Life, Disrupted: Young People, Education and Employment Before and After COVID-19

Liminality, COVID‐19 and the long crisis of young adults' employment

“…This conceptualisation of contemporary employment for young people as long-term liminality serves to counterbalance views that adjudicate this state of liminality intrinsically to the COVID-19 crisis. The crisis has brought ideas, metaphors and conceptualisations of life being disrupted (Walsh et al, 2021); of youth being demoralised about their future (Fronek & Briggs, 2021); and work being enveloped by uncertainty and ambiguity-including the reconfiguration to working from home (Izak et al, 2022). While there is no dispute that the COVID-19 crisis disrupted daily routines and employment for many young people, as well as introducing new social, economic and health risks, some researchers have already argued that the precarisation of youth employment and the economic disadvantaging of young people can be traced to several decades ago (Bessant et al, 2017;.…”

“…The COVID-19 crisis has brought conceptualisations and discourses of lives disrupted to the forefront of academic and public discussion. Researchers have focussed especially on disruptions to education and employment practices that jeopardise young people's ability to make a living and progress through the traditional milestones of adulthood on a normative schedule (Lambovska et al, 2021;Walsh et al, 2021). Other scholars have emphasised interruptions to mobility due to local and international restrictions on human movement and the closure of local and national borders (Cairns et al, 2021), as well as the disruption and reconfiguration of leisure practices (Woodrow & Moore, 2021).…”

“…With some exceptions (e.g. Lambovska et al, 2021;Walsh et al, 2021), they tend to focus on the present, and they generally address the disruption of contemporary experiences by considering how this renders the present unrecognisable from the not-so-distant past.…”