Shaping the Selves of “At Risk” Youth in Debt and Poverty in the Context of Economic Vulnerability

Abstract

Drawing on two interrelated areas of youth work, outreach youth work as a place of coordination of work, social benefits and social services, and youth workshops as a place for work training for young people “at risk”, our aim in this article is to analyse how young people in poor financial circumstances are governed through policies and practices in these institutions in Finland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with young people and professionals working with young people, we ask how the subjectivities of young people “at risk” (and particularly those in debt and poverty) are shaped in the context of economic vulnerability. This shaping is not only from top-down dimensional formation of a subject, but also from the multidimensional flow of power/knowledge via subjects that sometimes possess opportunities of acting otherwise, as delineated in the end of our analysis. In the context of ubiquitous neoliberal governmentality, we delineated a landscape of survival strategies for economically vulnerable young people in these power/knowledge relations.

Striding on a Winding Road: Young People’s Transitions from Education to Work in Bulgaria

“…The interviewees were largely aware of the structural constraints that faced them on the road to adulthood but did not consider themselves as "belonging to a vulnerable group" or a "group at risk", as the discourse in the policy documents defined them. Another common feature in their interpretations of the transitions from education to the labour market, confirming the findings of previous studies [60], was young people's conviction that they should rely on "their own efforts" to find a way out of difficult situations. They did not consider themselves as incapable to work in the aspired jobs and believed that, given the chance, they would make a successful integration into the world of work.…”