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.

“Anita Harris, Hernam Cuervo, and Johanna Wyn have written a brave pioneering book, exploring how this mercurial idea has been used and how it can in the future contribute to youth studies and-or the sociology of youth. They take readers on a scholarly and illuminating journey. It is a surprising journey … . The result is a carefully curated historic and contemporary tour of the many social sciences that help make up youth studies.” (Judith Bessant, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, Vol. 5 (1), March, 2022) “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 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

“This book is a game changer for youth studies. Offering a new and long overdue take on the turn to belonging in youth policy and research, it interrogates ideas about young people and relationality and how these are deployed particularly in settler-colonial nations. It opens up exciting new spaces for understanding how young people consider and enact connectedness in difficult times. This is an important must-read analysis from a team of leading youth studies scholars.”
—Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori Education, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

“This groundbreaking book is a must read for anyone interested in Youth Studies. Written by three world leading scholars it not only offers new insights into the recent ‘turn’ towards belonging, drawing upon a historical and a global analysis, but also introduces new ways of conceptualising young people’s lives today. One of its unique and pleasing features is its engagement with indigenous ideas and alternative world views illustrating the important contribution they can and do make to these debates.”
—Alan France, Professor of Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand

“In this thoughtful and original book, acclaimed youth studies researchers Johanna Wyn, Anita Harris and Hernan Cuervo turn a critical eye on the idea of belonging. They demonstrate how belonging, as a concept, as practice and as ways of being, can be used to illuminate the complexities of young people’s lives. It is indispensable reading for anyone wanting to understand how young people study, work and play in families, schools, communities and nation-states in late modernity. “
—Judith Bessant, Professor, Schools of Global, Urban & Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia

“This innovative book thoroughly and critically addresses a compelling question circulating among youth researches today: do we really need the concept of belonging to understandyoung people’s new life experiences? And why? As the volume highlights, using empirical examples, for young people the notion of belonging is intertwined with that of becoming. The authors unveil the reasons for this, offering a critical and expert view on the potential and limits of the concept.”
—Carmen Leccardi, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Anita Harris is Research Professor in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia. Her books include Future Girl (2004) and Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (2012).

Hernan Cuervo is Associate Professor in the Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia. His latest book is Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South (2019).

Johanna Wyn is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia, and the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.