Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies

This book takes a global perspective to address the concept of belonging in youth studies, interrogating its emergence as a reoccurring theme in the literature and elucidating its benefits and shortcomings. While belonging offers new alignments across previously divergent approaches to youth studies, its pervasiveness in the field has led to criticism that it means both everything and nothing and thus requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. The authors do this work to provide an accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses belonging by focusing on transitions, participation, citizenship and mobility to address its theoretical and historical underpinnings and its prevalence in youth policy and research.

“A fascinating, rigorous and wide-ranging exploration of the concept of ‘belonging’ with respect to young people’s lives. It brings together scholarship from across the globe to consider how ideas about belonging impact on our understandings of transitions, participation, citizenship and mobilities. An important and authoritative new text for youth researchers, written by three key scholars in the field.”
—Rachel Brooks, Professor, University of Surrey, UK“An incisive interrogation of ‘belonging’ as an idea and as a framing device. It shows that, as productive as ‘belonging’ has been across youth studies, it is poorly theorised. It offers a genealogy of uses of belonging and a systematic unpacking of its limitations and possibilities. It illustrates insightfully that in a mobile, global world we need a relational and dynamic understanding of the many faces of belonging.”  —Greg Noble, Professor, Western Sydney University, Australia