Personally Rememorizing Young People Differently: What Might Critical Adult Studies (Paradoxically) Have to Do With Researching, and Engaging With, Young People

This chapter focuses on research over about 35 years on, and occasionally directly with, young people, as well as inadvertent avoidances and decisions to avoid work. Resorting to memory and specifically the use of memory work are important; they are partly a means of locating oneself in the work done, or not done, with or on young people. Transnational Critical studies on adults and adulthood research on and with young people is thus doubly challenged and challenging, in striving to be anti-adultist and seeking not to reproduce adult hegemony, and working across complex transnational spaces, personal, social, geographical. The chapter argues that the reflections are stimulated from transnational collaboration between researchers in Finland and South Africa. It concludes by placing the political direction into transnational contexts, along with some implications for research itself.