Editorial

It is an exciting time for Adolescence and Youth Studies. Our journal is poised to propel the field in important directions, extending our trans-national and broad approach. We are not limited to any one aspect of youth, culture, or social dynamics, bringing together scholars, practitioners and others interested in all realms of youth-related experience and professional youth work. I consider myself lucky: As the new Editor, I am about to witness how our multiple and varied futures are unfolding, to experience first-hand how our field anticipates and responds to current trends, paradoxes, crises, and opportunities. Young people are at the cusp of local and global transformations, sometimes constructed as problems or dangers to reconcile, at other times as potential saviours of our communities. Still other contexts leave youth as casualties or arbitrarily fortunate subjects of institutional or environmental forces. Avoiding such essentializing quagmires, the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth consistently brings together policies, institutions, and social movements shaping the lives of young people with the critical analysis of how social structures and activism related to education, labour, welfare, and criminal justice informs contemporary policy debates, interventions, and the support of youth leadership.

An historical perspective on the construction of childhood offers valuable insights for scholars of youth and adolescence. It highlights the ways in which ideas and perceptions of young people have changed over time, and the social, cultural, and institutional factors that have shaped these constructions. Youth and adolescence are not fixed or universal categories. They are social and cultural constructs that vary across time and place. As we carry out our work and continue to dialogue through this journal, we should not ignore how notions of youth and adolescence have been shaped by cultural norms, social expectations, and historical contexts. This awareness challenges our assumptions, recognizing the diversity of experiences and meanings associated with being young. The historical construction of childhood and adolescence exposes power dynamics and social inequalities inherent in social hierarchies influencing the experiences and opportunities available to young people throughout history. Understanding how different groups of young people have been marginalized or privileged helps address inequities in research and policy. It can also reveal changing understandings of youth agency and autonomy. I hope that our journal will increase our exploration of societal expectations and legal frameworks that have shaped and that continue to frame our assumptions about rights, responsibilities, and decision-making abilities of young people. Recognizing the historical variations in perceptions of youth agency encourages nuanced analysis of their capabilities and contributions. It further encourages scholars to consider intersectionality – the interconnected nature of social identities – and its impact on young people’s experiences. Recognizing how identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status intersect can deepen understanding of the diverse and complex ways young people navigate their lives. Certain aspects of childhood and adolescence have remained constant across time, such as the significance of peer relationships and educational transitions. Yet it is remarkable how the very ideas of childhood, youth, and adolescence have changed dramatically through historic periods, and how biased is the presumption that there are universal characteristics that primarily describe youth across geography, politics, and cultures.

Bernadette Baker’s (1995) concept of a “rescue discourse’ provides important insights for scholars of youth and adolescence when examining the connections between young people and various social institutions. This notion highlights the tendency to view young people as in need of saving, guidance, or correction, often leading to paternalistic and prescriptive approaches. This can reinforce negative stereotypes and contribute to moral panics about youth, overshadowing the positive contributions and strengths that young people bring to society. The ‘abyssal line’ introduced by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) challenges youth studies as a coherent international and interdisciplinary field of study to grasp the depths and range of global social hierarchies and knowledge production impacting assumptions about youth and adolescence. The line represents a boundary separating different epistemologies, knowledge systems, economic relationships and social groups into privileged and marginalized categories established through colonialism and imperialism, and perpetuated by entrenched geopolitical structures into the present and future. Associated with the abyssal line, unequal power relationships, distribution of resources, and imposition of dominant assumptions about what can and cannot be known function together to privilege certain voices and perspectives, and exclude or marginalize others. Alternative visions of adolescence and youth, or even the existence or lack thereof, across cultural, geographic and regional spaces, are often erased from our awareness in the pursuit of a common universal study of ‘youth’ that ignores post-colonial realities. Eurocentric biases within youth studies, prioritizing Western theoretical frameworks and concepts, potentially limit our understanding of the diverse experiences and contexts of young people globally, particularly those from non-Western societies, hampering efforts to develop contextually relevant and culturally sensitive approaches to studying youth.

Taking such concerns seriously, I look forward to the journal’s increased attention to the agency and active participation of young people in their communities and in trans-national social movements, treating them primarily as active agents rather than as passive subjects, and incorporating youth in participatory and collaborative approaches to research. As editor, I will likewise promote cross-disciplinary and trans-cultural collaboration and dialogue, so that we can better understand and work with and around broader social structures. My goal is to avoid an overreliance on individualizing work with youth and individual-level explanations that might distract from the abyssal line or ideologically harmful discourses of rescue. Postcolonial critiques call for acknowledging and valuing diverse forms of youth activism and leadership across cultures. They emphasize the importance of understanding the specific socio-cultural, political, and historical contexts in which youth activism emerges. This perspective broadens the definition of youth activism beyond Western paradigms, recognizes alternative modes of engagement, and promotes an inclusive understanding of youth agency and leadership (Halpern, 2008; Steinberg, 2018; Steinberg & Ibrahim, 2016). This means the journal welcomes manuscripts co-authored by collaborative teams from different perspectives, whether they represent theory, practice, and research; policy and theory; regional and trans-national differences; agencies and scholars, or multiple methodologies. I hope to develop this aspect of IJAY through (1) inviting short commentaries and reactions from differing sites of youth work to be published in subsequent issues, with responses from the original author; (2) inviting highly critical reviewers to offer an alternative commentary, along with the author’s response, in the same issue; (3) and by explicitly inviting special issue proposals from teams of guest editors who represent different socio-political-geographic positions on a common theme. If you are interested in taking leadership on any of these projects, please contact me to discuss possibilities.

Global disasters, political violence, pandemics, and other adversities can create life-altering consequences for individuals, families, and the future of all communities (Masten, 2014). Changes in schooling and higher education, the loss of traditional youth labour markets, mass migration from severe weather devastation, war and economic crises, are together throwing family and intimate relationships in unforeseen directions (Kehily, 2007). Youth malaise and lack of purpose associated with a decline of ‘role societies’ (Côté, 2018), right-wing weaponizing of youth as threats to social orders as they are commodified and criminalized (Giroux, 2022), and the blurring of ‘youth’ as a definable category based on age through otherwise ‘adults’ investing in ‘youth cultural identities’ (Bennett, 2015), are all jumbled up in this mutually generative and equally perplexing, lively cacophony of conversations we call ‘Youth Studies’. On the one hand, such consequences and changes urgently call for scholarship on youth experiences in contemporary contexts. On the other hand, our scholarship can provide important support for those youth taking on leadership roles worldwide in collaborative environmental sustainability with the more-than human participants in our global ecosystems, cross-cultural dialogue with refugees and survivors of human trafficking, wellness and mental health, nutrition and hunger, education, entertainment and cultural consumer culture, gender and sexuality education, and more. This guides me to invite more manuscripts that engage with the scholarship of others, so that we can collectively develop a shared discourse responsive to both local and regional needs and possibilities. I seek to publish review articles that integrate past IJAY publications into expository essays. Linking the author’s own work in a dialogue with ongoing themes of the journal supports each other while promoting scholarly conversation across the varied contexts, locations, and knowledge bases we call home.

A managerial focus on principles such as ‘accountability’ and ‘risk management’ often fails to deliver needed services to vulnerable youth, further complicated by funding dynamics, institutional mandates and inter-organizational conflicts (Nichols, 2014). Listening approaches to youth work are proposed as a promising methodology for both practice and research, mediating institutional failures by centring youth experience (Stewart & Robbins, 2022). Digital media literacies and digital citizenship (Fernández de Castro et al., 2023), spirituality as a resource (Daughtry & Devenish, 2016), non-formal educational environments (Chauke, 2022) each offer perspectives on youth work underutilized until recently in our field. Despite my opening excitement in this introductory essay about our journal’s ‘futures’, I urge manuscripts to embrace a more powerful orientation inspired by youth work and youth stories outside of the globally dominant notion of progressive time. So much of our scholarship imagines futures and trajectories growing out of pasts and presents (Yunkaporta, 2021; López López & Coello, 2021; Edgerton, 2023). In the most generous if not entirely paternalistic orientations to youth work and youth studies, we often think implicitly in terms of enculturation and acculturation, in which young people change or are guided through change and development, so that they are prepared for futures. Of course, the presumption of a universal progressive, linear time through which folks pass (in life) is a product of colonialism, and there are many alternative ideas about time, knowledge, landscapes and sociality. Some of these alternatives feature members of a community potentially understood through notions of adolescence and youth. Some are less amenable to such a view, yet still include what looks like adolescence or youth to outside observers. How we engage with the stories and relationships of each other’s time(s), knowledge(s), landscape(s) and socialities turns out, in this way, to be of emerging importance. To capture this in the journal, I look forward to increasing our assignment of reviews and commentaries from different geopolitical and workplace perspectives. This raises concerns about the role of expertise, or rather, what forms of expertise are most relevant. So I also expect more time and interchanges devoted to working through the details of all this. I invite our readers, authors, and critics to join me on this experiment!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.