Young Turns Twenty: Reflections on the Journal’s Development

Abstract

There is no self-evident method in analyzing the development of Young. In my 15 years as an editor of the journal, my understanding of it was formed in practicethe everyday practice of editing articles and deciding whether we should encourage certain people to submit manuscripts and the more strategic practice of writing editorials and otherwise designing the profile. During this time, we the editors came back to such practical-strategic matters again and again and now six years after I left the editorial board, a new round of contemplations and attempts to generalize and analyze take the form of grounded theory approach, where theoretical perspectives are evoked from the back of my head. Theories of scientific development do not 'click' but rather theories of youth development and of cultural fields and I will start my account of Young's first twenty years from the perspective of a youth development theory classic, Erik Erikson's theory of the development of identity (and crises).The concept of identity is of course used as a metaphor here, as Young is not a living human being, but this metaphor is consciously chosen because the journal has been quite an organic entity formed by a very collective editorial board and a dynamic community. The journal's title hinted 'at a hidden parallel between the age of those studied and the youthfulness of the journal, as well as of the youth research field itself' (Fornäs, in this issue). The development of the journal can be seen, as in Erikson's concept of identity development, as a process with tensions at certain phases and solutions that to some extent capture both sides of the tension-akin to the dialectical conceptual triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Erikson's model can be seen as an idealistic model of evolution, but also as one of socialization and adaptation. Identity and Crisis During the First Decade of YoungThe Nordic network NYRI was established in the middle of 1980s and in 1991 the NYRI board turned to Kirsten Drotner and Johan Fornäs to establish a Nordic Youth Research journal, a task that was accomplished in less than two years by these pioneers who recruited three colleagues to form an all-Nordic editorial board.Johan Fornäs has described how the 'parents' of Young on the NYRI board in these hectic first years graciously granted the editorial board full autonomy, although