Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Unfolding Lives: Youth, Gender and Change

2012; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00385.x

1099-0860

Ann Phoenix,

Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

Unfolding Lives: Youth, Gender and Change By Rachel, ThomsonBristol: Policy Press, 2009 ISBN 9781847420510, 202 pp, £65 (hb) The question of how young people grow up is one that concerns all societies and parents and young people themselves. This partly accounts for why there has been such a volume of research and publications on the transition to adulthood and on development over time. What is missing from most work in this area, however, is an understanding of how this happens for particular young people, why it happens and how socio-structural and psychological factors are inextricably linked in the process. In particular, there is a dearth of analyses crafted from young people’s own viewpoints. In Unfolding Lives: Youth, Gender and Change, Rachel Thomson has produced new insights by engaging with these issues in innovative ways. She situates in-depth insights about individuals in macrosocial processes of gender, racialisation, social class, geography, temporality and generation. The research on which this book draws is a unique, longitudinal qualitative study of 100 young people in five localities in the UK that followed them for 10 years from their early teenage years in the 1990s, to their twenties in the mid noughties (see Henderson and others, 2007). This text takes a deep view of four of these young people, chosen because they are ‘emblematic of the kinds of situations that young people find and make, and the responses and pathways that are available to them’ (p.1). A central part of Thomson’s contribution is to show ‘how a singular life is forged from a range of possible destinies’ (p.1). The resulting book is a psychosocial text that uses depth, rather than breadth, to generate ‘a route towards generalisation’ (p.3), while recognising that there is no standard youth transition. The method that underpins this book is ‘a focus on biographical form, cultural resource and the particular as a route into generalisation’ (p.9) using ‘typical’ biographical narrative cases as emergent forms. The ten chapters can be viewed as divided into three parts. The first three chapters deal with literature on youth transitions, with a ‘method-in-practice’ that involves constructing longitudinal case histories and a critical engagement with literature on gender and social change. The second part presents the four case studies separated into individual chapters. The young people chosen are Sherleen, a British African Caribbean young woman (interviewed four times from 13 to 16 years) for whom educational attainment is a key issue played out in her familial and intimate relationships; Stan, a White, middle-class young man (interviewed three times from 18 to 20 years), who ‘experiments’ with consumption, religion and employment in the process of negotiating his social position; Devon, a White, working-class man (interviewed four times from 18 to 21 years), who negotiates ways to establish an identity as a gay young man over the course of the study and Karin, a Northern-Irish Protestant young woman (interviewed four times between 16 and 19 years), who has to deal with the inclusions and exclusions common in her local milieu as she negotiates education. The final part consists of three chapters designed to interrupt easy readings of the case studies by first presenting data from two of the ‘cases’, Devon and Sherleen collected after the earlier analysis were complete, to show that lives are in process, rather than finished at the point at which any particular interview is conducted. The second chapter in the final section attempts to move from the analysis of individual cases to an understanding of wider social processes. The final chapter considers the ways in which reflexivity and agency operate for the four young people. Thomson explains that each of the four cases she has chosen point to a ‘hotspot’ in contemporary youth transitions: the educational success of Black girls; the downward social mobility of the new middle classes; the ‘mainstreaming’ of gay lives and young women making ‘gender trouble’. It is, therefore, not surprising that this book presents insights into these issues drawing on the four lives that constitute its focus. Its innovativeness lies, however, in the ways in which it fleshes out the understanding of young people’s negotiations of their social positioning and the ways in which those negotiations are situated in generations, localities and socio-structural groupings; sometimes producing surprising effects and settlements. For example, Sherleen’s educational project is part of an intergenerational strategy, but the changes and developments in her mother’s trajectory (ending her relationship with her boyfriend and moving into and out of depression) led to ‘tensions between her identification with her mother and her assertion of her difference from her’ (p.59). Equally, it led Sherleen to adjust her notions of the activities she should be involved in (e.g. dropping martial arts because her mother’s ex-boyfriend introduced her to it) and the family members on whom she can depend (spending more time at her grandmother’s house). We see her identities, in a number of domains, in process in ways that would generally be flattened out in research. We also see intense personal and identity changes for Stan, who initially expects that he will go to university with his peers, but has to transform his plans when he does not get the ‘A’ levels he expects. Stan moves between identities constructed through masculine sports and those founded on Christianity and romantic love. While Sherleen negotiates upward social mobility, Stan draws on familial and cultural resources to negotiate what seems likely to be downward social mobility. This is a scholarly text that is theoretically dense and methodologically illuminating. Thomson draws, for example, on Bourdieu’s notion of social field, McNay’s notion of the generativity of agency, Bjerrum Nielsen and Rudberg’s distinctions between gender identity and gender subjectivity as well as the body of work on individualisation and detraditionalisation. In doing so, she lays out these theoretical frames in ways that will help readers who do not know the theories to apprehend their main points. For those who already know them, Thomson indicates why it is important to ask other questions than where young people are situated ‘within a hierarchy of more of less “detraditionalised” gender identities’ (p. 177). She shows that young people are constantly in the process of doing gendered relations in ways that are consequential. She argues that McNay’s generative framework is well suited to dealing with the ways in which, when faced with complexity and difference, individual responses may be unexpected and may facilitate, buttress or hinder social change rather than simply reflecting or producing it. Although it is theoretically sophisticated, ‘Unfolding Lives’ is written with a light touch that makes it possible to read it almost as a novel, searching for the story of how the four lives unfold. Thomson has a lucid and engaging writing style marked by eloquent turns of phrase and a sense of excitement and interest in the issues she addresses. This is, however, undoubtedly also a text that illuminates the research process and the substantive area of youth, gender and social change. The fact, for example, that the research informing this book is prospective makes it possible to engage with the retrospective nature of accounts and identity constructions that transform the past, and with how the future is adjusted as psychosocial circumstances change. In addition, the opportunity to see into four young people’s lives in depth, and from their perspectives, while situating them in their historical period and amongst their peers is a privilege for those interested in narratives, biographies and young people’s social transitions. As with any book, there are some areas with which I might take issue. The way in which the young people’s accounts are presented as a series of ‘partial narratives’ (p. 45) to capture different ‘fields’ (in Bourdieu’s sense) of their existence, can sometimes be frustrating. At times this makes it difficult to get a clear sense of the young people’s chronological stories and trajectories since the quotes in different sections move back and forth through time. Arguably, however, by this means, Thomson manages not to preempt the young people’s stories, but to allow them, and the analysis, to unfold. Along the way, it allows her to raise and address questions about the unevenness, relationality and mutability of development in different contexts and over time. Then too, I wondered whether the metaphor that informs the title ‘Unfolding Lives’ is too static. However, this book undoubtedly manages to convey that the young people’s lives are not preset since none of the four case studies is of a straightforward transition. There are, of course, always issues about how much analytic weight a small number of research participants can bear when macrosocial and microsocial processes are being investigated. However, the richness of the individual cases, drawn from the larger study, is uniquely illuminating. This book will, hopefully, be widely read across the social sciences and by those interested in, or grappling with, innovative methodologies, particularly in relation to secondary qualitative analysis or longitudinal qualitative studies as well as reflexivity and temporality.