Social Citizenship Aspirations: An Alternative Line of Analysis of the Social Reproduction of Youth Inequality

Abstract

Lifting the aspirations of disadvantaged young people has been a key focus within youth policies, often constructed as a solution to the complicated problem of achieving social mobility. A growing body of work critiques such policy discourses for their inadequate conceptualizations of aspirations. Particularly, the problematic framing of community culture and the tendency to allocate the problem of low aspirations to individuals’ psyche and cultural upbringing have been critiqued. Despite such critiques, this article argues for the importance of analysing disadvantaged young people’s aspirations, as aspirations play a crucial role in determining outcomes. However, further theorizing is needed to capture a more nuanced view on the intersection between material and social embeddedness and individual agency. The concept of social citizenship aspirations is introduced to develop a framework for understanding the reproduction of youth inequality, which also acknowledges agency as an expression of how young people themselves create meaningful lives.

Keywords

Aspirations belonging citizenship young people youth policy

Introduction

Strong assumptions exist in contemporary policy and populist discourses, including within the Australian and the wider Global North context, that the perceived ‘aspirational deficits’ of certain groups of young people contribute to their limited social mobility and poorer educational outcomes (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Reay, 2013; Spohrer et al., 2017). Such an emphasis reorients the understanding of socio-economic disadvantage from a product of structural inequality in society to an attribute or deficit of the individual (France, 2008; Mills & Pini, 2015). Sociologists of youth and education have highlighted the limited evidence supporting assumptions about the depressed aspirations of disadvantaged young people (Kintrea et al., 2015), arguing that such conceptualizations further serve to responsibilize the individual, by seeing the problematic area in need of change as residing within young people themselves (Spohrer et al., 2017). Teaching socio-economically disadvantaged young people to have high aspirations is in itself not enough to ensure successful outcomes (Le Gallais & Hatcher, 2014), as aspirations transfer to outcomes primarily via the mobilization of economic, social and cultural resources (Devine, 2004). Although policy discourses focusing on raising the aspirations of disadvantaged young people are seen as simplistic and problematic by many scholars, the argument put forward here is that we should not discount analysing and working with young people’s aspirations, as aspirations play a crucial role in determining longer-term outcomes (Goodman & Gregg, 2010). Through engaging with relevant literature in the field of sociology of youth, this article seeks to develop a more complex understanding of how disadvantage shapes young people’s aspirations by engaging with the concept of social citizenship.

Within youth studies, aspirations have been conceptualized as ways of thinking about the future (Woodman, 2011), involving plans, hopes and dreams (Nilsen, 1999), as well as opportunities and choices (Bryant & Ellard, 2015). Aspirations are seen as goal-orientated and related to both the future and the agency of the self (Hart, 2012), as they drive actions in the present (Quaglia & Cobb, 1996). Such meanings and visions of ‘the good life’ have been found to be context-dependent, specific to ethnicity, class, age and gender (Reay et al., 2005; Wierenga, 2009), and significantly shaped by structure (Brannen & Nilsen, 2002; Bryant & Ellard, 2015; Colic-Peisker & Johnson, 2012). Aspirations have further been theorized as a neoliberal ideology (Mendick, 2018; Spohrer et al., 2017) reproducing and reconstructing social inequality (Gordon et al., 2005). ‘Aspirations’ are understood in this article as being embedded in the material and social context and made up of young people’s embodied and emotional longing to find a valorized place among their peers (Moensted, 2018).

Notwithstanding the recurrent focus on ‘lifting aspirations and increasing opportunities for those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds’ (Brown, 2013, p. 681), the language used to comprehend the forming of aspirations within education and social inclusion policy literature lacks both specificity and nuance. Aspirations are mainly understood as an attribute of individual motivation, predominantly discussed in relation to future education and employment expectations (Kintrea et al., 2015). Within such policy narratives, raising the aspirations of young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds is seen to ensure their smooth transition into mainstream society, thereby positioning young people in terms of both ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’ (Spohrer et al., 2017). This emphasis on the deficits of the disadvantaged thus links to policies aiming at disciplining and re-socializing ‘problem’ groups such as unemployed young people, single mothers and criminal youth through, for example, activation programmes (Bullen & Kenway, 2004). This viewpoint is echoed in educational policy aimed at raising expectations towards (and demands on) working-class students, assuming they and their parents lack sociable and appropriate aspirations (Camilleri-Cassar, 2014). These policies frame the issues of low student achievement as problems that can be tackled through remediating individual student deficits rather than addressed through the reform of curriculum and pedagogy (Zipin et al., 2015). Young people are ‘urged to insure themselves against the risk of unemployment and social exclusion’ (Billett et al., 2010) by engaging actively in and managing their own learning (Stokes & Wyn, 2007). The role of the state is displaced under such policy orientations, transferring the management of a range of social and economic risks as the responsibility of individuals, thereby framing limited social mobility as personal pathologies, including irresponsibility, immorality and limited aspirations (Mendick, 2018). Such conceptualizations are consistent with the continuing neoliberal political discourse of the active and ‘self-governing’ citizen (Billett et al., 2010; Kelly, 2006). A growing body of work critiques policy discourses concerned with raising aspirations because of such inadequate conceptualizations of aspirations (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; France & Roberts, 2017; Holloway et al., 2011; St. Clair & Benjamin, 2011) and for neglecting to recognize how young people’s material and social embeddedness, opportunity structures and chances shape aspirations (Howard et al., 2010; Threadgold & Nilan, 2009). Despite such critique, individualistic explanations of social disadvantage and stunted aspirations continue to be influential in social policy and populist debates (Parr, 2017).

In order to show how these individualistic perspectives harbour simplistic and erroneous assumptions about the reproduction of disadvantage, this article starts by investigating the ways in which disadvantaged groups have been conceptualized within contemporary social policy (Bullen & Kenway, 2004; MacDonald et al., 2014; Murray et al., 1996). Second, the article examines what sociological literature tells us about how aspirations are shaped and stunted, paying attention to how disadvantaged young people’s aspirations have been understood. This discussion frames the argument that although many researchers on youth studies have critiqued dominant neoliberal explanations of aspirations, young people’s agency has often been overlooked in such accounts favouring structuralist explanations of the reproductions of limited aspirations. Additionally, these tend towards a conceptualization of young people that is individualizing, unable to capture the social aspects of the reproduction of inequality. This article extends and develops the critique of the individualistic explanations of how disadvantage shapes aspirations by highlighting the need for a more relational and social approach to understanding this dynamic. Social embeddedness acknowledges young people’s connection to, and place within, multiple sets of nested communities and relationships (Tilleczek, 2011) and the ways these communities and connections constrain and nurture certain imaginations of available futures for ‘people like me’. Lastly, the concept of social citizenship aspirations is introduced, to develop a social and community-based framework for understanding the reproduction of youth inequality, which also acknowledges agency as an expression of how young people themselves create meaningful lives.

Defining Aspirations in Neoliberal Policy Discourses

The term ‘underclass’ is a highly contentious and controversial label used to describe disadvantaged groups (Murray, 1990), which has influenced public opinion by fuelling concerns about the assumed dangers of excluded and delinquent young people (MacDonald, 1997). The discourse of the ‘underclass’, together with that of ‘welfare dependency’ and ‘lifters and leaners’, has been, and continues to be, influential in terms of defining a particular construction of poverty and welfare, in both the USA and the UK (Parr, 2017), and has gained considerable currency in Australia (Bullen & Kenway, 2004; Marston et al., 2014; Mendes, 2014) and New Zealand (Beddoe, 2014; Brown, 2011; Nolan, 2007). This perspective focuses on the moral and cultural causes of poverty by arguing that material factors are less significant than the impoverishment of cultural and civic values among this group (Murray, 1990). ‘Aspirational deficits’ are, according to this perspective, transmitted from one generation to another via antisocial values (Murray, 1990).

Over the last two decades, the Australian government has combined a fiscal policy approach reliant on neoliberal economics, with social policies emphasizing participation, citizenship and social inclusion (Batsleer, 2013; McLeod, 2012; Savelsberg & Martin-Giles, 2008), and the need to target intergenerational disadvantage and improve the participation of ‘at-risk’ youth (McLeod, 2012). A key policy strategy for enhancing socially disadvantaged students’ participation in higher education is raising the aspirations of such students (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2011), seeing the capacity to aspire and work hard as the primary resource through which to overcome disadvantage (Mendick, 2018). Several researchers, employing a ‘governmentality’ framework, have argued that such government policies operate with a normative construction of the successful, self-governing, entrepreneurial subject able to negotiate the economic and cultural demands of neoliberal societies (Farrugia et al., 2015; Smyth et al., 2014). This normative centre allows policy regimes to identify and govern populations that deviate from this pathway. Young people who experience disengagement from school or complicated labour market transitions are therefore constituted as the problem, both for themselves and for society.

Certain youth behaviours and dispositions place at risk the development of particular ideal forms of future adult identities and the construction of ‘the array of psychological, cultural and sociological systems of thought that imagine the adult self as an entrepreneurial Self’ (Kelly, 2006, p. 25). Here, the youth-at-risk discourse functions as a representation of who young people as adults are supposed to become, by highlighting what young people are at risk of not becoming (Kelly, 2006). Such simplistic conceptualizations about marginalization, which focus on the characteristics of individuals by side-stepping any structural explanations, shape how public discourses conceptualize the issues and needs of disadvantaged groups, making it ‘more palatable to suggest more draconian measures to cut benefit spending’ (Beddoe, 2014, p. 53). Within the Australian context, the widespread public support for increasingly stringent welfare regulation and strict eligibility criteria is a consequence of such demeaning rhetoric towards recipients of welfare (Bullen & Kenway, 2004), echoed in very targeted social security policies such as Newstart Allowance and Youth Allowance.

Articulating young people as responsible for managing a range of risks associated with schooling, employment and peer relations has particular consequences for disadvantaged groups and has been criticized for penalizing vulnerable citizens by ignoring the special challenges faced by some groups (Barber, 2009; Bessant, 2003; Black et al., 2011). For instance, Billett et al. (2011) found, analysing young people’s transitions from school to work, that the growing emphasis on the individual in the relations between persons and society fails to amend the lack of access to cultural and social capital experienced by some young people. A similar finding was made by Savelsberg and Martin-Giles (2008), who argued that young people most in need are most likely to be subjected to punitive interventions. As they note, ‘rather than recognise and ameliorate the exclusionary dynamics, many youth policies exacerbate the problems, engaging in the “politics of enforcement”’ (Savelsberg & Martin-Giles, 2008, p. 29). Here, socio-economic changes and policy reforms combine to create new forms of social exclusion, further intensifying the blaming and punitive approach towards young people (Wyn, 2015).

Critiques of the Deficit Approach

As an alternative analysis of the causes leading to poverty and social exclusion, research favouring structuralist explanatory perspectives tends to see individuals faced with poverty as ‘victims of circumstances’ (MacDonald, 1997, p. 13). The ‘deprivation story’, as coined by MacDonald et al. (2014), explains the culture of marginalized communities in terms of structural disadvantage and the corresponding ‘cultural adaptation to social structural factors’ (MacDonald, 1997, p. 17). Here, the focus is on the long-term depression of opportunity structures and the effect this has on groups and individuals (Bullen & Kenway, 2004; White, 1996). Lister names the main structural disadvantages as: ‘unemployment, widening class differences, the exclusion of the very poorest from rapidly rising living standards, and a hardening of public attitudes’ (Lister, 1996, p. 2). These factors combine separate groups of individuals from mainstream society, thereby creating social exclusion.

Significant studies have disproved the deficit narrative of young people’s aspiration, demonstrating that across social class, gender and race, young people aspire to higher education and professional careers (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Archer, 2010; Mendick, 2018; St. Clair & Benjamin, 2011). Others have highlighted the explanatory limits of much research that focuses on the cultural practices, outlooks and lifestyles of the excluded without including a broader analysis of social and economic changes and how these might affect places and groups (Jeffrey & McDowell, 2004). Correspondingly, MacDonald and Marsh (2005) contest the individualist perspective on, for example, school disengagement displayed by working-class pupils, arguing that attitudes towards education need to be understood in view of the specific contemporary and historical conditions of a given neighbourhood. Furthermore, on the basis of qualitative research among young adults in deprived neighbourhoods, the researchers reject the ‘underclass’ thesis of the existence of a welfare-dependent, work-shy, morally questionable subculture, having instead found strong commitment to the ‘social and moral value of working for a living among the participants’ (MacDonald & Marsh, 2005, p. 123). Along similar lines, research among residents in social housing challenges the notion of intergenerational ‘worklessness’, concluding that the ‘problem’ of the residents was not a lack of motivation or work ethic, nor was it finding work as such, but instead avoiding becoming caught up in cycles of low-paid, insecure jobs and underemployment (Fletcher et al., 2008). Brown (2013) reaches a parallel conclusion, arguing that the ‘deficit model’ based on blaming the victims ignores much of the sociological evidence concerning social mobility and opportunity structures for marginalized groups.

Seeking to better grasp the social aspects that are part of the reproduction of inequality, much scholarship has turned towards Bourdieu’s concept of social practice (Bourdieu, 1984). Within such frameworks, young people’s aspirations are seen as embedded within their social connection and collective identities, which in turn influence the ways they envision their current and future place in society (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Bottrell & France, 2015; Hart, 2012). Local knowledge acts as ‘cultural capital’ due to its vital role in negotiating sites of recognition and belonging. The logic of the field orients young peoples’ practical logic and cultural practices and shapes their self-understanding and aspirational horizons (France et al., 2013). As Bottrell and France note, ‘decision-making in everyday life is not then a matter of free and rational choice, but is always delimited by the choices and positions available in the field’ (2015, p. 160).

Bullen and Kenway (2004) also advocate using Bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital to acknowledge the culture of disadvantaged communities and their generational synergies, without arriving at the same pernicious implications of the ‘underclass’ thesis. This article picks up on MacDonald’s (1997) and Bullen and Kenway’s (2004) suggestions that a less judgemental and more complex conceptual apparatus, able to address the social and cultural reproduction of inequality, is needed. However, although Bullen and Kenway’s use of subcultural capital goes some way towards understanding the cultural currencies of disadvantaged young people, a Bourdieusian framework still arguably lacks the ability to capture the nuances of learning that facilitate change of habitus (Brown, 1987; Jenkins, 1992). Critiques of Bourdieu highlight the seeming structural determinism of this approach, seeing the adaptation of social practices as an essentially one-way process (Brown, 1987; Evans, 2002; Jenkins, 1992). Where scholarship that adopts such Bourdieusian frameworks captures the limits placed on young people’s choices and acknowledges that actors influence and reshape their local world (field and habitus), it often struggles to appreciate the resourcefulness and active labour undertaken by many disadvantaged young people. As a result, young people’s agency and reflexivity can be lost in such analysis (Evans, 2002; Roberts, 2012).

Reframing the Impact of Community Embeddedness

As argued in the sections above, the policy discourse of ‘low aspirations’ is often used as an explanation for a lack of social mobility in certain groups (Cummings et al., 2012). However, a similar understanding of the causes of young people’s low aspirations can be reached by means of the structuralist perspective that frequently emphasizes that unemployment can lead to pessimism, fatalism and low aspirations. Whether this group is blamed or pitied, it seems neither perspective leaves much room for the recognition of young people as actors in their own lives. Despite the structuralists’ arguably more nuanced perspective on the complex dynamic reproducing disadvantage, both perspectives reinforce assumptions about the moral character of certain groups of people; ‘although the structuralist approach is more complex and less punitive than the culturalist, and privileges structure over agency, it takes merely a different route to reach the same destination’ (Bullen & Kenway, 2004, p. 143). This suggests a need for an alternative conceptual apparatus to capture how structural inequalities are negotiated through cultural practices, within a framework that allows for recognition of the process through which young people are actively engaging in shaping their lives.

Furthermore, much research on social disadvantage frames ‘community culture’ in problematic ways, seeing it either as the cause or the effect of exclusion. Despite the lack of empirical evidence, the ideas of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’ and ‘workless families’ passing on their unsociable and inappropriate aspirations to their ‘at-risk’ children have become two of the dominant ideas of social politics (MacDonald et al., 2014, p. 200; Mendick, 2018). Young people who live in disadvantaged areas and who express stunted aspirations are often explained by the ‘neighbourhood effects’—seeing the neighbourhood as ‘providing a key transmission mechanism between place-based disadvantage and socioeconomic outcomes for adults’ (Kintrea et al., 2015, p. 665). Research adopting a culturalist explanatory perspective tends to focus on how the cultural transmission of certain values, behaviours and beliefs reproduces inequalities for disadvantaged groups. For example, Calarco (2014) compares middle-class and working-class parents and children to show ‘the active processes by which parents and children together reproduce inequalities’ (p. 1035), as well as the ways ‘parents contributed to social reproduction by actively equipping children with class-based strategies’ (p. 1016). Structuralist studies have instead highlighted that young people who remain in places where employment opportunities are limited face restricted life chances and prospects of fulﬁlling their aspirations (Ball et al., 2000; McDowell, 2003; Roberts, 1995). This argument has frequently been taken up in policy discourses as evidence of the pathology of working-class culture (Reay, 2013) and the supposed fixed and inflexible attachment to place (Skeggs, 2004). Because of this, much research tends to avoid the social aspects of disadvantaged groups, favouring economic and social structural factors instead.

Influential critiques have been made of culturalists’ overemphasis on agency and choice (Roberts, 2010; Shildrick & MacDonald, 2006), as well as the tendency of the structuralist approach to avoid addressing the social reproduction of inequality due to its ambivalent connotations (MacDonald, 1997). Although significant studies have been done to understand the social reproduction of disadvantage and to bridge the structuralist–culturalist divide (Blackman, 2005; Bottrell & France, 2015; Harris, 2013; Roberts, 2010; Shildrick & MacDonald, 2006; Wierenga, 2009), attention still needs to be paid to developing new frameworks for understanding how social embeddedness affects the reproduction of disadvantage (Hollingworth, 2015). It seems that the many frameworks employed to discuss young people’s aspirations simultaneously render the process behind aspiration formation invisible, despite the acknowledgement that normative frameworks affect aspirations. The following section seeks to build a foundation for this argument by investigating how the process of aspiring has been dealt with within youth studies.

Conceptualizing Aspirations in Less Individualizing Ways

Youth studies have often critiqued the tendency to pathologize the aspirations of working-class young people, highlighting that categories such as social class, gender and ethnicity cannot by themselves explain young people’s aspirations (Evans, 2016). Studies have also attended to the role of institutions in forming young people’s aspirational horizons, focusing for instance on how educational attachment or changes in the labour market shape how young people think about their lives and their future. For instance, McDowell’s research among young working-class men found that they aspired to much the same as middle-class youths and carried similar notions of ‘the good life’ (McDowell, 2003). However, a strong relationship between negative labelling and unsatisfactory behaviour within educational settings was also found, leading many to discount the availability of an educational pathway for themselves personally. More so, disadvantaged young people’s meeting with the educational system habitually involves them facing institutionalized low expectations stemming from cynicism, fatalism and traditionalism (Bottrell, 2007), which have been found to negatively affect their aspirations (Moensted, 2018). Wyn and White (2000) argue that many young people experience their future possibilities as vague and uncertain, as their future hopes and dreams are rapidly foreclosing. As young people lose the ability to engage in long-term self-projections, they adopt a practical attitude of low expectations beyond the present. Along similar lines, Wierenga (2009) shows how cultural practices and community attitudes towards, for example, domestic labour, paid labour and gender-based citizenship, reproduce and reconstruct social inequality and confine what young people conceive of as their attainable future. Harris (2015) utilizes Bauman’s (1998) concept of ‘locally bound’ neighbourhoods to highlight the ways local communities and the cultural practices associated with these place boundaries on disadvantaged young people’s avenues of recognition and participation. Despite the strong sense of local belonging available, these communities offer limited alternative pathways (Harris, 2015). This confirms the affinities between structural conditions and cultural ideas of the good life, emphasizing that it is not low expectations that constrain choice but dominant cultural and socio-economic conditions that induce a lowering of aspirations.

Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997), observing the significant knowledge gap regarding the subjective realities involved in making career decisions and the processes by which these choices are made, suggest a model of decision-making that incorporates social and cultural factors. The model includes a sophisticated understanding of how learning can lead to adaptation of preferences, as well as how ‘individual preferences [blend] with opportunity structures in a way that incorporates serendipity’ (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997, p. 32). The authors argue that young people make pragmatically rational decisions within their culturally derived ‘horizons for action’—as individuals can only ‘choose’ what they can ‘see’. Horizons for actions are influenced both by opportunity structures and by individual preferences. In this, decisions regarding one’s future are context-related and simultaneously influenced by significant others, family context, culture and life experience, shaped by opportunities and networks and influenced by rationality, as well as feelings (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997). In other words, decisions regarding the future, such as career and education plans, can best be appreciated ‘in terms of the life history of those who make them’ (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997, p. 33).

Drawing on Sen’s capability approach (1999), Hart (2012) developed a framework for analysing the functioning of aspiring. She suggests that aspirations should be conceptualized as a meta-capability, that is, aspirations should be seen as an important capability that individuals may enjoy to various degrees. The ‘capability to aspire’ can be viewed as a freedom in its own right, namely a freedom to pursue a life deemed of value, which may be nurtured or stunted through relations with others, including peers or societal institutions. The realization of the ‘capability to aspire’ as a function underpins the possibilities to develop numerous future capabilities. Hart goes on to emphasize the distinction between preferences and choices (Hart, 2012). Choices represent the actions taken and avenues pursued, although these choices may or may not fully reflect that person’s preferences. The capability to aspire thus links to the freedom to aspire. Hence, agency becomes central, as the ability to pursue goals that one values requires both agency and possibilities. In this sense, choice should not be confused with agency without acknowledging the limits placed on such choices. Here, the analytical lens focuses on the multiplicity of aspirations, as well as a person’s opportunities to develop their aspirations freely (Hart, 2012).

Psycho-social factors have also been found to dampen aspirations among disadvantaged young people. Out of fear of ridicule, many young people align their aspirations to those of their parents and community, to the aspirations felt appropriate according to their gender, class or ethnicity, and to what they feel encouraged to aspire towards (Hart, 2012). ‘Adapted aspirations’ reflect the expectations and aspirations of significant others. These are the aspirations people feel they ‘ought’ to have. As Hart notes, ‘one of the most insidious forms of power is where individuals decide not to strive for certain goals because they deem themselves ineligible and thus become complicit in the exclusion’ (2012, p. 92). In the process of adapting one’s aspirations to avoid ridicule and failure, a sense of autonomy and control is gained, making the process of adapted preferences and the power involved difficult to identify. Similarly, Sinclair et al. (2010) suggest that young people’s self-esteem, confidence and motivation are affected by circumstances, including the socio-economic positioning of their family, and some may reduce their aspirations or be unwilling to express their ‘real aspirations’ due to such emotional factors. Maintaining a sense of belonging to one’s place and peer community has also been found to influence aspirations, as conflicting drivers between the lure of social mobility and working-class loyalty may suppress some aspirations (Reay, 2001). High aspirations have further been linked to an increased possibility for frustrations. Genicot and Ray (2017) note that aspirations that are moderately above an individual’s current standard of living tend to encourage investment in human capital, while still higher aspirations are found to lead to frustration.

These understandings of aspirations are significant in highlighting young people’s capacity to project themselves into the future. However, the process behind aspiring still lacks specificity and can appear static. For instance, while Hart’s framework allows for insight into the freedom needed to develop capabilities and to choose to pursue a future one has reason to value, such conceptualizations do not tell us more comprehensively about how aspirations become shaped in a process of interactions with others. Although Hart argues for an acknowledgement of how aspirations are adapted, it appears as if aspirations are stunted against the will and agency of a person. In contrast, newer research investigating the effects of disadvantage on young people’s aspirations has found that it is not that young people aspire for futures they do not ‘really’ value (Moensted, 2020a). Adapted aspirations instead emerge due to limited exposure, restricted avenues of belonging and recognition and a homogeneity of community influence, leading to narrow aspirational horizons (Moensted, 2020a). Furthermore, discerning young people’s adapted aspirations from their ‘real’ aspirations is problematic. It may be difficult to avoid value judgements about the types of aspirations worth having for working-class young people based on largely middle-class social narratives of ‘the good life’ and valuable futures.

While all of the above-mentioned works make important contributions to understanding the social reproduction of disadvantage, the intersection between disadvantage and aspirations is still mainly conceptualized in individualistic ways. Aspirations are largely constructed as an individual attribute, a product of choice and agency, or a product of community culture producing a particular type of future orientation or habitus. Although some studies have attended to the role of family, friends and significant others in shaping young people’s imaginations of the future, a more holistic view is still needed to understand the ways young people’s connection to, and place within, multiple sets of communities of belonging, networks of peers and relationships shape and facilitate certain aspirational horizons. The ways communities constrain and nurture certain imaginations of available futures for ‘people like me’ may be especially important for analysis of disadvantaged young people, as normative imaginations of the good life may clash with restricted opportunity structures, limited exterior connections with the world and constrained exposure to alternative future visions.

Further, theorizing is needed to capture a more nuanced view on the intersection between disadvantaged young people’s aspirations and their communities. The following section introduces the concept of social citizenship aspirations to develop such a potential framework.

Social Citizenship Aspirations

This section puts forward the argument that aspirations should best be understood as not just individual but instead deeply socially embedded and made up of people’s embodied and emotional longing for belonging and a meaningful future for ‘people like me’.

The concept of social citizenship focuses on the interaction between individual identity and society by capturing the concrete, imagined or virtual relationships between people, collectives, institutions and social structures (Fraser & Gordon, 1994). The concept relates to processes of learning, belonging, identity and social rights, such as the right to a certain level of well-being and security (Hall & Coffey, 2007; Lister, 2007a), as well as activities young people engage in to enact participation, social action, identification with communities and public self-making (Thomson et al., 2004). Experiences and feelings of citizenship fluctuate throughout the life course, from being more or less fluid or stable (Smith et al., 2005). Social citizenship aspirations thus offer a more holistic account beyond simply education, employment or family-related future plans.

The concept of citizenship has been taken up in youth studies as a useful way of making sense of youth transitions and defining and discussing ‘membership’ of adult society (Harris, 2013, 2015; Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008). Where the framework of citizenship has been applied within youth studies, this has often been done to problematize young people’s capacity to exercise their formal entitlements of citizenship (Harris, 2015; Jones & Wallace, 1992; Lister, 1990), or to investigate youths’ cultural and leisure practices as new forms of civic participation (Vromen, 2003). McLeod (2012) notes that although the framework of citizenship is increasingly utilized within youth studies, a rights-based model of citizenship is habitually applied, focusing on youth participation, empowerment and political socialization. Vromen instead suggests that a maximizing, humanistic and subjective view on youth citizenship accounting for youth beliefs and values would be better placed to capture how, why and why not young people participate and exercise their citizenship (Vromen, 2003). Seeking to develop a more subjective model of citizenship, Thomson et al. (2004) focus on the ways in which young people seek out opportunities for responsibility, competence and recognition in different fields of their lives and how these attempts are highly significant in shaping their future trajectory. Viewing citizenship as context-dependent and expressed in spaces and places, Lister introduces the concept of lived citizenship, emphasizing the meaning citizenship has in people’s lives (Lister, 2007).

Citizenship has been conceptualized as a field of struggle where relations linking people to their communities, and wider social and political contexts, are persistently negotiated and contested (Hall et al., 2000). Strong signifiers of successful and unsuccessful citizenship exist, which tend to pathologize mainly socio-economically marginalized young people (Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008). Hence, citizenship is connected to notions of power, agency and choice, as aspects of citizenship are in some cases chosen and in others assigned (Rattansi & Phoenix, 2005). Kennelly and Dillabough (2008) show how economically disadvantaged and racially diverse young people living on the urban fringes experience tensions relating to their claiming of social citizenship and the interaction of social class and youth subcultural positioning. The researchers argue that social positioning and ethnicity influence ‘young people’s national and class imaginaries of legitimate citizenship and the state’ (Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008, p. 494). Here, contemporary notions of citizenship consequently act as a barrier for the recognition of alternative ways disadvantaged young people participate in society and wish to exercise their citizenship. This understanding highlights that for young people to experience themselves as citizens in society, they must be able to participate as active members, which hinges on young people being recognized as members of the citizen community in the first place (Lister, 2007a).

Citizenship theory is a relevant framework for understanding the tensions between disadvantaged youth and broader society, as it gives attention to the idea of young people achieving the freedom to function in a manner that reasonably expresses the way they choose to be and how they are best resourced to do this. The role of institutional attachments in forming young people’s future thinking is central here, as the welfare state as an institution of societal recognition may be considered pathological, that is, it may act as a barrier that prevents the realization of the good life for some and supports this realization for others (Fraser & Gordon, 1994). An example here could be education, which for many is an essential sphere of belonging and self-realization, in line with the sphere of work for adult citizens; however, for disadvantaged young people, educational institutions appear to largely fail as a sphere of mastery. Instead, school habitually delivers experiences of misrecognition, unbelonging and failure (Bottrell, 2007; Camilleri-Cassar, 2014; Farrugia et al., 2015; Riele, 2011). Tying this in with the concept of social citizenship, a person unable to gain social appreciation in their meeting with societal institutions, such as educational institutions, is at risk of losing their sense of shared value and place in society, or at risk of diminishing their social citizenship aspirations. In this sense, the equal distribution of opportunities to develop skills and abilities that would lead to self-realization and broad horizons of possibilities is central to understanding the reproduction of youth inequality.

Social citizenship is, for this article, understood as a process of creating a valorized place in society, and it is fundamentally social, taking place within available sites of belonging, connections and social organization which structure the everyday. These negotiations are mediated by people’s structural embeddedness and shaped by socially given conditions, constraints and opportunities. This broad definition of citizenship sees social citizenship not as a status gained once and for all but instead as a status requiring active and continuous action (Lister, 2007b). Such an embedded and relational conceptualization allows for a line of analysis that neither positions young people as passive victims of circumstance nor overemphasizes the agency and social mobility possible.

Social Citizenship Aspirations as Mediated Through Feelings of Belonging and Longing

In this article, I draw on three dimensions of citizenship theorizing to develop a concept of social citizenship aspirations: belonging, becoming and longing. The notion of belonging can be seen as a way of concretizing the subjective and emotional components of social citizenship (Williamson, 2007). Belonging is a person-centred, dynamic and complex concept that allows for an examination of how people engage with social structures (May, 2011). As a relational concept, belonging emphasizes social interaction and inter-subjectivity, and the emotional content of these (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014). Belonging delineates processes of identification and representation and understandings of ‘people like me’ and who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ stand for (Miller, 2003). Attitudes, ideologies and discourses maintain and construct boundaries of belonging, but these are also contested and resisted in the everyday actions of individuals. By bringing individuals’ interconnectedness, as well as their striving for connection, safety, visibility and respect, into focus, the search for belonging as a continuous process is highlighted (Thomson, 2007). In this regard, belonging also involves struggles over representation and acts of claim-making for space and for recognition (Honneth, 2001). Such a perspective encourages analysis of disadvantaged young people’s access to and transitions between contexts and communities that enhance their belonging and broaden their aspirational horizons.

However, young people’s active labour to enhance types of belonging can exclude them from other modes of belonging. Belonging to a community includes a notion of sameness and, in this, a misrecognition of difference. Insofar as young people desire to belong, they are also required to align with the language, practices, values and behaviours of the community, preventing to a degree the expression of alternative identities (Moensted, 2020b). The tension between being a part and being distinct brings to the forefront the tensions and processual aspects of belonging.

Although the concepts of becoming and longing appear similar, as both are future-oriented and aspirational, there is an important difference. Longing denotes movements towards the future that are deliberate, due to a sense of needing, wanting, seeking or attaining something. Longing involves desire and hope. In following young people’s longing, we find what type of meaningful life they crave. Becoming has a focus on the fluidity of personal identity and orientation towards the future (Tilleczek, 2011). Becoming refers to transitions of growing up, moving on and settling in, and it denotes happenings, opportunities and constraints, choices made and chances taken, as well as paths of least resistance. Future aspirations are as much made up of people’s longing (for safety, connection, respect and visibility) as they are of structural constraints, opportunities and the availability of local communities.

The ways people long to be part of society (social citizenship aspirations) is anchored in people’s history, shaped and negotiated through their social position and material and relational embeddedness. Macro-level social and economic inequalities structure young people’s opportunities, but so too does negotiations and struggles over attaining a valorized role within the broader society and available communities. In this, understanding young people’s choice to participate now and in the future hinges not only on an experience of belonging to society but also on the availability of types of social citizenship for ‘people like me’.

Through this framework, it becomes possible to conduct a different type of social criticism where the focus is not only on the material conditions structuring aspirations but also on the equal distribution of avenues for self-realization, belonging and imagined social citizenship. Nurturing young people’s social citizenship aspirations is understood as facilitating the development of their essential creativity and talents that allows them to take part in society in a meaningful way. Theoretically, such an alternative focus that acknowledges young people’s longing to belong and creative actions to enhance some types of belonging highlights tensions in how aspirations are being conceptualized in accounts of social inequality (because of individual and community deficits) and in accounts of socially just responses to young people’s search for meaningful futures and ways of belonging. The concept of belonging can help us understand how social, as opposed to predominantly individual, factors shape future horizons and may provide a more holistic and sensitive account of the social and cultural reproduction of problematic social practices, so often avoided due to its ambivalent and uncomfortable connotations.

Conclusion

This article suggests that the concepts of social citizenship aspirations can bring something new to sociology’s attempts to capture the complex relationship between structural limits and possibilities and subjective aspirations. It further calls for a rethinking of how young people’s aspirations are conceptualized both in government policy and in some academic research, by seeking to addresses two central weaknesses, namely the tendency to conceptualize aspirations in individualizing terms and the tendency to perpetuate a narrow focus on what shapes aspirations. This highlights the need for a more holistic framework that offers a reconsideration of the interconnection between community embeddedness and individual agency, to conceptualize the process of disadvantage in less reductionist ways.

Social citizenship aspirations sharpen the analytical focus on the dynamic and multidimensional lives of young people through their embeddedness within multiple sets of connections and communities. This understanding of aspirations breaks with the habitual way of understanding aspirations among disadvantaged groups, as the enactment of preference within constraint. Instead, young people’s community belonging both enables and constrains aspirational horizons. This suggests that analyses that seek to comprehend the structures that delimit and define aspirational horizons such as gender, class and place should best be contextualized within young people’s active labour to find a valorized role for themselves. The concept of social citizenship further broadens the discussions of aspirations beyond those related to education and employment, helping them focus instead on how young people make sense of the world and their future place within it.

While the language of low aspirations and the need to broaden aspirational horizons employed in this article might appear similar to that of neoliberal policies focusing on young people’s ‘aspirational deficits’, there is an important difference. This article suggests, along with others, that the connection between limited social mobility and low aspirations cannot simply be fixed by teaching disadvantaged young people to broaden their aspirations (France & Roberts, 2017; Spohrer et al., 2017). However, despite the limited ways in which the framework of ‘raising aspirations’ has been understood and applied within policy discourses, we should not disregard working with and investigating young people’s aspirations. The concept of aspirations offers a powerful lens for understanding how disadvantage affects young people’s lives and opportunities.

This article contributes to and extends the growing critique of the tendency to pathologize the impact communities have on disadvantaged young people’s aspirations. It argues that a relational focus on what shapes social citizenship aspirations offers a productive lens for understanding the reproduction of youth inequality, as such a framework is well suited to capture both the limits placed on young people’s aspirations by their ‘horizons for action’ and the importance of nurturing young people’s capacities to aspire. Further, the focus on young people’s labour to enhance belonging and recognition emphasizes their resilience and agency, avoiding the tendency to view disadvantaged young people as simply victims. Such a framework holds promise for both researchers and practitioners seeking to support young people in building expansive and hopeful horizons for action and visions of their future.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author has no conflict of interest to declare.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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