This article makes a contribution to ongoing debate with youth studies about the frameworks and concepts that inform research and practice. It offers an analysis of the spatial metaphor of transition and the emerging relational metaphor of belonging. Noting that metaphor is an essential tool of theory, and that all theories illuminate particular elements of life and obscure others, it argues that there are elements of the transitions metaphor that have become entrenched as orthodoxies. These include the focus on youth-as-transition, the entrenchment of particular markers of progress and the tendency to see youth as a category [not in employment, education or training (NEET), for example]. While the goal is not to replace one orthodoxy with another, new insights into the production of inequalities and the creation of enabling processes can be forged through consideration of what is opened up when a metaphor of belonging informs theorising and analysis. Belonging brings the idea of youth as a social process back into the centre of analysis, enabling researchers to recognise the significance of relationships to people, place and to the times. Drawing on analyses of young people's lives from an Australian longitudinal study, it illustrates the ways in which transitions and belonging approaches open up different insights.
Although humanities and social science disciplines have witnessed an explosion of interest in the topic of hope in recent decades, uptake of this concept has been comparatively uneven in sociological research. Hope has garnered substantial attention in relation to topics such as health, poverty, youth and work within creative industries, while attracting sporadic interest elsewhere. However, despite this uneven engagement, studies addressing hope in each area have echoed many of the same ambiguities. We focus on two such ambiguities: the relationship between hope and futurity, and the relationship between hope and agency. Drawing on the observation that recent treatments of hope appear to either emphasise a hoped-for outcome situated in the future or focus on the role of hope in coping with the present we reframe this debate, contending that these tendencies suggest two distinct modes of hope: representational and non-representational. By reframing the relationship between hope and futurity thus we seek to, in turn, untangle the ambiguous relationship between hope and agency. We test the utility of our conceptualisations of hope by placing them into dialogue with longitudinal case studies compiled from biennial interviews and annual surveys conducted over a 10-year period. We ultimately put forward some means by which recent sociological treatments of hope can be unified, and in so doing contend that conceptualising hope not as an individual experience, but as part of broader political economies of hope can attune us to the ways in which inequalities are manifest through uneven distributions and experiences of hope.
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