Howard Williamson

Conceptualizing citizenship: young people and the transition to adulthood

This paper examines the relationship between citizenship and young peoples’ social identities. The concept of social citizenship is explored in the context of contemporary debates about the transition to adult status. In the light of recent calls for an education for citizenship, at both compulsory and post‐compulsory levels, the paper makes a timely contribution to the ongoing discussion of what constitutes social citizenship, by whom and to what end. The paper has three main sections. In the first, Marshalls (1950) contribution to our modern‐day understanding of citizenship is examined. In the second section the paper particularly addresses the connections between young people, adulthood and citizenship. In the final section attention is turned to the problems of combining citizenship with other, complex, aspects of young peoples’ social identities. In doing so the paper offers a critique of the concept of active citizenship.

Radicalisation to retreat: responses of the young to austerity Europe

The prospects for young people in Europe look bleak. The ‘social condition’ of young people is characterised by experiences of exclusion, and a sense of betrayal and anger at having been ‘sacrificed’ by the older generation. Many more young people, from more diverse backgrounds and perspectives, are now exposed to precarious social circumstances. Spontaneous and planned ‘riots’ and urban protest have displayed the anger and the anxieties of youth in Europe. How young people will continue to respond to these conditions is clearly a matter for conjecture and there is a range of possibilities. The democratic imperative is by no means certain. This paper advances a scenario in which historically socially disadvantaged youth may connect with newly intellectually disaffected young people to produce either more toxic or more creative alliances amongst the young.

Mini‐Enterprise in Schools: The Pupils’ Experience

Abstract Mini‐enterprise in schools is the most tangible manifestation of ‘education for enteprise’. Despite its growing presence in schools, and diverse views about its potential impact, little is known about how pupils experience such activity. Findings suggest that interpersonal learning objectives are achieved effectively through mini‐enterprise but more narrow economic goals (such as fostering positive attitudes towards self‐employment) may not be. This paper sets out the pupils’ perspective on mini‐enterprise in schools and raises questions about current models of practice.

Lost youth in the global city: class, culture and the urban imaginary

In his famous book The Uses of Literacy first published in 1957, the cultural studies scholar Richard Hoggart meticulously observes and archives the changing landscape of post-war British working-class culture. Hoggart envisions a rapidly changing world in which some of the cherished traditions of British working-class culture, at least as he sees them, are being supplanted by a new gaudy modernism. Hoggart’s roving critical eye is already drawn to the newly emergent consumerist practices related to cheap films, grubby crime novellas and ‘spicy magazines’. Ever forthright in his opinions, Hoggart largely regards this phenomenon as ‘a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious simulations’, a hollow consumerism that amounts to little more than ‘sex in shiny packets’ (1966 [1957], 246). What is evident in Hoggart’s colourful account of working-class culture is an unreflexive commitment to discernment. Having gained a scholarship granting access to a grammar school education, Hoggart sought to act as a spokesperson who wanted to preserve the elements of working-class life he felt were worthy of being seen as ‘cultural’. Inevitably he is bound to particular ‘practices of distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984) and is scornful of many of the popular pastimes being taken up by a new generation of post-war working-class youth. Amongst this increasingly visible youth culture is to be found the ‘Juke-Box Boys’, a subculture of young men who hang out at night in harshly-lit milk-bars listening to the latest ‘rock-n-roll’ blaring out from ‘nickelodeons’. For Hoggart the milk-bars are compared unfavourably with the homes of the urban poor and even the local ale houses that populate the working-class landscape. He observes: