Annelies Kamp

Capitals and Commitment: The Case of a Local Learning and Employment Network.

This article draws on research undertaken with a Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN) in the state of Victoria, Australia. LLEN are networks that were implemented by the state government in 2001 to undertake community capacity building through which the outcomes of young people aged 15–19 in education, training and employment would be enhanced. In 2008, in the context of an enhanced federal commitment to social inclusion through ‘joining-up’, the Victorian experience provides insights on the implications of such policy initiatives. Drawing on Bourdieus discussion of the forms of capital and Granovetters notion of the strength of weak ties, I argue that stores of economic, cultural and social capital as outlined by Bourdieu were necessary, but insufficient, for LLEN to achieve the objectives with which they were charged given the failure of government to follow through on the implications of its policies. I argue for a commitment on the part of all stakeholders to realise the potential of ‘joining-up’.

Once were young: reflexive hindsight and the problem of teen parents

Adults are the ones who do the social science that takes young people as its object. In this paper, we draw on empirical research, social theory, our background in Youth Studies and, for one of us, experiential knowledge as a ‘former’ teenage parent to trouble the practice of social science, in general, and Youth Studies, in particular. Using teenage pregnancy and parenting as a lens, the paper explores what it might mean to work at/on the limits of reflexive hindsight. We suggest that reflexive hindsight offers a particular, limited intervention into the knowledge practices of social science; one that makes explicit and plays with the ambivalence and ambiguity, even irony, of adult social scientists – who once were young – taking the behaviours and dispositions, the hopes, the fears and aspirations, the past, present and futures of young people as their objects.

Critical Childhood and Youth Studies

This chapter takes a generative stance to the challenge of ‘wicked problems’ in the context of childhood and youth studies. As articulated in Rittel and Webber’s classic article from 1973, wicked problems are those problems which resist ready definition, let alone solution. In the globalized context, childhood and youth studies are replete with such problems, problems that offer no easy solutions, only ideas about how to proceed that are better or worse. At the same time, childhood and youth studies draw on an established hinterland, one evoked by existing methods and arguments. In this chapter we draw on our 2014 collection − A Critical Youth Studies for the twenty-first Century − to illustrate an argument that contemporary times demand new theoretical and practical hinterlands that better acknowledge and respond to complexity. The focus of the chapter – youth transition – offers one example of such a potential hinterland.

12 Pre-assembling Our Young: Points of Movement in Post-Austerity Ireland

The chapter offers something of a post-critical reading of youth transition through and beyond secondary school towards some form of work in the context of the Republic of Ireland (Ireland). The chapter takes material-semiotic tools, media reportage and extant research to consider what I refer to as the ‘pre-assemblage’ of young people moving through, and beyond, second-level school in what appears as some kind of post-austerity context. In doing this, the chapter brings into focus actors, both distant and local, human and nonhuman, who in various ways shape and form, by subtle and not-so-subtle means, and contribute, or impede, the movement of young people beyond a primary engagement with formal education and the consequences of this for young people’s health and well-being, broadly defined.

Humans, nonhumans and the mediation of workplace learning in the senior school curriculum

Abstract This paper brings together concepts drawn from Actor Network Theory and data generated in a research project that was conducted across the island of Ireland. Using surveys and interviews with school staff, that research explored the limits and possibilities for workplace learning as a valued component of the senior school curriculum. The current paper works with the data from the Republic of Ireland only and brings into focus the full range of actors – both human and nonhuman – that generate, or constrain, productive workplace learning opportunities for students. In the wake of the Great Recession, it is suggested that such opportunities have gained increased importance. The analysis suggests attention to the full range of actors highlights areas for intervention, and the possibilities for alliances that may be beneficial for students and their schools, for employers who provide workplace learning placements, and for vocational learning itself.

Assembling the actors: exploring the challenges of ‘system leadership’ in education through Actor-Network Theory

Abstract This paper presents insights into the leadership implications of recent shifts in a range of policy contexts towards notions of collaboration and partnership. The paper draws on empirical research into the formation and operation of government instituted networks in the context of education in Victoria, Australia. From 2001, School Networks and Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN) were implemented by the state government to support young people in their transition through school and into employment in a context of a risk society, a context where pathways into sustainable employment for young people, and others, had become more erratic. For comparative purposes, the paper also draws on published research into the implementation of joined-up approaches, including Primary Strategy Learning Networks (PSLN), in England. Using concepts from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the paper argues for the value of considering the full range of actors – both human and non-human, real and unreal – involved in networking initiatives and proposes some thoughts on the implications of such a sociology of associations for both leadership and governance.

Deleuze and the teenage mother: trouble makers for education and transition

The title of this chapter is doing some work, albeit in a somewhat awkward fashion. Giles Deleuze appears, philosopher of a “bastard kind” (Massumi 1992, 1). Deleuze opens the work because he, and his concepts, do something they are rather good at: a bit of troubling, a bit of “prying open” of habitual ways of thinking (Massumi 1987, xv). In this chapter that bit of troubling and prying open is directed toward a rethinking of youth transition and the role of schools in that particular form of ‘becoming’. Teenage mothers appear as they, too, are ‘known’ to be trouble makers: the ‘teenage mother’ signifier is by default a negative one. As Sara found, ‘teenage mother’ as a signifier doesn’t rest easily alongside ‘school girl’ as a signifier. It is this assemblage of teenager+parent+school student — a gathering in which I too was once involved (Kamp and Kelly forthcoming) — that is the focus of this chapter.