The madness that is the world:young activists' emotional reasoning and their participation in a local Occupy movement

The focus of this paper is young people’s participation in the Occupy protest movement that emerged in the early autumn of 2011. Its concern is with the emotional dimensions of this and in particular the significance of emotions to the reasoning of young people who came to commit significant time and energy to the movement. Its starting point is the critique of emotions as narrowly subjective, whereby the passions that events like Occupy arouse are treated as beyond the scope of human reason. The rightful rejection of this reductionist argument has given rise to an interest in under- standings of the emotional content of social and political protest as normatively con- stituted, but this paper seeks a different perspective by arguing that the emotions of Occupy activists can be regarded as a reasonable force. It does so by discussing find- ings from long-term qualitative research with a Local Occupy movement somewhere in England and Wales. Using the arguments of social realists, the paper explores this data to examine why things matter sufficiently for young people to care about them and how the emotional force that this involves constitutes an indispensable source of reason in young activists’ decisions to become involved in Local Occupy

Picture this: researching child workers

Visual methods such as photography are under-used in the active process of sociological research. As rare as visual methods are, it is even rarer for the resultant images to be made by rather than of research participants. Primarily, the paper explores the challenges and contradictions of using photography within a multi-method approach. We consider processes for analysing visual data, different ways of utilising visual methods in sociological research, and the use of primary and secondary data, or, simple illustration versus active visual exploration of the social. The question of triangulation of visual data against text and testimony versus a stand-alone approach is explored in depth

Television news and the symbolic criminalisation of young people

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 9(1), 75 - 90, 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14616700701768105.This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Bringing the Street Back In:Considering Strategy, Contingency and Relative Good Fortune in Street Children’s Access to Paid Work in Accra

A sociology of street children has emerged defined by its rejection of the dominant narratives of child welfare organisations that identify the street as the root cause of children’s immiseration and improper socialisation. In its place, sociological analysis has undermined the value of conceptualising street children as a coherent group on the street and in a parallel move has looked to conceptually reposition street children away from assumptions of passivity and neglect, towards a foundational insistence that the starting place for analysis is the positioning of street children as active and strategic social agents. It is the adequacy of this latter concern that is the focus of this article. By reintroducing the location of children within the social relations of the informal street economy, this article draws upon extensive and long-term qualitative research examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. The argument here is that sociological notions of strategic action and efficacious agency seem ill-suited to accounting for the dilemmas and difficulties that street children’s quests for paid work inevitably involve. Rather, it is relative good fortune within the radical uncertainty of the social relations of the informal street economy that seems much more appropriate to accounting for how these children are integrated into wor

Young people's experiences of the Youth Training Scheme : a case study of recent state intervention in the youth labour market

The Youth Training Scheme (YTS) is a state sponsored training programme for 16 and 17 year old schoolleavers. This thesis sets out to explore how young people experience leaving school and enter the YTS. It draws on data generated by a one-off survey of fifth form school pupils, semi-structured interviews amongst a sample of YTS trainees and previously unpublished figures from the Training Agency's 1 100% Follow-Up Survey of YTS Leavers'. The thesis takes some of the key assumptions and assertions on which YTS' claimed successes have been built and examines them in relation to the actual ways in which young people make sense of, and cope with, the transition from school to a training scheme. There has been much written about the development of YTS but there is an acknowledged dearth of information on the views and experiences of young people themselves. In addressing this problem, the thesis provides an addition to the existing body of sociological knowledge relating to young people and their movement into the labour market. Furthermore, the thesis addresses some important policy considerations relating to Britain's continued inability to provide youngsters with quality training for jobs. Contrary to claims that YTS has 'revolutionized' young people's attitudes towards training and the labour market, the research illustrates its continued failure to provide them with a credible training alternative on leaving school. YTS fails to grasp the significance of work for many working class youngsters, as they grow up and prepare to leave school, and so ignores their consequent ambivalence towards the training package offered by the Scheme. In addition, it illustrates that YTS has failed to provide youngsters with a period of quality foundation training and explores some of the mechanisms that account for the Scheme's chronic inability to retain youngsters for the full length of their training programmes. It also explores young people's attitudes towards compulsory training and concludes with some pointers as to the likely achievements of its successor, Youth Training