Looking South, Looking North: what can Youth Studies in the Global North learn from research on youth and policy in the MENA countries - and vice versa?

Description

This paper attempts to see what can be learned from bringing together sociologically-oriented research on youth and youth policy from the Global North (the field known as Youth Studies) with studies about young people's lives in the Middle East and North African countries (often conducted by scholars working from Area Studies and International Relations disciplinary perspectives). Thus, the paper seeks to bring together research and theory from different
disciplines/ fields and from different regions/ states so as to consider how we might better research and theorise about 'youth' (as a socially constructed life-phase) and about the empirical realities of young people's lives (as they play out
in social, political, cultural and economic contexts). This is within the global context of young people challenging social hierarchies and inequalities (from the Arab Spring to 'Youthquake'). Drawing on the EU Power to Youth programme of research (in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Turkey and Lebanon), and our experience in UK Youth Studies, we suggest ways that researchers in these different fields and places might benefit from each other. To do so, we focus on five sociological themes about youth and young people: variation in dominant state/ social constructions of 'youth'; how youth is divided, especially by gender; the flaws in human capital-based youth policies; the significance of informal and non-standard work for young people; and the meaning of insecurity for young people. (presented by co-author, Hannah King).

Period	24 Apr 2019
Event title	British Sociological Association Annual Conference: Challenging Social Hierarchies and Inequalities
Event type	Conference
Location	Glasgow, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International