Biography, History and Place: Understanding Youth Transitions in Teeside

This chapter talks about young people's transitions to adulthood. During the 1990s and 2000s, the concept of 'transition' took some buffeting in Youth Studies. The chapter focuses on the way that young people make transitions to adulthood in times of socio-economic change, under inauspicious conditions and in a place that has high levels of multiple deprivation. It shows how the voodoo sociology and weak versions of 'social exclusion' that infect much policy thinking would have it that this pattern is an outcome of individual choices or other facets of supply-side characteristics. Dave Byrne has described Teesside 'as one of the most deindustrialised locales' in the UK and, in fact, it is hard to think of anywhere else, including amongst the rust belt cities of the USA and Europe, that has undergone such a dramatic turnaround.