relegated to the past; but it seems not, it has just re-emerged in another form through the back door. It is an interesting question as to why social class continues to remain such a verboten topic, and to understand why we need to get inside what is going on. I can get to the essence of my argument quickly through an example from a university colleague: ‘This is bullshit,’ the student muttered under her breath. The tutorial topic assigned for that week was class. I’d kicked things off by asking whether class existed in modern Australia, or whether it was a relic of nineteenth century Europe. Struck by the student’s response, I asked her to elaborate. She did: Look, I went to private school and my Dad’s a CEO and most of his friends are business people. So I guess that’s supposed to make me upper class? But class has nothing to do with it. Going to a private school was my parents’ decision. And my Dad’s friends are just his friends. I suggested that the choice of school – not to mention the capacity to affordthe fees – and her father’s friendship network might have been heavily shaped by their class position. That wasn’t to say there was anything wrong with it, but it did show how our lives are shaped by larger social and economic forces we don’t control. The student was having none of it. It was clear that she’d encountered the notion of class before and found it singularly unconvincing. In her world, everything was simply a matter of individual choice – choices that were unconstrained … [and while] she didn’t actually say it, … class seemed to be an excuse for people who made the wrong choices in life. (Scanlon 2014)
White Australian identities and Indigenous land rights
- Authors: Koerner, Catherine
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Social Identities Vol. 21, no. 2 (2015), p. 87-101
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- Description: Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.