Youth and the Politics of the Present

Coping with Complexity and Ambivalence

Enzo Colombo, Paola Rebughini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367150990
• eBook ISBN: 9780429582325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Youth and the Politics of the Present presents a range of topical sociological investigations into various aspects of the everyday practices of young adults in different European contexts. Indeed, this volume provides an original and provocative investigation of various current central issues surrounding the effects of globalization and the directions in which Western societies are steering their future.

Containing a wide range of empirical and comparative examples from across Europe, this title highlights how young adults are trying to implement new forms of understanding, interpretation and action to cope with unprecedented situations; developing new forms of relationships, identifications and belonging while they experience new and unprecedented forms of inclusion and exclusion. Grounding this exploration is the suggestion that careful observations of the everyday practices of young adults can be an excellent vantage point to grasp how and in what direction the future of contemporary Western societies is heading.

Offering an original and provocative investigation, Youth and the Politics of the Present will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Youth Studies, Globalization Studies, Migration Studies, Gender Studies and Social Policy.

Part I

Complexity

Chapter 1

Learning (not) to labour

How middle-class young adults look for creative jobs in a precarious time in Italy

Lorenzo Domaneschi

Introduction

The economic crisis that started in 2008 considerably affected young Italians, becoming part of their everyday life and a taken-for-granted frame of reference (Colombo and Rebughini, 2012). Compared with their peers in Europe, Italian young adults suffer from a higher unemployment rate and more persistent condition of precarious employment, which affects their everyday living conditions and their passage to adulthood (ISTAT, 2016). Such experience of job insecurity, the fragmentary nature of professional careers and the difficulty of achieving economic autonomy strongly contribute to setting a wider scenario of social changes that eventually creates ‘a new generational location’ (Colombo, Leonini and Rebughini, 2018, p. 62, emphasis in the original).

Hence, the starting hypothesis of the research presented here is that ‘the crisis’ is not just a temporary economic conjuncture; rather, it is a shared experience, the ‘normal’ context in which young people are about to accomplish their transition from school to work, from childhood to adult life (Cuzzocrea, 2011). Therefore, the crisis itself becomes a social phenomenon reshaping the social positions of individuals in both structural and subjective terms.

Nowadays, one relevant effect often highlighted by scholars and public opinion of such a ‘new generational location’ is an increasing distance between young people and public issues and the consequent uncertainty characterising youth’s existential condition, with a weakening of their wider expectations and projects and a forced focalisation on private and present issues (Brannen and Nilsen, 2002). Nevertheless, volunteering and political activism outside institutional contexts are increasing among youth, and the economic crisis, instead of only pushing young people deeper into the realms of the ‘private’ sphere, also caused a proliferation in several of these forms of participation (Henn, Oldfield and Hart, 2017; Genova, 2018). Within such a frame, the chapter presents the case of a collective of students in Italy as an alternative small-scale form of political and cultural action and explores its dynamics and limits. While examining a particular form of youth activism in political squats, the chapter aims particularly to unpack the ‘black box’ of youth agency (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014) within the present structural context set by the economic crisis.

Therefore, the main questions that guide this study concern how classical structural categories like gender and cultural capital work together in defining the structural gap between aspirations and actual potential, by a specific social group of middle-class millennials. Which sets of constraints and alternative opportunities are put back into play in the daily practices of middle-class young students? What is the experience and possibly reflexive re-interpretation according to different degrees of this structural gap?

In order to understand such issues, there is the need to look at the specific intersection of structural dimensions – gender, class and education – which generates different social locations (Anthias, 2013) that, in turn, create different constraints, opportunities and strategies. Accordingly, by intersecting gender and cultural capital, I aim to highlight the stratification internal to a generational location. Thus, I start by briefly introducing the question of youth agency and the role of intersectional studies in approaching such an issue. Then, I show how I drew on the seminal work by Willis as a sort of ante-litteram intersectional scholar in order to investigate middle-class young students in Italy. Finally, I present and discuss the main empirical findings coming from my field work, and I conclude by analysing how the precariousness produced by the incongruences between the school system and the labour market opens a surplus of space for reflexivity, hence a sort of sur-reflexivity¹ which could become a specific resource in coping with the present frame of uncertainty.

Youth agency, intersectionality and habitus fragmentation

Agency is essential to one of the most considerable theoretical debates in contemporary youth sociology: ‘the relationship between individualization … and contemporary youth inequalities’ (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014, p. 464). Accordingly, a relevant issue in the way agency is frequently operationalised in the sociology of youth relates to issues on how the relationship between the subject and power is understood (Spencer and Doull, 2015). From this point of view, agency and structure are considered separate and opposed forces found in different portions of the social world and with different effects on the social organisation of everyday life. In this view, structure explains reproduction, whereas an autonomous creative agency explains social change, with Bourdieu (1990) and Beck (1992) being brought in to represent, respectively, the structural constraints and the creative agency of this dichotomy (Woodman, 2009). Eventually, the debate has led to the need to move outside simplistic distinctions between agency and structure and, following from this, to the call for increased dialogue between Beck’s work and Bourdieu’s positions (Farrugia, 2013).

In line with such a plea, it becomes particularly useful to adopt the intersectionality perspective (Crenshaw, 1989; Walby, Armstrong and Strid, 2012; Colombo and Rebughini, 2016) in order to cope with both the various structural dimensions and the individual agency. In fact, the possibility of analysing the articulation of structural categories such as class, gender and race/ethnicity – instead of considering them as independent and separate forms of power relations – is at the basis of the notion of intersectionality as ‘an epistemological approach to domination’ (Colombo and Rebughini, 2016, p. 439). This leads to expanding the theoretical and heuristic potential of intersectionality as an analytical tool, not exclusively related to the investigation of overlapping forms of oppression, but which also concerns the more general relationship between individual agency and structural determinants. In short, the aim is precisely to show how intersectionality can make a new contribution to the traditional agency/structure debate.

Despite differences and variations, the common theoretical claim of accounts of intersectionality is that different social categories mutually constitute each other as overall social structures as well as in creating composite identities. Structural categories such as gender, cultural capital and class are not parallel; they create each other and consequently cannot be examined separately. Converting this statement into the analysis of youth cultures allows us to think of the complexity of the shared social situation created by the frame of the ‘crisis’ as well as ‘the complexity of their collective answers to their situation’ (Jensen, 2018, p. 414). In a nutshell, it allows us to investigate the constraints and possibilities of a new generational location. Taken as an epistemological approach to domination, then, ‘intersectionality may be useful for the analysis of not only the “matrix of domination” but also the “matrix of privilege” to show how any single categorisation only works in relation to other categorisations to produce a field of opportunities and constraints’ (Colombo and Rebughini, 2016, p. 443).

In this broader – epistemological – sense, intersectionality may be usefully compatible with Bourdieu’s sociology, in particular his view on the body and his idea of the habitus as socially conditioned embodiment (Jensen and Elg, 2010). Habitus is in fact both classed, gendered, ethnicitised and racialised. Thinking of the habitus as multidimensional and complex (that is, as simultaneously conditioned by different social structures) but also as the basis for practical agency (Bourdieu, 1990) seems fully compatible with this particular ‘epistemological’ approach to intersectionality.

A key register of the concept of habitus is, in fact, that it incorporates past experiences which are modified by present ones, as well as a sense of a probable future (Bourdieu, 1990). Yet, Bourdieu changed his presentations of the notion of habitus during his works: from earlier elaborations, where a unified habitus is prevalent, to later conceptions of habitus fragmentation (Silva, 2016). It then accounts for a plural interiority in tension with dissonances and fragmented belongings. This is a key theoretical connection with intersectionality: how the habitus incorporates differences and is transformed as the person relates to various fields both over time and simultaneously. The habitus ‘helps to understand social change because it provides multiple locations to negotiate submission and defiance, adaptability and resistance’ (Silva, 2016, p. 174). A challenge for the habitus in contemporary life is then integration, but integration is not solely made within a unit. It can happen from various units and present varied depth and texture in different cases and circumstances.

In the case of young people of Generation Y (Strauss and Howe, 2006; Kelan, 2014), therefore, the research aims to investigate in what way this generation – not necessarily in its most marginal positions – is positioned with respect to structural categories like gender and cultural capital: namely, how and how much they are more or less able to manipulate and reflexively managing such categorisation and how, at the same time, these intertwined categories contribute to define contexts in which these individuals are located. Hence, intersectionality is employed as an analytical approach to investigate how different ‘structural categories’ act not only by adding privileges or disadvantages but, above all, by defining the conditions for particular social locations (Anthias, 2013).

Learning (not) to labour: the case of young middle-class activists in Italy

The idea of generational locations (Mannheim, 1952; Woodman and Wyn, 2014), understood as a set of attempts at a solution, answer or response to a shared situation, did not necessarily imply an optimistic prognosis for such solutions. For example, resistance may be practiced in a way that actually strengthens the reproduction of class society. Such mechanisms, in fact, were the main theme of Paul Willis’s seminal work, Learning to Labour (1978), that explicitly contains a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between youth agency and structural reproduction. He demonstrated that youth creative resistance against class dominance in school – a practice he termed counter school culture – in fact facilitated the reproduction of the overall class system and was part of what doomed working-class young students (the ‘lads’) to traditional, dreary sweatshop jobs. Willis argued that ‘the lads’ gained status from the construction of a tough and sexist masculinity in a situation where they were otherwise disadvantaged due to their class position (Willis, 1978). Thus, mixing and matching the effect of different social categorisations (class and gender), ‘Willis’ analysis may be considered an example of an intersectional analysis without the concept’. (Jensen, 2018, p. 415).

Hence, the inspiring work by Willis could be very useful in researching the present situation in Italy, especially the case of middle-class young millennials. In fact, if we look at the latest Istat report (2016), 62.5% of young Italians between 18 and 34 years of age, the so-called Generation Y (Howe and Strauss, 2000; Kelan, 2014), still live with their parents, with a marked difference among women (56.9%) and men (68%), but above all a significant difference with the European average, which stands at 48.1%. The most interesting aspect of this sociologically growing inequality, the effects of which seem to fall especially on the generation born between 1980 and 2000, concerns the impact from the initial structural conditions: according to Istat (2016), in fact, Italy is among the European countries where the advantage of individuals whose starting status is ‘high’ is greater; that is, at the age of 14 years they lived in a house owned and who had at least one parent graduated and occupied in a managerial profession.

Therefore, the research aims to examine the particular generation of millennials (born between 1980 and 2000), as defined as a new shape of ‘generation betrayed’ (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 148) in which the gap between the aspirations produced by the school system and the actual possibilities it offers becomes a structural fact, that affects in a different way all members of a generation. This imbalance caused by such a structural gap between aspirations and possibilities nowadays assumes – objectively and subjectively – different forms according to different social locations, particularly in the case of the middle-class young student.

If working-class kids, as shown by Willis, while showing capacity for innovation and agency, through opposition to the school they condemned themselves to a social destiny equal to their origin, we could ask what happens to middle-class young adults today within the frame of crisis. If school degrees do not guarantee the working and social position neither to the middle class, but rather produces more and more precariousness, how do the identities of the middle class reproduce themselves?

In order to analyse and map the different social locations of these youngsters positioned in the mismatch between the ‘educational paradigm’ and the prospects of precariousness in the labour market, the ethnographic tool, as again proved by Willis, is needed to grasp the daily living experience of these boys and girls. Accordingly, conclusions presented in this chapter arise from the author’s longstanding ethnographic engagement with a group of 26 middle-class young students from 19 to 26 years of age (10 female and 16 male) in Milan, who squatted in an empty building in the city centre in order to create a brand new space of both political and artistic action, sharing skills and information with one another. In particular, for 11 months I engaged in participant observation (March 2017 to April 2018) and carried out in-depth interviews in order to uncover the rituals, practices and mentalities produced by the participants of this youth political and cultural space, and to understand how new subjectivities and collectivities might come into being.

Finally, in order to investigate the dynamics of their particular social location, I operationalised that into the dilemma about the possibilities and opportunities for planning their future: that is, to plan or not to plan (Devadason, 2008; Woodman, 2011). The search interest, in fact, is to investigate the dynamics of the particular kind of ‘planning agency’ at work in the moment of thinking about the future and imaging and projecting expectations and aspirations.

Unpacking the black box of youth agency: six ideal typical profiles

While the interviews and ethnographic transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis for commonalities, in this chapter I will not present the analysis, as is often the case, as a number of transcript excerpts from a selected part of the participants to illustrate each theme. Instead, as other scholars have already proved useful (Woodman, 2011; Franceschelli and Keating, 2018), I will present material from six participants in the form of a small case study on each using a number of extended quotations from the interview. Thus, I will illustrate the main themes using the narratives and cases of specific individuals who distilled the wider patterns apparent in the data. These case studies, along with contextual information about their everyday lives and practices collected through the ethnographic work, help us to shed light on the ways in which young people talk about their future and eventually make sense of the often-contradictory experiences of their lives.

The discussion of empiric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• A complex uncertainty: young people in the riddle of the present
• Part I Complexity
• Part II Uncertainty
• Part III Involvement
• Index