Current European Youth Research Agenda

Challenges and Opportunities

Kathryn McGarry

Supported by

Youth Research in Europe Today

Youth Research in Europe

History, priorities, directions in national contexts

European Youth Research

allowing for a European wide understanding and knowledge of youth to develop shaped by social, political, economic changes and contributing back to a broader understanding of these changes and what they mean for youth studies

Policy Frameworks & Research Directions

“The future of the Council of Europe youth policy: AGENDA 2020” and the Committee of Ministers in its Resolution 2008 (23) on the youth policy of the Council of Europe

European Commission’s Youth Strategy ‘Investing and Empowering’ (April 2009)

Council of Minister’s “Renewed Framework for European Co-operation in the Youth Field (2010-2018)

Partnership between Council of Europe and European Commission – EKCYP, Pool of European Youth Researchers

Resonance for youth research today:Participation, opportunity, autonomy, mutual solidarity, social inclusion, equality…

European Research Area

Promoting transnational research Launched at Lisbon European Council in 2000 Further green paper on ERA in 2007 Actions of ERA include framework programmes - currently FP7

Conceptual challenges and opportunities

EU policy level shaping research priorities – influencing pace and direction of research agenda (Lynne’s paper)

‘Competition of rationalities’ (Beck, 1992)

Interface - cross-disciplinary, cross-sector, cross-specialisms – developments creating new theoretical and empirical frameworks

Cultural disconnections Language politics (CL) – how is the evidence base

developed/received?

Challenges and Opportunities

New conceptualisations

Individualisation thesis – young people ‘choosing’ biographies – ‘responsibility’

Social imagination growing – imagining a number of different biographies – implications of the ‘reflexive project of the self’ (Giddens, 1991) for the research agenda and research frameworks

Economic and social capital – implicating abilities to construct worlds of imagination (CL)

Demanding new research questions

Methodological Challenges and Opportunities

“European” research – holistic analyses

Making sense of local, national, European, global youth realities

Disembedded social relations – disembedded research? Demanding more creative and responsive methodologies

Researcher gaze –methodological designs (different ways of observing youth realities) - production of knowledge

A European gaze?

Views of users of youth research? Communication

Where are young people? Counted OR Connected?

Directions for European youth research

How critically reflexive and forward looking is European youth research today ???