COMPONENTES ESENCIALES DE UN PLAN

Beneath the broad banner of youth studies, ‘youth’ are often defined in culturally specific ways.

While definitions usually involve age categories, these vary across contexts as the prevailing social, political and economic relations of any given society provide the meanings of age. South Africa classifies youth as being between the ages of 14 and 35 years, whereas ‘developed’ nations typically have an upper age limit of 25 years (Graham, 2012:6). This illustrates how understandings of childhood and youth do not solely refer to biology, and ‘youth’ is ‘not a fixed demographic cohort’

(De Boeck and Honwana, 2005:4). Instead, classifications of young people are often strategic and can be contested. This is evident through the use of terms such as ‘child soldier’, ‘teenage mother’

and ‘youth violence,’ among others. Such labels ‘authorise the interpretation of biological chronology in social terms that may shift according to socio-political circumstances’ (Bucholtz, 2002:527). Yet despite a lack of consensus around the topic of age, the category of youth is commonly viewed as a period of transition – the liminal phase between childhood and adulthood (Kehily, 2007). What this ‘transition’ means is variable, as lives are shaped along multiple paths of

transition rather than a single path or through a predefined set of stages, and the possibilities available to young people varies greatly across contexts (Johnson-Hanks, 2002).

As both an ‘emerging influence’ and ‘submerged by power’ (Coulter, 1998), ‘youth’ occupy numerous positions at once. This is evident through the ways in which public discourses have positioned young people both as ‘vandals’ and ‘breakers’, as well as ‘vanguards’ and ‘makers’ who create new networks, economic opportunities, cultural developments and social criticisms of the worlds they occupy (Honwana and de Boeck, 2005). Poststructural theories have alerted me to the different language used to describe ‘youth,’ a concept which is supposedly neutral and ungendered but remains implicitly male and, in being defined differently within particular contexts, has served particular purposes.

Within existing literature, most theories about childhood and youth have originated from the West and imposed Western notions onto the Global South with little regard for these young people’s actual realities (Diptee and Trotman, 2014:437). While there has been an increasing focus on exploring the lives of youth in developing countries, much of the global policy discourse is still concerned with young people’s ‘transition into adulthood’ (Morrow, 2013). This implies that individuals develop in linear ways, separate from their families and communities, and that there are identifiable features that indicate a ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ transition to adulthood, which is understood in normative and universalising terms. Depending on the social circumstances of the young person, it has been assumed that transitioning includes all or some of the following experiences: entering secondary school, leaving school, entering further education, training or employment, moving away from the birth family, entering marriage, having children, and voting (Cuervo and Wyn, 2014). Such an understanding of ‘transition’ has been critiqued for its assumption of a linear progression through a number of ‘stages’ by which young people enter into

‘adulthood’ (Gale and Parker, 2014:739). Social scientists have argued that it owes too much to naturalistic, universal discourses of psychosocial development (Cohen and Ainley, 2000), which aim to ensure that ‘young people are steered on a path into healthy adulthood’ (Horowitz and Bromnick, 2007:209). These discourses valorise and normalise particular ‘pathways,’ espousing ideals that are largely Western, highly classed, and which are particularly difficult for youth in ‘Third World’ settings to emulate (Jeffrey and McDowell, 2004:137). This means that the lives of young people that do not align with these established markers of progress too easily become invisible or pathologised.

Despite immense disparities in the experiences of youth across contexts, international policy literature on transitions often fails to reflect upon the socioeconomic contexts in which young people

from the Third World find themselves, that is, growing up in societies that can be said to be in transition themselves, with rapid social change and often uneven economic development (Morrow, 2013). In recognition of this, there has been a move within youth studies towards acknowledging the fragmented, complex nature of transitions, whereby ‘young people may engage in adult practices incrementally and early, across multiple dimensions of their lives’ (Stokes and Wyn, 2007:498). Some scholars have even suggested that the concept of transitions is redundant, because it sets up false dichotomies – between child and adult, school and work, marriage and leaving home - and assumes that young people move straightforwardly from one state to the next (Jeffrey, 2010).

Despite its shortcomings, I have chosen to use the word ‘transitions’ in this research. This is because I feel that it has the potential to represent how, in environments that ascribe to the institution of education, both young people and the social world of which they are a part anticipate a change or movement, through space and time, to occur at the end of secondary schooling. I demonstrate that these transitions are often uncertain and elusive, and that many young people may struggle to live up to the aspirations for post-school transitions that they have been encouraged to take on. An interest in how young people identify their future selves is at the heart of my understanding of transition as a process of continual ‘becoming’, influenced by a desire for

‘belonging’ (Cuervo and Wyn, 2012). The metaphor of belonging draws attention to how institutions and formal processes includes and excludes certain people. This is of interest for my research given that the youth in my study, having been historically disadvantaged and marginalised from education and employment, often have to work particularly hard to belong to the futures they desire.

While an interest in ‘belonging’ is often associated with citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 2011), my attention is not on institutionalised politics but rather the broader material conditions and subjective elements that connect young people to the past, present and future as well as to particular spaces.

My understanding of ‘space’, discussed further in Chapter Six, sees it as a relational concept, whereby locations are not bounded enclosures in themselves and social space contains ‘a local articulation within a wider world’ (Massey, 1994:3). The social construction of space refers to the production of material and symbolic practices in localised contexts, themselves ‘produced within wider circuits of global, national and local scales’ (Fataar, 2007:601).

Another important dimension of youth’s envisionings of the future is their ties and relationships to others, be it family, friends, community members etc. Belonging understood in this way is about commonalities and differences with others, the ‘social relationships that provide a life anchor and often play a crucial role in decision-making about the future’ (Thomson, 2007:909). While any

imagining of the future may be idiosyncratic, ‘the forms of imagination belong to the social field’

(Johnson-Hanks, 2002:878). Johnson-Hanks eloquently expresses this by saying that ‘the temporal coordination that young people face is the partially realised project of the social institutions that frame one’s alternatives, which make certain aspirations plausible, possible, or almost unthinkable’

(2002:878).

As South Africa transitioned into democracy, there was a sense of immense potential and opportunity for the young of the nation, who have been considered crucial in the building of a different and brighter future, whereby once unthinkable aspirations suddenly became thinkable.

However, for many young black South Africans in particular, this period of social transition has been compounded by severe structural constraints, making it difficult for them to reach normative markers of autonomous ‘adulthood,’ such as employment, completing tertiary ed ucation or being financially independent of their families or the state. Their ‘transitions’ to adulthood are often

‘protracted or even permanent’ and typically involve a period of ‘waithood’ (Crause and Booyens, 2010).