Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives

"How does the world change, and what does it feel to be caught up in it? Using methods that range from ethnography, archives, interviews and surveys, the very best scholars in youth studies share the concepts and methods needed to make sense of being young in unsettling times."

Rachel Thomson, University of Sussex, UK

"This is a book about transitions. By studying youth in different contexts and countries, it shows at once the social changes of the last decade that affect the transition from school to work and the theoretical changes necessary to conceptually and empirically investigate the agency of youth under changed economic and social conditions. Having studied culture (in the 1980’s), structure (in the 1990’s) and agency (in the 2000’s) the field of youth studies has now reached enough maturity to investigate their interchange in qualitative research on the life course in times of transition."

Frédéric Vandenberghe, Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Departing from a restless knowledge, attentive to the recent pandemic transformations, here is a publication that tackles youth transitions in the agency-structure limbo, without succumbing to the fatalist determinism or the popular post-modern and liberal idea of a limitless free will. In fact, this book illustrates the analytical gains of complex thought, that articulates instead of excluding: it articulates windows of observation, analytical objects, disciplinary knowledge, social inequality dimensions, origins, trajectories and pathways, methodologies. Hence, youth life courses gain new contours with the multiplication of perspectives, shedding light to what was hidden by the persistence of unidimensional and limited approaches. Moreover, the book responds to one of the eternal issues in sociology: will those who are under the sociological lens be able to reflexively understand the research results that take them as objects? In this case, I believe so. Here is a hope for the future: research and publications that, without resigning their scientific autonomy and their own ways of questioning, involve subjects as reflexive (and transformative) recipients, thus broadening the frontiers of citizenship."

João Teixeira Lopes, President of the Portuguese Sociological Association; University of Porto, Portugal

"The book offers a highly innovative perspective to a very traditional dilemma in sociological thought – structure and agency. An impressive panel of authors examine the interplay of the two concepts applying it to the youth life phase which serves as an ideal laboratory for testing research outcomes and developing new theories...The book makes an original contribution to youth studies and wider academic scholarship."

Siyka Kovacheva, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria