Special Issue - Contemporary Youth: Precarity, Resistance and (Re)Imagined Futures

Abstract

First paragraph: In recent years, the association between youth and precarity has become increasingly strengthened. Most commonly, youth precarity has been linked to the labour market (Shildrick et al., 2010; Crisp and Powell, 2017; Formby, 2017) and the housing market (McKee et al., 2020) although other social strata such as precarity of place (Banki, 2013) and precarious leisure (Batchelor et al., 2020) have also received attention. Deindustrialisation, forceful neoliberal politics, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008, austerity measures and, most likely now, the social and economic costs of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated academic attention on young people with concern over how they are faring amid a complex web of unpredictable and insecure social structures and what consequences these will have for their futures.