Dorothy Bottrell

Understanding ‘Marginal’ Perspectives Towards a Social Theory of Resilience

This article contributes to a social theory of resilience. It critiques aspects of developmental and individual-level analyses in the resilience literature, arguing for the significance of social identities and collective experience to resilience. Drawing on a study of the experiences of young people from an inner-city public housing estate in Sydney, key themes of the young people’s accounts engage with both classic and constructivist perspectives. Resistance based resilience is claimed to indicate the social constitution of individuals in local relations, suggesting that interventions for resilience building need to recognize the embeddedness of resilience in social inequities, social processes and the differentiated societal and ideological expectations of young people. How resilience is conceptualized is central to resilience building interventions. Here the case is put for the importance of resources to support and strengthen the resilience of marginalized youth.

Resistance, Resilience and Social Identities: Reframing ‘Problem Youth’ and the Problem of Schooling

This paper explores the experiences of young people on a public housing estate in inner-city Sydney. Their relations to schooling, truancy and participation in the illicit activities of the local youth network are framed as resistances, as necessary identity work, given the context of their marginalisation. In their explication of the dynamics of schooling, the network and the neighbourhood, young people claim the margins, as an alternative ‘centre’ where they obtain status, positive reputation, and a sense of belonging to their people. Social identity is central to their experiences and cultural management. The argument is made for two distinct forms of belonging to identifiable groups: that which is ‘chosen’, claimed and desired; as well as ‘unchosen’, ascribed and positioned, identity. How outsiders see them is largely an unchosen identity which young people resist. Chosen identity is mainly associated with the norms and values of the margins. In their transgressions of dominant norms, attempts to counter negative stereotypes, and social critiques, young peoples strengths despite adversity are evident. Resistances are thus reframed as resilience.

Changes and Exchanges in Marginal Youth Transitions

While some groups of young people may negotiate successful transitions to work, others are unable or unlikely to do so. The concept of ‘fair exchange’ is pertinent to understanding youth transitions in their formative stages through educational experiences. Patterns of disrupted education challenge the education–work nexus not only because failure in education may limit labour market competitiveness but because the perceived false promises of educational exchange, together with the immediate and available rewards of local cultural options, may, from young peoples perspectives, necessitate alternative transitions. The ascendancies of risk management constitute the emergence of binary systems of youth governance in which youth are dichotomised as potential citizen-workers or people in need of control and discipline. The hardening of youth justice and the contraction of welfare constrict the legitimate places of youth participation. Yet marginalised youth do not necessarily give up the ideal of a fair exchange, as their continued efforts in school and orientations towards work show. However, the ‘fair exchange’ within the youth justice system is fundamentally different from exchanges within other systems, warranting consideration of how failure in education together with forms of youth governance are implicated in the questionable, on social justice grounds, alternative transitions through youth justice.

Managing everyday life: the conceptualisation and value of cultural capital in navigating everyday life for working-class youth

This article draws upon Bourdieus concept of ‘cultural capital’ to examine how working-class young people negotiate and navigate everyday life in their neighbourhoods. Young peoples relationship with cultural capital has traditionally been conceptualised by its value in the formal institutional setting (i.e. schools); being ‘owned’ and ‘used’ by parents or professional workers such as teachers to advantage (or disadvantage) certain groups; or by being passed down to young people through intergenerational linkages. Limited recognition has been given to the embodied and objectified nature of cultural capital in the lives of the young themselves or how it may operate in different informal settings and social interactions to structure and situate their individual agency. This article centralises the voices of a group of young people living in British working-class neighbourhoods to show how certain cultural illiteracies and cultural assets help them manage everyday life. Life in such areas is both ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’ and requires them to draw upon forms of cultural capital recognised amongst their peers to help them construct ‘safe’ and ‘successful’ routes through working-class transitions.

Young People’s Relations to Crime: Pathways across Ecologies

This article analyses young people’s accounts of their relations to crime, elucidating microecological factors emphasized in developmental criminological explanations of offending and how macroecological forces emphasized in critical criminology enter their lives. Interrelated victimization, witnessing crime, cultural and societal access routes and institutional interventions including criminalization constitute their relations to crime and are formative of life pathways that include offending. Young people’s accounts suggest the need to consider the effects of distal systems both in the construction of crime as a social problem and their constitutive effects in local ecologies and individual lives.

Local Resources and Distal Decisions: The Political Ecology of Resilience

This chapter examines the resilience of young people as they cope with processes of school exclusion, placement as students with emotional and behavioral difficulties (EBDs), and interactions with the criminal justice system. The authors report findings from a qualitative study in the United Kingdom called “Pathways Into and Out of Crime: Risk, Resilience and Diversity” that showed links between criminality, school experiences, and coping.

Valued outcomes in the counter-spaces of alternative education programs: success but on whose scale?

For marginalised young people, alternative education settings - referred to here as flexible learning programs (FLPs) - are thought to provide a powerful ‘counter-space’ to damaging experiences of mainstream schooling. Such programs are inherently contradictory, with potential to also reproduce stigma and disadvantage. The provision of secondary schooling via FLPs is significant. In Australia, for example, the sector serves over 70,000 students. A better understanding of student experiences and outcomes in these educational spaces is needed. Drawing on interview data with staff, students, and graduates from two FLPs in Victoria, this paper employs Sojas ideas about conceived, perceived, and lived space to explore what outcomes are valued and to consider how success is measured in these programs. The paper shows that FLP staff and students valued a diverse range of academic, social, and personal outcomes that support a more expansive vision of education and monitoring student success than dominant perspectives. The paper also suggests that these FLPs are both a counter-space and a space that connects back to the mainstream, optimally understood as third space, a hybrid place, bringing together the conventional and the alternative to create a valued and valuable education for marginalised young people.

Understanding the pathways to resilience: voices from Chinese adolescents

Drawing on social ecological resilience frameworks, this study added adolescents’ voices to explore how they achieve academic and behavioural competencies despite being in high-risk environments in a Chinese context. Thirty-one 11th grade resilient students (12 male and 19 female) based on the previous quantitative results were interviewed. Results showed that the key people in the lives of resilient individuals are located in the micro-system of individuals’ ecological social environment (e.g., family and school). They have six important roles: caring and support in everyday life; academic expectations and involvement; spiritual encouragement; behavioural discipline and guidance; providing opportunities for meaningful involvement and role modelling. In addition, having positive life goals, perseverance and confidence were identified as common attributes of the resilient Chinese adolescents. Students’ accounts indicate that their resilience is grounded in cultural beliefs.

Social support, academic adversity and academic buoyancy: a person-centred analysis and implications for academic outcomes

Abstract The present study employed person-centred analyses that enabled identification of groups of students separated on the basis of their perceptions of social support (home and community), academic support, academic adversity and academic buoyancy. Among a sample of 249 young people, including many from high-needs communities, cluster analysis revealed three distinct groups of students: the thriver, supported struggler and at-risk struggler. We compared the three groups on their academic motivation. Analyses revealed significant differences between groups in adaptive motivation outcomes, but no differences in impeding or maladaptive motivation outcomes. Combined, the results speak to the importance of support and academic buoyancy for positive student outcomes.

Resilienz: Stärken und Ressourcen im Jugendalter

Um ein sozial-okologisches, kontextbezogenes Verstandnis von Resilienz zu entwickeln, werden wir im Folgenden drei Prinzipien diskutieren: (1) Die Umwelt ist wichtiger als die Anlage, (2) die Wirkung resilienzbezogener Prozesse hangt von der Risikobelastung ab, (3) Kontext und Kultur beeinflussen protektive Prozesse. Sie zeigen weltweit Homogenitat und Heterogenitat. Es mag sein, dass sich ein gewisser Prozentsatz von Personen innerhalb einer Population, die sehr ungunstigen Bedingungen ausgesetzt ist, trotz aller Widrigkeiten behaupten wird. Mit unserer Auffassung von Resilienz verbindet sich jedoch die Uberzeugung, dass wir fur die meisten Menschen eine positive Entwicklung wahrscheinlicher machen konnen und auch die gefahrdetsten Menschen sich positiv entwickeln konnen, wenn wir durch die Veranderung ihrer Umwelt forderliche Bedingungen schaffen (Rutter 2007). Wie Scheper-Hughes (2008) zeigt, konnen sich Menschen – als waren sie biologisch entsprechend vorprogrammiert – widerstandsfahig zeigen. Aber erst unsere Gedanken, Handlungen und die uns zur Verfugung stehende Unterstutzung machen es uns moglich, Resilienz zu zeigen: „While theories of human vulnerability and trauma acknowledge the weight of the world on the lives of the poor, the excluded, and the oppressed, human frailty is matched by a possibly even bio-evolutionarily derived, certainly historically situated, and culturally elaborated capacity for resilience. While for many years searching in the nooks and crannies of oppressed and excluded communities for political mobilizations and organized resistance in the face of terror as usual, I found, instead, forms of everyday resilience“ (ebd., S. 52). Diese alltagliche Resilienz erwachst aus unterschiedlichen Prozessen wie sozialer Integration, gegenseitiger Unterstutzung und der Gewahrung von Sicherheit – all dies sind Aspekte einer Gemeinschaft, die Individuen gemeinsam beeinflussen konnen. Diese eher okologische Perspektive von Resilienz steht hier im Zentrum unserer Betrachtung.