Outreach youth work and employability in the ethos of vulnerability

Abstract

There is general agreement overall about the desirability and importance of youth support systems as being crucial for young people ‘at risk’ to help them cultivate their subjectivities about employability. In this article, we take a closer look at these support systems and especially at outreach youth work in Finland. We focus on the construction of knowledge and subjectivities of young people related to it. We argue that among the good intentions in cultivating young people’s subjectivities, outreach youth work tends to operate as a practice for enhancing the construction of psycho-emotional vulnerabilities and employability of young people while translating wider societal questions of austerity, poverty and inequality into questions of individualised deficiencies.

Representing a Fading Welfare System that Is Failing Young People in ‘NEET’ Situations: a WPR Analysis of Swedish Youth Policies

“…Additionally, the problem representations risk silencing alternative interpretations of how the 'NEET' phenomenon may be understood in relation to larger societal changes characterised, for example, by the growing labour-market precarisation in Sweden (Gauffin 2020). Here, we agree with scholars who have stressed that young people's labour-market engagement can neither be reduced to a question of their vulnerability (at an individual level) nor be seen solely as a responsibility of the welfare state to support these vulnerable subjects (at an organisational level) (Smyth et al 2013;Mäkelä et al 2021). Instead, employment-especially of those on the margins of labour markets and education systems-needs to be understood as a complex structural issue that is highly contingent upon the availability of ('decent' 2 ) work which, in turn, is shaped by a range of institutional, demographic, technological and economic factors (ILO 2018).…”

“…Young people's ability to take ownership of themselves and their lives, regardless of whether this implies reproducing or resisting existing inequalities, is central to our understanding of fractured youth transitions (Rikala 2019;Coffey and Farrugia 2014). By locating the 'problem' primarily at the level of the welfare system-in the knowledge, collaboration and services required to provide support to the 'NEET' segment of young populations-we suggest that the problem representations disregard the young people's capacity to question these practices (Mäkelä et al 2021) and talk back to 'the deafness of an unbalanced politics' (Smyth et al 2014 p. 492). Through the above representations of the 'problem', the policies thus risk silencing the agency of young people in 'NEET' situations by reducing them to vulnerable welfare recipients with complex needs who 'require restorative or compensatory action to ensure equality of treatment and recognition' (McLeod 2012).…”

“…In Sweden, analyses similar to that of Mertanen et al (2020) have so far been absent, despite the situation of 'NEET' young people becoming a priority among Swedish policymakers during the last decade. Considering that Sweden, similarly to Finland, exemplifies a largely unchallenged Nordic welfare model characterised mainly by publicly funded support systems and services, critical policy inquiries become especially salient since they may unearth taken-for-granted assumptions about government responsibility for equal opportunities and equity (Ecclestone and Brunila 2015;Mäkelä et al 2021). In this regard, the current lack of Swedish policy analyses in the area is not only surprising, but also problematic.…”

“…At the same time, Nordic studies (Holte et al 2019) and Swedish reports (Forslund and Liljeberg 2021) have contributed insights into risk factors for, and characteristics of, this demographic segment of young populations. However, beyond building on the assumed benefit of producing knowledge about young people in the process of cultivating their 'employability' (Mäkelä et al 2021) (Q2), the proposed solutions show how the urge for more knowledge (or as Foucault calls it 'the will to knowledge') contains ambitions to categorise, monitor and govern. 1 These ambitions, especially monitoring and governing, were explicit in solutions stressing the need for statistics and register-based information about characteristics of the 'NEET' group (e.g.…”

“…This rationale builds on the idea that vulnerable subjects who are 'in the hands of social structures which cause morally unacceptable social harms' (Brown 2017 p. 669) need protection via state intervention and control. The problem representations can therefore have lived effects for 'NEET' young people by directing initiatives and assessments their way, while legitimising the provision of, and their access to, welfare services and support (Mäkelä et al 2021, Brunila et al 2016, Hodgson 2019, Te Riele and Shelley 2021.…”