Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School [1st ed.] 9783030523015, 9783030523022

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction (Seth Brown, Peter Kelly, Scott K. Phillips)....Pages 1-25
Identity (Seth Brown, Peter Kelly, Scott K. Phillips)....Pages 27-62
Belonging (Seth Brown, Peter Kelly, Scott K. Phillips)....Pages 63-97
Time (Seth Brown, Peter Kelly, Scott K. Phillips)....Pages 99-124
Conclusions (Seth Brown, Peter Kelly, Scott K. Phillips)....Pages 125-149
Back Matter ....Pages 151-156

Citation preview

Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School Seth Brown Peter Kelly Scott K. Phillips

Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School

Seth Brown  • Peter Kelly Scott  K. Phillips

Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School

Seth Brown School of Education RMIT University Bundoora, VIC, Australia

Peter Kelly School of Education RMIT University Bundoora, VIC, Australia

Scott K. Phillips Kershaw Phillips Consulting Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-52301-5    ISBN 978-3-030-52302-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne / patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Seth: For Soraya and Star Peter: For Georgia and Julie Scott: For Susan, Natalie, Timothy and Claudia

Acknowledgements

This book has multiple beginnings over a long period of time. During this time there have been too many conversations, discussions, conferences, research and writing projects that have made some contribution to what each of us brings to this project to acknowledge. But, they have been significant in shaping what we have done here and why we have done it. We acknowledge, though don’t name, our indebtedness to many colleagues over this period who we have worked with and who have shaped our thinking. The particular project with the Whittlesea Youth Commitment Committee (WYC) that provides the primary data that we use to situate much of our discussion was made possible by a small grant from the Collier Charitable Foundation. We are grateful for this support. We also want to acknowledge the generous and valuable support provided by various office holders and members of the WYC. In Chap. 1 we introduce these various individuals and assign them pseudonyms so as to minimise the possibility of them being identified. Given the character of the conversations that we draw on here—generous, open, productive, insightful, caring and concerned—it would have been fitting to identify them and acknowledge their support openly. We trust that they are aware of our gratitude. Seth and Peter also acknowledge the School of Education at RMIT for their support of our involvement in this project. Scott acknowledges the UNEVOC Centre at RMIT for their support of his involvement in the project. vii

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Identity 27 3 Belonging 63 4 Time 99 5 Conclusions125 Index151

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  Brown, Kelly and Phillips introduce a post-critical contribution to the ongoing, academic, community and policy discussions about young people’s engagement and dis-engagement in the middle years of schooling. This introductory chapter discusses how this period of schooling— from the upper primary years through to the early-middle years of compulsory secondary schooling—is understood differently in different national contexts, in global frameworks such as the Incheon Declaration and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and in Melbourne (AUSTRALIA) where the research that informs this contribution was undertaken. Although it may be understood variously in these diverse contexts, there is an emerging, shared focus on this period of schooling as shaping young people’s transitions through compulsory education to further/higher education and into work. Keywords  Middle years • Engagement • Dis-engagement • Transitions • Incheon Declaration • UN Sustainable Development Goals

Maranguka (‘caring for others’) Maranguka, which…[means]…‘caring for others’ in Ngemba language, is a model of Indigenous self-governance which empowers community to coordinate the right mix and timing of services through an Aboriginal commu© The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2_1

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nity owned and led, multi-disciplinary team working in partnership with relevant government and non-government agencies.1

The remote, isolated New South Wales (AUSTRALIA) outback town of Bourke has a population of 2465. Bourke is so remote that there is a saying in Australia—Out back of Bourke!—which signifies that somewhere, someplace, is really remote and isolated. A place that would be really difficult to get to. If that is what you wanted to do. (Why?). Remoteness and isolation in the Australian context also usually signifies heat, desert or arid country, mining and or agricultural (pastoral) economic activity, and, often, a lack of the resources and opportunities that are more usually available in bigger country towns and cities. Remoteness and isolation often, then, also tends to signify a range of social, economic, cultural and political problems that accompany a relative lack of resources and opportunities. And, at the start of the twenty-first century, the historical legacy of more than 200 years as a colonial, settler society means that these social, economic, cultural and political problems that accompany a relative lack of resources and opportunities in remote, isolated communities in Australia are overwhelmingly visited upon and experienced by Aboriginal communities. And in these communities, young people tend to be over-­represented in these problem spaces. As problems. In Bourke, 30% of the current population (762 people) are from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background (the Australian Bureau of Statistics category for identifying and counting Australia’s First Nations/ Indigenous populations). The website for the Maranguka Just Reinvest project in Bourke notes that as a consequence of ‘past government Aboriginal specific policies such as forced relocations and removals in the 1920s, today there are 21 different Tribal Groups living in Bourke’ Just Reinvest NSW (2019). The median age of Bourke’s Indigenous population is 25 years. More than one third of this population are children and young people aged up to 14 years old. The Maranguka Justice Reinvestment project emerged from the ways in which various sections of the Bourke community were ‘concerned about the number of Aboriginal families experiencing high levels of social disadvantage and rising crime’. The Maranguka project claims that: ‘Over $4 million each year is spent locking up children and young people in 1  The information in this section draws largely from the account of Marunguka found here: http://www.justreinvest.org.au/justice-reinvestment-in-bourke/

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Bourke’. And that ‘Local community members have had enough’. This historical, and ongoing, legacy of colonialism, isolation, lack of resources and opportunities—made real in the health and well-being challenges faced by young Aboriginal people, their dis-engagement from, and often lack of participation in, compulsory and post compulsory education, and their entanglement in the juvenile justice systems—takes on a particular, though often repeated, character in places such as Bourke. According to Alistair Ferguson, the local manager of the Maranguka project: Kids were being taken away. Too many of my community were being locked up. Families were being shattered, again and again…And this was happening despite the huge amount of money government was channelling through a large number of service organisations in this town. So we started talking together. We decided that a new way of thinking and doing things needed to be developed that helped our children. We decided it was time for our community to move beyond the existing service delivery model…a model which had clearly failed. …so…together we could look at what’s happening in our town and why Aboriginal disadvantage was not improving, and together we could build a new accountability framework which wouldn’t let our kids slip through.

Our interest at this point is with the approach, the methodology, that the local community adopted as they sought to productively engage the challenges that Aboriginal young people were facing in Bourke. The Maranguka project is framed by a methodology called the collective impact approach. Collective impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a complex social problem. The underlying premise of collective impact is that alone, no single individual or organisation can create large-scale, lasting social change. “Silver bullet” solutions to systemic social problems do not exist; they cannot be solved by simply scaling or replicating one organisation or program. Strong organisations are necessary but not sufficient for large-scale social change.2

This methodology, which is similar in a number of ways to the socio-­ ecological, action research approach that we will discuss at various points in what follows, meant that: 2

 Collective Impact Model: http://www.justreinvest.org.au/collective-impact/

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The first stage of the justice reinvestment project has focused on building trust between community and service providers, identifying community priorities and circuit breakers, and data collection.

These sorts of approaches require developing, as we will discuss later, surprising alliances, and thinking disruptively about seemingly wicked problems: Regular meetings have been held with Bourke community members and visiting and/or local representatives from most government departments. Government attendance and ongoing commitment towards exploring alternative means of service delivery during this time has gone a long way towards building a better relationship between community members and the government. The local community has spent a lot of time thinking about how to reduce offending and make the community safer. They have identified and are in the process of implementing, in partnership with local service providers, a number of cross-sector initiatives or ‘circuit breakers’ to achieve this, including three justice circuit breakers addressing breaches of bail, outstanding warrants and the need for a learner driver program in Bourke.

Various data sources have been drawn on to identify problems, provide evidence of the outcomes from programs and interventions, and in relation to ‘issues’ that, at first glance, might not seem connected to a particular problem. This data includes information on such things as: young person’s passage through the criminal justice system in Bourke and how the community is fairing [sic] in terms of offending, diversion, bail, sentencing and punishment, and re-offending rates. Data has also been collected on the community’s outcomes in early life, education, employment, housing, healthcare, child safety, and health outcomes including mental health and drugs and alcohol.

In an article in The Guardian in 2018 Lorena Allam (2018) wrote an account of the Maranguka project in which she provided some context for the ‘need’ for such a program—‘Bourke is one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia, with high long-term unemployment and family violence, and the highest rate of juvenile convictions in NSW’. Allam spoke with some key people in the community about the challenges faced by Aboriginal young people in Bourke, and the opportunities that a

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project such as this offered for disentangling some of the threads and trajectories that resulted in so many of the problems that confounded the communities in Bourke. Much of this account, and the account found on the Just Reinvest website point to the apparent success of this sort of disruption to ‘business as usual’. For example, Allam reports that between 2015 and 2017 the rates for various crimes in Bourke fell by: . 18% for major offences 1 2. 34% for non-domestic violence-related assaults 3. 39% for domestic violence-related assaults 4. 39% for drug offences 5. 35% for driving offences In addition, rates of ‘reoffending also dropped significantly’. There was, as one example, ‘a 72% reduction in the number of people under 25 arrested for driving without a licence’. And, in ways that we want to return to later, it is often the surprising alliances that drive the most disruptive interventions into the socio-ecologies of a particular place-based problem, and the development of practices that show the most promise. Allam (2018) cited a ‘key initiative’ in the project that assisted ‘more than 200 mostly young people obtain a driving licence’. Police Inspector Andrew Hurst of Bourke police is quoted indicating that eight ‘off-duty police officers volunteered in the licensing program, “helping young learner drivers get their hours up”’.3 Allam (2018) indicates that Inspector Hurst was reluctant to pinpoint the exact reasons for the drops in various categories of offences. However, he did recognise that ‘there had been a noticeable improvement over the past 12 months, as collaboration between the community and police has increased’. “We’re working a lot more closely around youth engagement and family violence. The closer we work together the better,”…“The collaboration is geared to problem-solve rather than us using arrest as the only tool in the kit.”

The chair of Just Reinvest NSW is Sarah Hopkins. In a conversation with Allam (2018), Hopkins says that the place-based response to the 3  In most Australian jurisdictions young people aged between 16 and 21 are required to undertake 120 hours of supervised driving training, recorded in a logbook, before they can obtain a probationary driving licence.

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challenges and opportunities for young Aboriginal people in Bourke suggests a promising way forward for thinking about a number of related concerns: “Over previous decades, we have seen the imprisonment rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children increasing dramatically”…“The experience in Bourke demonstrates that the solutions to this national crisis lie in community-led initiatives. “We need to build communities, not prisons.”

The Middle Years of Schooling: Challenges and Opportunities In this book we want to make a post-critical, sociologically informed contribution to the ongoing, significant, and challenging academic, community and policy discussions about young people’s engagement and dis-engagement in the middle years of schooling. This period of schooling—from the upper primary years through to the early-middle years of compulsory secondary schooling—is understood differently in different contexts in the OECD/EU economies, in the developing economies, and, increasingly, in global frameworks such the Incheon Declaration and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.4 Although it may be understood in various ways in these diverse contexts, and, indeed, will be situated differently in the particular institutionalised schooling infrastructure in these disparate contexts, there is an increasing academic, policy and community focus on this period of schooling as being fundamentally implicated in the development of young people’s pathways and transitions through compulsory and post compulsory education, technical and further/higher education and into the worlds of work (see, for example: Bland et al. 2009; Boylan and Renzulli 2017; Owens 2018; Smyth and McInerney 2013). We became aware of the Maranguka Just Reinvest project as we were finalising the report for a place-based research project that will be central to the stories we tell here about the ways in which Belonging, Identity and  Incheon Declaration https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245656 UN SDGs https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300 and SDG 4 Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4 4

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Time shape young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling. We were, and continue to be, interested in the ways in which local communities were looking for opportunities to deal with and respond to the local manifestations of profound, seemingly intractable problems that have beginnings, happenings, causes and consequences which extend far beyond the apparent boundaries and borders (geographical, administrative, juridical) of particular places. What is also significant, challenging and powerful in these Maranguka stories is that they compel us to think about what ‘caring for others’ might mean beyond a place such as Bourke. A place where first nations’ people are working to re-imagine what caring for others might mean when all around them social, cultural, economic and political systems, processes and practices demonstrate, too often and with damaging consequences, a distinct lack of care for their communities. Our approach takes into account a recognition by some researchers of a need to look beyond a deficit approach to explaining and addressing school dis-engagement. To move beyond seeing dis-engagement as a result of poverty, a lack of parental interest and involvement, a lack of academic ability and so on (Smyth and McInerney 2013). We have examined student’s ‘engagement’ and ‘dis-engagement’ in the context of a multiplicity of factors that affect young people’s lived experience of ‘being in school’. We describe this approach as socio-ecological, because it draws on a range of sociological and ecological models and methods reported in the educational research literature that have provided support for the actors involved in educational settings—young people, parents, teachers, school staff, community support services—to imagine and co-create new ways of interacting with each other so that they might facilitate successful educational outcomes and career trajectories. For example, Nicholson and Putwain (2015, 1) highlight several dimensions of the construct of ‘student engagement’—including cognitive, affective and behavioural elements—to suggest that: ‘Engagement is malleable and responsive to contextual factors—a student’s family and school circumstances’. They specifically ‘investigated the school-related factors that facilitate re-engagement in learning from the perspective of initially disengaged students’ (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 1). What is of interest here is that, while they do not theorise their approach as socio-ecological, Nicholson and Putwain examined the influences affecting re-engagement of students in school education in terms of sundry factors associated with the ecology of school experience within an alternate provision (AP) school. Factors that disengaged students saw as

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facilitating their re-engagement were analysed by Nicholson and Putwain under four thematic areas: classroom, relational, generic school and personal factors. (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 1) And the significance of these can be appreciated, at least in part, when seen in relation to their ‘maranguka’ dimension—or how they help to foster practices of caring for others. Classroom factors concern the space in which learning and engagement is experienced. The researchers suggest, for example, that the size of the class can be a critical factor: Students believed that small class size led to greater concentration in lessons due to staff being better able to monitor and control behavioural problems. They emphasised the importance of the low student-staff ratio (typically two-three members of staff to five-six students) in ensuring that help was readily available and in receiving sufficient one-to-one support. (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 4–5)

Other classroom factors included the tenor of pedagogical relationships. Staff in the alternative provision (AP) school were perceived as more approachable than staff in mainstream schools, and students were given more autonomy to choose topics they would write on (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 4–5). The level of stimulus was also important. Students indicated that an appropriate intellectual challenge made learning enjoyable. The tone of the learning environment was a further classroom factor the researchers noted. In the AP school, lessons were relaxed, fun and interactive. Finally, the ways in which students interacted with one another was supportive of positive engagement. In the AP setting positive peer learning and support were encouraged (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 4–5). Relational factors, according to Nicholson and Putwain, are those positive staff-student relationships that students experienced in the AP school they investigated. They identified the following four dimensions of relationships as being important in shaping engagement: • Staff showed respect to students (who showed respect back) • Staff got to know students personally • Staff understood that home problems often affected students at school and sought to help address those problems • Staff encouraged students to believe they could achieve success. (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 5)

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Generic school factors include a range of characteristics in the school ecology that distinguished the AP school structure from that of mainstream schools. Nicholson and Putwain (2015, 6) identified how, for example, students reported having more freedom to leave and return to school during the day (for instance, at break time). A further element concerned greater flexibility regarding the way the school day operated. They noted how the structure of the school day suited previously disengaged students better than that of mainstream school(s) they had experienced previously. Another component related to the physical and material fabric of the school itself. That is, students evidently were satisfied with school resources and facilities. Also, in the AP setting, students felt supported to explore wider options beyond the school in the wider society and economy. They participated in school excursions more than they had in other schools, and they received support from teachers in relation to their future employability. Finally, Nicholson and Putwain (2015) identified several personal factors which the AP setting fostered that influenced re-engagement of previously disengaged students. Here Nicholson and Putwain observed how experiences in the AP school helped previously disengaged students understand the value of education, become determined learners, and to focus on achieving academically. They suggest that some students were investing time on study outside school hours. In addition, the AP school helped them to improve psychologically: they felt more mature, more relaxed, less angry, and their self-confidence had increased. And there was an overall shift in their intellectual and personal engagement with the school experience: students said that they applied more time and cognitive effort into understanding their schoolwork, and that since starting at the school, their attendance, behaviour and academic achievement had all improved. (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 7)

In effect, without saying as much, Nicholson and Putwain’s research (2015) points to the productive possibilities of a socio-ecological perspective inasmuch as it highlights the importance of seeing the issues in a school-based and place-based relational context. As they argue: There was evidence of affective (e.g., students reported that they enjoyed school and had positive relationships with staff and peers), cognitive (e.g.,

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they invested time and effort into learning) and behavioural (e.g., their school attendance and behavioural conduct had greatly improved since they joined the school) engagement in these initially disengaged students. Considering that these students were disconnected with education on entry to the AP school, often with extremely poor rates of attendance at their previous school(s), these are important findings and strongly suggest that the school-related contextual factors identified here have had a major part to play in their re-engagement with education. (Nicholson and Putwain 2015, 7, emphasis added)

Other researchers have emphasised the importance of a ‘socio-spatial approach’ (Smyth and McInerney 2013). Smyth and McInerney (2013, 39), to illustrate, suggest that: Young people who disengage or disconnect from school are often demonised within the media and the wider public imagination, from a largely individualized and pathological positioning. Policy explanations and responses are often unhelpful in their focus on a range of ‘deficit’ attributes—poverty, poor parenting, dysfunctional families, low familial achievement, aspiration and motivation, and other ‘at risk’ categories.

Smyth and McInerney (2013, 39) argue for: ‘a different explanatory framework that foregrounds the experiences of some young people who had disengaged from school and resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to the ones that had exiled them from schools in the first place.’ Their socio-spatial framework allows them to explore ‘the notion of “relational space” as it was appropriated and reclaimed by these young people, in explaining how they saw themselves as constructing viable and sustainable learning identities for themselves’. Other researchers have emphasised an ‘ecological approach’ to understanding the interplay of the school system and classroom elements in affecting young people’s engagement and dis-engagement with school. Emilie Phillips Smith et al. (1997) and her colleagues described a study in which they used an ecological model to investigate parent involvement in a medium-size, urban, southeastern school district. They noted that research had been undertaken of the ways in which home, school and community partnerships operate. However, while others had investigated factors influencing parent involvement, Phillips Smith et al. (1997, 339) suggested that ‘little research has examined the combined impact of family, teacher, school, and community factors’. In their work in a

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medium-­size, urban, southeastern school district in the US, they suggest that parent background and attitudes, teacher practices, school and neighborhood climate all provide ecological contexts under which involvement can be encouraged (Phillips Smith et al. 1997, 339). More recently, Doll et al. (2012, 44) have reported on the use of ‘an ecological framework for school mental health services that differs in important ways from existing service delivery models’. They argue that ‘integration of the ecological model into existing strategies for school mental health services can strengthen the contributions of school psychologists to routines and practices that support students’ success in school’. A Bourdeusian approach has also been used by some researchers to analyse the ‘social capital’ factors affecting school dis-engagement and dropout within a socio-ecological perspective. Nairz-Wirth and Feldmann (2017), for instance, highlight structural factors associated with the ‘habitus’ of the school which can, and do, frustrate the development of positive and supportive relationships between students and teachers in school. Their study is based on a series of 60 semi-structured interviews with teachers from Austrian secondary schools. From this perspective they claim that ‘many teachers attribute school dis-engagement and dropout to personal and family factors, whereas the causes of school dropout which are linked to the school structure, attitudes and behaviour remain unspoken or marginalised’. They conclude: The findings illustrate that the interplay between a defensive traditional teaching habitus, a field of traditional teaching and the mainstream doxa legitimises a logic of teaching practice which ignores the importance of social capital to counteract the process of dropping out. It is concluded that traditional habitus–field relations inhibit the building of social capital and relationships in school, which both are crucial resources to tackle school dropout. (Nairz-Wirth and Feldmann 2017, 121)

Recent survey-based research has examined the range of factors in Australia that contribute to up to 25% of middle years young people experiencing low levels of well-being and marginalisation. The Australian Child Wellbeing Project (AWCP 2016), for example, has outlined several evidence-­based arguments advanced about how and why this occurs: • Low wellbeing is concentrated in groups of young people who are recognised as marginalised—young people with disability, young

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carers, materially disadvantaged young people, culturally and linguistically diverse young people, Indigenous young people, young people in rural and remote Australia and young people in out of home care. • Different forms of low well-being are linked—outcomes in one domain are often associated with outcomes in other domains. For example, high pressure from schoolwork, reported by 15% of boys and 23% of girls in Year 8, is related to high levels of health complaints, seen by experts as an indicator of stress. • Almost one young person in five (19%) reported going hungry to school or to bed. These young people are more likely to miss school frequently. • Both young people who go hungry and the one in ten who miss school frequently are likely to experience high levels of health complaints, frequent bullying, and low levels of engagement at school. • Young people who are in a marginalised group are more likely than others to go hungry, miss school, and experience its identified correlates of health complaints, bullying and low engagement at school. • Family and social networks provide support to young people. Young people with smaller support networks have lower average levels of wellbeing than those with larger networks. (Redmond et  al. 2016, 1–2) The authors suggest that the policy implications are clear. Marginalised young people who are hungry, disengaged from school and stressed by schoolwork are likely to miss opportunities for healthy development and strengthening of their skills for productive employment and citizenship in their adult life. Consequently, they call on governments to ‘develop joined up approaches that reach across policy silos’ and to ‘develop policies that are sensitive to the needs of young people who are marginalised, and the role that family and social networks can play in supporting them’ (Redmond et al. 2016, 1–2). This is consistent with an earlier report (Grogan et al. 2013) on how to strengthen the support system for young people in Victoria (Australia), which emphasised the value of integrating family support, early years, middle years and youth programs to facilitate effective transitions and secure positive outcomes within and across each life phase. The five key areas of focus it noted are:

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1. Support across the life course: adolescence is starting earlier and finishing later. This shift demands a rethink about how we respond to children, young people and young adults. 2. Early intervention at every age and stage: a diverse mix of services can provide support to young people at every age and at every stage of an issue, from prevention and early invention to more specialist supports through to crisis support and beyond. 3. Services working collaboratively: youth services must remain at the heart of the service system for young people, but an integrated response also requires the expertise of other services such as family support, adult support services and schools. 4. Accessible and inclusive services: support needs to be accessible, available when and where young people need it and inclusive of a diverse range of young people. 5. Supporting improved outcomes: services and supports need to be built on sound evidence and respond to identified need within communities. Our review of the scholarship on young people’s engagement in the middle years is not meant to be exhaustive, is not, even, meant to be illustrative. Such work is beyond the scope of this book. Our brief sketch is meant to map the spaces in which we will situate what follows, and to outline some of the limits and possibilities of these spaces.

The Whittlesea Youth Commitment and Socio-­ecological Models of Young People’s Well-being, Resilience and Enterprise: A Pilot Intervention to Promote Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years The start of the twenty-first century presents many challenges, and provides many opportunities for individual young people, their families, and the communities, towns and cities that they grow up in. The unfolding ‘digital disruption’—driven by the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI technologies and rapidly advancing bio-­genetic technologies—promises to profoundly transform traditional understandings of education, training, employment and the trajectories of our life course. Some argue that the so-called ‘gig economy’ is already contributing to the growth

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of a global ‘precariat’ class, millions of whom are young people (FYA 2015; Kelly 2017; Productivity Commission 2016; Rifkin 2015; Standing 2011). These challenges are compounded by the echoing effects of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008; the expectation that young people provide enterprising solutions to their own economic insecurity; and by the ‘moral economies of neo-liberalism and austerity’ that are shaped by debates about the choices made by individuals, groups, communities and organisations in relation to what is ‘good’ for young people (Kelly and Pike 2017). There are also growing environmental threats such as the effects of climate change, including, in Australia, bushfires and floods. And, at the time of finalising the draft of this book, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose new and compounding social and economic challenges that are transforming the choices and options of young people, families and communities, both locally and globally. Including, at the most fundamental level, the very possibility of attending school. These emerging and established challenges impact different populations of young people in different ways. The capable, the successful, the included, mainstream of young people are imagined as being able to respond to these challenges and opportunities through their capacities for innovation and enterprise. They are imagined as being equipped with a set of skills, capabilities, behaviours and dispositions that enable them to thrive in contexts of uncertainty, precarity, turbulence and disruption. They are resilient and enterprising (Kelly 2013). In the foreword to a 2015 report from the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) titled The New Work Order, FYA’s CEO Jan Owen (2015, 2) suggested that: At FYA we see a significant opportunity to sure [sic] up our nation’s future by investing in the next generation and backing them to create the kind of world they want to live in. Core to this will be a generations [sic] of enterprising young people who are job builders and creators, not only job seekers. That’s why FYA is calling for a national enterprise skills strategy to ensure young people are prepared for the economy of the future and equipped with the tools to drive economic and social progress. We want all young Australians to learn the skills to be digitally-literate, financially-savvy, innovative and adaptable and help them navigate complex careers of the future.

At the same time, more marginalised populations of young people—for example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, refugee/migrant communities and young people from poorer households and communities—are more likely to disengage from education and training, experience

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unemployment or precarious employment at rates far higher than their peers and older workers, and experience a range of issues that impact on the state of their social, physical and mental health and well-being (Kelly 2018; Kelly and Kamp 2015; Kelly and Pike 2017). Marginalisation suggests a lack of well-being, resilience and enterprise (Kelly et al. 2019). It is against this general background, and the more specific details that emerge from detailed research, that we, and fellow RMIT University researchers from the School of Education have developed a program of research, comprising multiple research projects, that is titled Young People, Well-being, Resilience and Enterprise: Critical Perspectives for the Anthropocene.5 In collaboration with a range of stakeholders, this program of research aims to investigate and co-design innovative responses to these challenges that shift attention from an individual young person’s well-­ being, resilience and enterprise, to the ‘ecologies’ that can promote inclusion, social justice and democracy. At a time when ‘solutions’ to these challenges and opportunities are often reduced to a set of technical inputs to what are imagined as ‘technical’, ‘engineering’ (social, mechanical, environmental) problems. With the support of a small grant from the Collier Charitable Fund,6 and together with key stakeholders from the Hume-Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network (HWLLEN), and the Whittlesea Youth Commitment Committee (WYC CoM), we conducted a pilot research project in which we developed a conceptual model, and a model for collaborative practice, framed by a sense of the need to identify and explore innovative and disruptive socio-ecological understandings of young people’s well-being, resilience and enterprise, and the ways in which these shaped young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling. HWLLEN is a not-for-profit, membership–based organisation located in the outer northern suburbs in Melbourne (Australia). HWLLEN, along with the other members of a state wide LLEN, is partly funded by the Victorian State Government and aims to improve transition outcomes and

 See our project webpage https://youngpeopleanthropocene.org. The Guardian newspaper reports that the word Anthropocene, ‘from the Ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”, acknowledges that humans are the major cause’ of the forces—‘extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages, vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout’—currently transforming the planet. See, also, Resilience Thinking for the Anthropocene. 6  https://www.colliercharitable.org/ 5

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to help young people complete Year 12 (or equivalent).7 WYC CoM is a community-based intervention strategy designed to improve young people’s transitions and education, training and employment opportunities. It was founded in 1998 from a process based on a Spirit of Cooperation Agreement between the partners in the Whittlesea community (including the City of Whittlesea, community support agencies and employer representatives, employment services, and stakeholders involved in secondary and tertiary education).8 The HWLLEN and the WYC CoM are, in this sense, part of a place-­ based response in the City of Whittlesea to issues of relative disadvantage associated with Melbourne’s Northern suburbs. These suburbs have a fast-growing youth population—many from migrant/refugee backgrounds—and high levels of youth unemployment. The Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Index of Disadvantage ranks the City of Whittlesea (CoW) as the eighth most disadvantaged area in Victoria. The City of Whittlesea (CoW) Youth Plan 2030 projects a population of 40,000 young people in the city by 2021, with a high percentage from a Non-English Speaking Background. A total of 40,000+ young people currently live in the City of Hume. In a number of ways, young people in the City of Whittlesea are living in a situation of relative disadvantage compared with the experience of young people across Greater Melbourne. Their situation is revealed most starkly in relation to differing experiences of education and employment pathways: • There are more young people (aged 15 to 24 years) in the City of Whittlesea who are disengaged from both education and employment compared with Greater Melbourne (9.8% and 7.5%, respectively). Consequently, the outcomes from school education in the City of Whittlesea are worse for young people than in other parts of Melbourne:

7  Details of the Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network are available at https://www.hwllen.com.au 8  Details of the WYC are available at http://dusseldorp.org.au/resource/whittleseayouth-commitment-resources—accessed October 2018

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• There are more residents from the City of Whittlesea with no post-­ school qualification compared with Greater Melbourne (46.0% and 38.6%, respectively). For those young people in the City of Whittlesea who contemplate post-school qualifications, fewer transition into university than across Greater Melbourne, while more complete vocational qualifications than elsewhere in Melbourne: • There are fewer residents from the City of Whittlesea attending university compared with Greater Melbourne (4.8% and 6.4%, respectively). • There are proportionally more residents with a vocational qualification in the City of Whittlesea compared with Greater Melbourne (18.1% and 15.3%, respectively).9 Children in their middle years in the City of Whittlesea (between 9 and 14 years of age) are also vulnerable to disadvantage compared with children of comparable age across Greater Melbourne. The City of Whittlesea has examined middle years issues by collecting data using a Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) over several years. Data from the latest MDI survey in 2016 revealed that students in their middle years, experience a declining sense of belonging at schools—68% of Grade 4 students felt connected and valued at their school reporting a high level of school belonging, but only 41% of Year 7 students felt connected in the same way (City of Whittlesea 2018, 23). Similar trends of declining outcomes for middle years children in the City of Whittlesea are apparent as regards their self-esteem, school-day nutrition and engagement in after-school activities: • A child’s perception of self-worth was relatively high, but declined as the child got older: –– 80% of Grade 4 students and 65% of Year 7 students reported a high level of self-esteem;

9  This data is drawn from City of Whittlesea (2018) Place Profiles Demographic Profiles of Precinct Areas in the City of Whittlesea.

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–– 65% of Grade 4 students and 44% of Year 7 students had a high level of happiness with their lives; and, –– 66% of Grade 4 students and 48% of Year 7 students reported a high level of optimism and having positive expectations for their future. • The proportion of children who eat breakfast regularly (five or more times per week) also declined as the child ages (81% of Grade 4 students and 61% of Year 7 students). • The majority of children surveyed participated in an organised after-­ school activity at least once a week; however the proportion of children participating declined as the child reached high school (82% of Grade 4 students and 67% of Year 7 students) (City of Whittlesea 2018, 24). These data reveal a story of relative disadvantage which, if left unaddressed, would mean worsening outcomes for young people and the community of the City of Whittlesea. The pilot project that we report on at different times in what follows developed from a number of concerns about the growing problems and challenges of school non-attendance in Whittlesea, and the array of agencies with some interest in this concern: • the Department of Education and Training that is focused on issues of youth mental health, school retention and transition; • the Brotherhood of St. Laurence’s, whose Reconnect program caters for young people aged 15–24 years who are early school leavers and are not currently participating in education, training or employment; • Invigor8ing Education (a partnership with Whittlesea City Council, WYC and the YMCA); • the YMCA, whose Engage program aims to empower and train young people in understanding and assisting peers experiencing mental health distress; • Kildonan Uniting Care’s School Focused Youth Services (SFYS) that provide support for young people at risk of leaving school; • Melbourne Polytechnic, which aims to engage people in education as a pathway to employment; and • the Victoria Police, with their focus on high risk young people, employing two new Youth Specialists to work across four local government areas in the northern Melbourne metropolitan region.

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Our project was linked to the strategic directions identified in the Middle Years in Whittlesea: A Collective Response, and was aimed at addressing specific actions set out in the Whittlesea Middle Years Implementation Plan (Whittlesea Youth Commitment, Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network, City of Whittlesea (2017). HWLLEN, WYC CoM and the City of Whittlesea developed the Whittlesea Middle Years Strategy to support young people aged 9 to 14 during a time of significant transition, risk and opportunity. A Collective Response was built on consultation and survey data, especially implementation of the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI). The Implementation Plan for the Collective Response strategy outlined a structured approach for supporting the rollout of the strategy, including the conduct of Action Research (AR) projects such as the one that we will discuss here. This pilot project involved a structured, collaborative process of action research and co-design of interventions to promote engagement of ung people in middle years schooling and to reduce non-attendance by a cohort of students identified in school satisfaction surveys and other research instruments (notably the MDI) as constituting up to 30% of students in the middle years across Whittlesea. In brief, a series of four AR workshops involving, at different times, eight to ten participants from the HWLLEN and WYC networks revealed three primary, intersecting themes concerning the engagement of young people in middle years schooling: Belonging, Identity and Time. These were reflected in discussions during the remaining Workshops, as participants: • articulated a number of possible interventions, • mapped the range of stakeholders who could be involved in co-­ designing and implementing them, • formulated the intervention ideas into a set of Logic Models to guide implementation of the activities in a strategic way and to provide the basis for an evaluation framework so the processes and impacts associated with the interventions could be monitored and assessed. Participants Our action research process was embodied by a particular group of stakeholders in a particular place. So that our readers might have a sense of those actual people, their organisational affiliations and roles, and their focal concerns, we will begin by taking you into the room where we

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usually met and introducing the participants to you. (Consistent with human research ethics, and in the interest of preserving anonymity, the names of all participants have been changed. Where participants work at schools, the names of the schools have also been changed, and are referred to simply as School A, School B and so on). Ashley is a leader in the HWLLEN. The purpose of the HWLLEN is to improve outcomes for young people (ages 10–25) by increasing their opportunities to participate, achieve and successfully transition in education, training or employment. The HWLLEN provides local knowledge and capacity to address education and training needs with a particular focus on young people at risk of disengaging or who have disengaged from education and training and who are unemployed or not in full time employment. Beth is a Case Manager at Melbourne Polytechnic. Her background is in social science and sociology with a Master of Science in Criminology. She mostly works with young people who are disengaged from education and training, are homeless, and/or are dealing with drug and alcohol issues, behavioural issues, or criminal backgrounds. Cathy is a registered division one nurse with the Secondary School Nurse Program from the Victorian (State Government) Department of Education and Training. The program is placed in secondary settings to support the well-being of young people. Cathy works full time and is placed in two schools. Deb is the Leading Teacher at a secondary school (School A) in Whittlesea that is seen locally as a ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ 7 to 12 secondary school. She has experience working with Year 11 and 12 students, and is focused on working with them to support school engagement, and learning and training pathways, in ways that take account of students’ home lives and backgrounds. Ellen is the Principal of School A. As well, she is the Chairperson of the Whittlesea Youth Commitment. She has worked for 40 years in schools, and with culturally diverse schools and communities in Melbourne’s inner and outer northern suburbs. Alan works in a community engagement role with the YMCA at Whittlesea. He directs a youth services team that runs programs for young people at the YMCA and in local schools.

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Brock is a Team Leader of Youth Services at the Whittlesea Council (Local Government). Youth Services runs a range of different programs, activities and events for young people across the municipality. Fran is the Principal of School B in Whittlesea. Her school enrols students from the northern suburbs. Most of its 220 students have behavioural difficulties and social/emotional development issues and have fallen through the gaps in the ‘mainstream’ schooling system. Ginger has been working for over three years as a Senior Wellbeing and Engagement Officer at the Victorian (State Government) Department of Education and Training (DET). Before taking on the role in the DET, she was the School Focused Youth Service Coordinator in the northern suburbs and has also worked in Local Government, Community Services and in government schools. Chris is the Manager of Youth Pathways and Transitions, with the Victorian (State Government) Department of Education and Training (DET). Chris has a Master of Science in Social Science and has worked in various roles in Victoria, including as the Director of Community and Social Innovation in the Victorian (State Government) Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. Dale is an Inspector with the Victoria Police. He is a second-generation police officer who has worked in Victoria Police for over 20 years. Over that time, he has worked in different roles such as operations review and support, and on the ‘frontline’. He recently became an inspector in the Whittlesea area where he works on tackling the problem of family violence. Heather is a School-Focused Youth Services Coordinator working in Whittlesea with Uniting Kildonan—a not-for-profit ‘faith-based’ organisation. Heather has experience in education and wellness and as a youth specialist. In her role as a School Focused Youth Service Coordinator at Whittlesea, Uniting Kildonan, she works with primary and secondary schools in Whittlesea to assist students at risk of disengaging from education. Our introductions here are designed to provide a more ‘personal’ understanding of the human and professional interests that were brought together in a project aimed at imagining new ways to create a culture of ‘caring for others’ in Whittlesea’s schools.

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Stories of Identity, Belonging and Time Our ‘disruptive’ contribution to policy, community and academic debates relates to the ways in which we will explore—through a ‘post’ (structural, human, critical) framework—how concepts, ideas and experiences of Identity, Belonging and Time are ‘entangled’ in complex and diverse ways in shaping the ways in which young people engage, or not, with the middle years of schooling. And, importantly, by suggesting that these ‘entanglements’ need to be understood ‘socio-ecologically’ rather than individually. That is, we will suggest that these debates need to move beyond a focus on why individual young people engage with the middle years, or not, to a focus on the socio-ecologies of particular places, and the ways that these ecologies shape the opportunities, supports, responses to, and possibilities of, young people engaging productively in the middle years as part of their educational and work biographies. In Chap. 2 we argue that identity, a sense of self, is important in shaping young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling. Drawing on posthuman and feminist theories, we suggest that identity is relational, embodied and situated (Wexler 1992). Referencing research conducted in Melbourne we illustrate how Place, Families and Institutions are entangled in forming young people’s identities and engagement. The analysis is framed by: the ways in which globalisation processes produce ‘wild and tame zones’; Foucault’s theories of governmentalities to illuminate the need for young people to develop ‘enterprising’ forms of personhood (Dean 2010; Foucault 1995; Rose 1998, 1999); and how various posthumanist understandings of human subjects—including Braidotti’s (2013) concept of ‘nomad’ selfhood—provide new frameworks for understanding young people’s identities. Chapter 3 engages with the extensive research literature on young people and belonging—in schools, in communities, as members of an ethnic or religious group, as part of a collective somewhere, doing something. We draw on research undertaken in Melbourne, to discuss the ways in which school culture, school networks and ideas about resilience intersect in complex ways to shape young people’s belonging. The chapter explores ‘the trouble’ with the emergence of the concept of belonging as a means to understand and explain young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling, and the related movement in policy and educational discourses from thinking about young people at-risk, to thinking about and being concerned with young people’s resilience.

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In Chap. 4, we examine schooling as a time-based institutional process. This chapter examines young people’s experiences of, and enactments of time in relation to young people’s engagement in the middle years in Melbourne, through concerns about timetables, networked time and sleep time. Our analysis of time in its disciplinary, institutional and metaphorical forms, and how these forms shape young people’s engagement with the middle years of school, references: Foucault’s examination of the disciplinary possibilities of clock time in the ways that schools order time and space; Giddens’ work on time and the colonisation of young people’s futures; and the material and embodied challenges that emerge from Hochschild’s powerful metaphors of ‘quality time’ in a ‘24/7’ world. Finally, in Chap. 5, we each contribute closing remarks about future options for thinking about young people’s engagement in the middle years. Scott explores the value of socio-ecological models and integrated life-course service frameworks. He suggests ‘maranguka’ offers a model for ‘caring for others’ and of collaboration between services to improve young people’s engagement. Seth engages with the concepts of the ‘precariat’, ‘nomad self’, ‘affirmative ethics’, ‘endurance’, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to frame support for young people as they work towards affirmation in the middle years. Peter canvasses the posthuman literatures on ‘complexities’, ‘entanglements’ and ‘convergences’. He suggests that a ‘posthuman ethics’ provides a framework for disruptive thinking to remake education processes for the trouble we find ourselves in.

References Allam, L. 2018. Unique community policing sees crime rates plunge in Bourke. The Guardian, October, 8. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/ oct/09/unique-community-policing-sees-rates-plunge-in-bourke Bland, D., S. Carrington, and K. Brady 2009. Young people, imagination and re-­ engagement in the middle years, Improving Schools, 12:3: 237–248 Boylan, R. L, and L. Renzulli. 2017. Routes and Reasons Out, Paths Back: The Influence of Push and Pull Reasons for Leaving School on Students’ School Reengagement, Youth & Society, 49:1: 46–71 Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge City of Whittlesea. 2018. Place Profiles Demographic Profiles of Precinct Areas in the City of Whittlesea. https://www.whittlesea.vic.gov.au/media/1133/c-usersguh-desktop-place-profiles-full-report_v1_final.pdf

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Dean, M. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd edition, Sage, London. Doll, B, R. Spies, and A. Champion. 2012. Contributions of Ecological School Mental Health Services to Students’ Academic Success, Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 22:1–2: 44–61, https://doi.org/10.108 0/10474412.2011.649642 Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York. Foundation for Young Australians (FYA). 2015. The New Work Order, Melbourne, The Foundation for Young Australians. Grogan, P., K.  Colvin, J.  Rose, L.  Morstyn, and C.  Atkins. 2013. Building the Scaffolding—Strengthening support for young people in Victoria, accessed online at http://vcoss.org.au/documents/2013/04/Building-the-ScaffoldingVCOSS-YACVic.pdf Just Reinvest NSW. 2019. http://www.justreinvest.org.au/ Kelly, P. 2013. The Self as Enterprise: Foucault and the “Spirit” of 21st Century Capitalism, Routledge, London. Kelly, P. 2017. Growing up After the GFC: Responsibilisation and Mortgaged Futures, Discourse, 38, 1: 57–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630 6.2015.1104852 Kelly, P. 2018. The ‘trouble’ with belonging. In C.  Halse (ed) Interrogating belonging for young people in schools, Palgrave Macmillan, London: 319–333 Kelly, P. and A. Kamp (editors). 2015. A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century, Brill, Amsterdam/Boston Kelly, P. and J.  Pike (editors). 2017. Neo-Liberalism and Austerity: The Moral Economies of Young People’s Health and Well-Being, Palgrave Macmillan, London Kelly, P., P.  Campbell and L.  Howie. 2019. Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation: Beyond neo-Liberal Futures?, Routledge, Abingdon. Nairz-Wirth, E and K. Feldmann. 2017. Teachers’ views on the impact of teacher– student relationships on school dropout: a Bourdieusian analysis of misrecognition, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 25:1: 121–136, https://doi.org/10.108 0/14681366.2016.1230881 Nicholson, L.J., and D.W. Putwain. 2015. Facilitating re-engagement in learning: A disengaged student perspective, The Psychology of Education Review, 39: 2, Autumn 2015—pre publication version Owen, J. 2015. Foreword, in The New Work Order, The Foundation for Young Australians, Melbourne. Owens, A. 2018. Income Segregation between School Districts and Inequality in Students’ Achievement, Sociology of Education, 91:1: 1–27. Phillips Smith, E., C.M. Connell, G. Wright, M. Sizer, J.M. Norman, A. Hurley, and S.N. Walker. 1997. An Ecological Model of Home, School, and Community Partnerships: Implications for Research and Practice, Journal of Educational

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and Psychological Consultation, 8:4: 339–360, https://doi.org/10.1207/ s1532768xjepc0804 Productivity Commission. 2016. Digital Disruption: What do governments need to do? Commission Research Paper, Canberra. Redmond, G., J. Skattebol, et al. 2016. Are the kids alright? Young Australians in their middle years: Final summary report of the Australian Child Wellbeing Project. Flinders University, UNSW Australia, Australian Council for Educational Research, www.australianchildwellbeing.com.au. Rifkin, J. 2015. The Third Industrial Revolution: How lateral power is transforming energy, the economy, and the world. http://thethirdindustrialrevolution.com/ Rose, N. 1998. Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Smyth, J. and P. McInerney. 2013. Making ‘space’: young people put at a disadvantage re-engaging with learning, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34:1: 39–55. Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury, London. Wexler, P. 1992. Becoming Somebody, The Falmer Press, London Whittlesea Youth Commitment, Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network, City of Whittlesea. 2017. Middle Years in Whittlesea: A Collective Response—A municipal middle years strategy for the City of Whittlesea

CHAPTER 2

Identity

Abstract  In this chapter Brown, Kelly and Phillips argue that identity, a sense of self, is important in shaping young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling. Drawing on posthuman and feminist theories they suggest that identity is relational, embodied and situated. Referencing research conducted in Melbourne they illustrate how Place, Families, and Institutions are entangled in forming young people’s identities and engagement. The analysis is framed by: the ways in which globalisation processes produce ‘wild and tame zones’; Foucault’s theories of governmentalities to illuminate the need for young people to develop ‘enterprising’ forms of personhood; and how various post-humanist understandings of human subjects—including Braidotti’s concept of ‘nomad’ selfhood— provide new frameworks for understanding young people’s identities. Keywords  Young people • Identity • Middle years • Engagement • Place • Families • Institutions • Braidotti • Foucault • Wild and tame zones

Introduction Schools can be understood—at one level—as ‘intense interactional economies’ where the most important work being done is about ‘becoming somebody’ (Wexler 1992). Philip Wexler (1992, 8), a US-based critical © The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2_2

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social-psychologist, in his analysis of the ways in which identity is constructed for and by young people in the intense ‘interactional economy’ of schools, argues that against the backdrop of a ‘seemingly shared mass youth culture’: what students struggle for in becoming somebody and how they engage that interactional life project during high school is different depending on where their school is located in the larger societal pattern of organised social differences and inequalities…The ideal and the route to becoming somebody in the suburban white working class is not the same as becoming somebody in a high school in a professional middle class suburb. Both are as different from urban under class among youths, as it is for their parents.

Identity, a sense of self, is an important element that shapes young people’s participation and engagement in schools. Identity can be understood in various ways. We want to suggest that a sense of self is always relational and always embodied. Our sense of ourselves, of others, of who I am, who I can be, what I want to do, always has others implicated in it, involved in it, shaping it—positively and/or negatively. And, it is not just about how we think about things. It is embodied in that sense that bodies move, feel, change over time, are considered attractive or not, are what we ‘live’ in/through, are what others see/respond to and can do some things/not others. Rosi Braidotti (2011a, b, 2013) talks of a ‘nomad self’—one that has to continually move in, and across, and between different networks of relationships, different communities of belonging. It is as a nomad self that young people have to develop and deploy strategies for fashioning and maintaining (holding) a sense of self as a consequence of these mobilities. Often in ecologies that are supportive of it, but which may also be hostile to it. We have found this concept particularly powerful for thinking about young people’s transitions, and their ‘struggles’ to be and become somebody—in schools, in training spaces, in work, at home, with peers, online, in the neighbourhood. And the shifting dimensions of these struggles at different times. Identity is something that is constructed for, and by us. For, and by young people. Identities, young people’s identities, are situated. They are shaped by and related to places. To families. To communities. To online spaces. To bodies. To schools. These things, these practices, relations and processes are entangled, as we have suggested, in complex ways to

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co-­shape the lines of force that work to engage, or dis-engage young people in the middle years of schooling. In the section that follows we draw on the discussions that we conducted in Whittlesea to identify the ways in which Place, Families, and Institutions highlight some specific dimensions and characteristics of these entanglements. We want to build on these dimensions in the final section of the chapter to say something more generalisable and, possibly, generative about young people’s identities through three themes: processes of globalisation and the ways in which we can think of different places in terms of what we call ‘wild and tame zones’; the ways in which contemporary neo-liberal governmentalities seek to develop a form of personhood that we can understand as ‘entrepreneurial’; and various post-humanist understandings of human subjects, forms of identity and selfhood—including the work of Rosi Braidotti on what she calls forms of ‘nomad’ selfhood.

Identity: Becoming Somebody in Whittlesea In this section we draw on the action research workshops we conducted with Whittlesea Youth Commitment Committee (WYC) stakeholders to identify and discuss how, at various times and in different ways, principals and teachers, local government and NGO youth and health workers, members of Victoria Police and officials from the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) assist young people to shape their identities. In those workshops, participants gave accounts of, told stories about, young people, their families and their communities that spoke to three key identity themes: Place, Families, Institutions. We want to suggest that if we think about identities in these ways, we can imagine the problems of young people’s engagement and dis-engagement in the middle years in a more productive manner. Place Donna Haraway (2016, 31), in writing about the ways in which the Anthropocene requires new ways of thinking about the human, the more than human, the possible character of the relationships between humans and the more than human, suggests a way to conceive of places, and what places mean when we recognise, in new ways, the challenges of saying that places matter in a world of truly global entanglements and interconnection:

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‘Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something’. Places are where people, young and old, live their lives. Places are where families, of all sorts, of differing circumstances and resources, seek to fashion a life for their children. Places are where young people go to school, and in which the institutions that shape, and are related to, their identities (including families and schools) are located. When people in Whittlesea talked about their place, their assumptions about how Whittlesea is perceived (and stigmatised) came through. So did their ideas about the impact of class, ethnicity and disadvantage. And the theme ‘place’ was evident in the way people spoke about young people’s aspirations, opportunities and mobilities. Stigma of Place

When I got to university and sat in my first education tutorial I witnessed a conversation among my fellow students who marvelled at the fact that there were people from the Western Suburbs at university. They didn’t know how ‘us westies’ had managed that, and I was just gobsmacked. I felt that there needs to be so much more done to equalise the opportunities and access, and for those misconceptions to be exposed. (Ashley) I envisage over the next five years in the Whittlesea corridor how this is going to be—it’s already out of control but it’s going to be a major issue. We have to believe in these young people, and we have to find what they’re good at and use it as the catalyst to give them an opportunity to be something, I don’t care what it is, something that they want to be. (Ellen) As we outlined in our Introductory chapter, Whittlesea is part of Melbourne’s burgeoning outer northern suburbs. It is one of the city’s new ‘growth corridors’. For various reasons, most powerfully captured in official data that identifies Whittlesea as among the most disadvantaged areas of metropolitan Melbourne, it is a place with stigmatised associations in the minds of its residents and community professionals such as police, social workers, youth workers and teachers. Those ideas and feelings about stigma are shaped by and refracted through a number of factors, including: lived experiences of ethnic

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prejudice; coping with a relative lack of public transport infrastructure; the sense of relative isolation as regards distance, modes and forms of mobility and immobility; the relative lack of labour market opportunities; and other forms of social, cultural and economic resources and infrastructure in comparison to more networked, more affluent, more resourced, often inner-urban, suburbs and areas of metropolitan Melbourne. Throughout the action research process, stories about Whittlesea frequently reflected local residents’ and social professionals’ understandings of relative disadvantage, working class identity, limited mobility and constrained educational aspirations. Having an identity that is shaped by, formed within, and practised in a place like Whittlesea, then, is often expressed and experienced as being part of a peripheral community cut off from not only the metropolitan centre of Melbourne but also its range of services and opportunities. In this sense, people in outer northern suburbs such as Whittlesea represent themselves, to themselves and others, in ways that echo the stigma of other working-class places and of prior generations. Part of the challenge in disrupting people’s imaginations about middle years engagement in education involves telling stories of ‘northern suburbs young people’ as being ‘good enough’ to remain engaged in educational pathways. To some extent, this means disrupting hidden curriculum and class-based assumptions which teachers sometimes bring into classrooms and playgrounds about what young people from these places might ‘amount to’ in school. Some principals recognise this, when they talk about encouraging students to discover ‘what they’re good at’ and to then help them become ‘something they want to be’. Anoop Nayak is a social geographer who has written extensively about places and spaces. He opens a recent article about the stigma often associated with the de-industrialising regions of the north of England (particularly the Teesside region and the ways in which its heavy-industrial economic base has profoundly shaped this ‘place’) with a reference to renowned film director Ridley Scott’s observations about these landscapes, and their influence on the aesthetic he developed for the original Blade Runner movie: There’s a walk from Redcar into Hartlepool. I’d cross a bridge at night, and walk above the steel works. So that’s probably where the opening of Blade Runner comes from. It always seemed to be gloomy and raining, and I’d

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just think, “God, this is beautiful”. You can find beauty in everything, and so I think I found the beauty in that darkness. (Nayak 2019, 927)

Nayak (2019, 927–928) says his purpose is to examine spatial stigma in the post-industrial heartlands of Teeside—how it is experienced, how it is embodied in the region’s rates of early pregnancy, participation in education and employment, alcohol and drug use patterns, health and longevity profiles. In exploring spatial stigma, Nayak focuses not so much on ‘the production and attribution of urban stigma’, but more on ‘how people in low-income neighbourhoods manage stigma, and the extent to which they may resist or challenge it.’ Our action research process in Whittlesea allowed people in that place to explore how to manage stigmatised identities, to re-­imagine possibilities for (re)engagement of young people in education and life trajectories within and beyond the municipality. Class, Ethnicity and Relative Disadvantage

…if you think about the communities where these kids are coming from, which is interesting, we are really looking at very marginalised families, communities disengaged from society in general, not in the workforce, very poorly regulated parents, very low levels of education from parents. It is a class issue to me and I think you really need to look at the lives that these kids are living in the community as being probably the biggest factor in their dis-engagement. (Fran) …you’d all know, in every school, there’s five or 10 kids that are the ones that we deal with but every one of those kids is a completely individual situation, and some of them are what you’ve all alluded to already in terms of generational dis-engagement from education for whatever reason; we also have a very big demographic in terms of cultural diversity—people coming from different places with different outlooks on education. (Deb) Class, ethnicity and relative disadvantage are bound up with the ways in which principals associated with alternative schools, and teachers in more traditional Years 7–12 high schools, describe the identities of disengaged students in Whittlesea. There is a sense in which these class and ethnic boundaries constitute an interactional economy that limits the possibilities for young people from these backgrounds developing the capabilities

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required of nomadic selves—the ability to cross between networks, relationships and communities of belonging. It is as if the communities of ‘home’ and ‘culture’ are destined to remain distinct and closed from the communities of ‘school’ and ‘post school education’. The stereotyping that can, and does, occur within schools is likely to inform the social reproduction of class, unless the particularities and networked contexts of students’ gendered and cultural identities are understood. What emerges from examining the experiences of marginalised ‘minority’ students’ backgrounds, and how they are perceived by their white ‘majority’ teachers, is a significant challenge for teachers. And it is no less significant in multicultural school settings in places like Whittlesea. It is a challenge not just in terms of the complexities of classroom management but also how teachers communicate with students. It means recognising that the attitudes and assumptions teachers bring into the school space affect how students and their families see themselves, what and who they might be, and where their journey of ‘becoming somebody’ might take them. This also might mean challenging deep-seated assumptions among teachers about their task of facilitating assimilation and engagement in mainstream education rather than celebrating the diversity of students and enabling them to thrive and flourish within school and beyond it in terms meaningful to them and their particular cultural contexts. Young People’s Aspirations, Opportunities and Mobilities

I think that’s where that whole focus on the middle years really has struck home for me, that it’s the time where young people start to lose their dream, they start to have that squashed out of them. The changes and the vulnerabilities that they’re experiencing need to be recognised and supported. (Ashley) The concept of young people’s ‘aspirations’ was central to much of the conversation about engagement, and frequently was filtered through ideas about class and agency. Conversations about ‘aspiration’ raised questions about whose aspirations and whose dreams teachers and principals were talking about, and to what extent these dreams and aspirations were those of young people themselves, or those being shaped for them by their teachers and parents. In many respects, the answer we would provide to this question is that these dreams and aspirations are always both, and they

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are shaped by persons in interactions in the social, symbolic and material spaces and places that they inhabit and move through. At the same time, the vulnerabilities which many middle years students experience are complex. These can include feelings of disconnectedness, exposure to bullying, drug and alcohol mis-use, domestic violence, and growing distances from each other and youth-related support services. In Whittlesea, the perception of place can have a powerful influence in shaping a young person’s identity. The stigma associated with Whittlesea can, and does, raise questions about how young people create alternative stories about Whittlesea, re-inscribe stories about what it means to come from Whittlesea, and re-imagine post-school options and pathways that offer alternative stories to still dominant white, middle class trajectories. In the next section we focus our attention on family and the complexities of family relationships as these form and inform young people’s identity and their engagement with school. Family The ‘Trouble’ with Families

We had a number of stakeholders, so schools, representatives from the community, Headspace, other service agencies commenting on the increasing number of young people who were presenting with youth mental health issues, that this was happening at a lower age, that the complexities were actually growing, that the families were very much a part of that, and that there’s reasons behind that associated with domestic violence, with depression, with anxiety. We also heard that a number of young people, particularly girls in Year 8, were presenting with increasingly harmful behaviours, including self-harm, and this was leading to real issues beyond that and obviously dis-engagement. We heard that bullying from the students was one of the main issues, along with domestic violence. (Ashley) In Whittlesea, when teachers, principals, police officers, local government youth workers and community health professionals have conversations about ‘Families’—(in upper case and in the ‘abstract’)—and young people, and the roles that Families play in young people’s development,

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health and well-being, success, failure, participation and/or engagement in schooling, and any number of other ‘youth issues’ that these professionals are required to develop knowledge about and take action on, there is a powerful tendency to make judgements about Families. There is a tendency to make observations about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Families, to focus on Families as often isolated ‘units’ of relationships and resources, and as holders of various forms and quantities of ‘capital’ (economic, social, cultural) that young people can draw on. These judgements and observations often, also, make reference to and draw on assumptions, stereotypes, official and expert accounts of Families that are then applied to what we might call ‘real families’ (in the lower case), ‘real young people’, ‘real parents’, ‘real brothers and sisters’, ‘real grandparents’, and ‘real aunts and uncles’. These ‘real families’ are the ones that these professionals deal with on a day-to-day basis as they bring their ‘real lives’—in all their complexity, messiness, contradictions, tensions, uncertainties, struggles, successes and failures—into schools, health centres, police stations and local government facilities. A useful analytical distinction to draw in this regard concerns what social anthropologists Ladislav Holy and Milan Stuchlik (1980) referred to as ‘folk models’, which they saw as being of two related kinds: ‘representational models’ and ‘operational models’ (Holy and Stuchlik 1980). ‘Representational models’ are those notions, ideas, perspectives which people have within a particular society, of how their institutions (such as ‘families’) are formed and structured. ‘Operational models’, on the other hand, are the ways they use, modify, adapt these notions in their practical and day-to-day lives. Today’s young people are faced with many challenges in achieving ‘preferred’ educational outcomes, as institutional structures that once supported young people in their pursuit of educational pathways and employment, have been profoundly transformed in the last 40 years. The deregulation of the labour market in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s (Pusey 2003), the introduction of school choice over school provision (Campbell and Proctor 2014), and the rise of entrepreneurialism (Kelly 2006) based on institutional assumptions of individualism, personal responsibility and self-reliance have all influenced the ways in which young people navigate through the education system. These changes, along with young people’s experiences of uncertainty in a precarious labour market exist alongside, and are entangled with, a multitude of choices and options that make young people dependent on these institutions in new ways.

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Campbell et al. (2009), for example, explain how choice biographies support young people taking on greater responsibility for their school selection and educational achievement, shifting much of the responsibility on families to choose the ‘right’ school to meet the needs of their children. These assumptions ignore the role of economic, social and emotional factors that determine young people’s ‘actual’ choices and the complexity of family resources needed for young people to achieve educational outcomes (te Reile 2004). Family resources and socio-economic status play important roles in the process of young people developing educational pathways and post-school options. For example, Butler and Muir (2017) examine the roles of family relationships in shaping young people’s (ages 12–24) educational biographies. Their study of 20 young people in Queensland explores how young people talk about their educational experiences and choices, and how these are connected to family relationships. The research also explores how these relationships shape their decisions and how young people make sense of such experiences. Liam, a 15-year old Anglo-Australian shared his feelings of obligation, concern and guilt about spending the family budget to study at TAFE (Technical and Further Education) in his decision to continue with his education. I don’t know if I will go [to TAFE] this year, because mum and dad don’t have the money really. It’s going to be $800 and it’s very expensive. My step-dad is not working at the moment. So we are very short on money. So I don’t know if I’ll go. I will probably just go and try to get a full-time job. (Butler and Muir 2017, 325)

This example illustrates the complexities of family relationships and young people’s decisions about their educational pathways. In what follows we look at the ways in which families, schools and social professionals think about, and respond to, the ‘trouble’ with families. We uncover the ways in which ‘family life’ is experienced by young people in Whittlesea, and consider how insights into these lived realities can help to inform more effective strategies for school engagement. And we consider the importance of tracking and supporting the transitions of young people to facilitate effective transitions into and through the middle years of schooling.

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Kids as Carers, Parents as Kid’s Friends, Kids as Interpreters and Breadwinners

I’ve harassed a young man in Year 9 all year about being late for school. Every morning I give him so much grief about being late and he gets to school somewhere between 9:15 and 9:45 every morning. By pure luck I discovered over the school holidays that he has to stay in the morning and wait until the Special School bus picks his sibling up, and the bus doesn’t get there until just after 9 o’clock. So this morning when he came in I did my usual number of harassing him and then said to him, “All I need is a note and then nobody’s going to give you any grief, you won’t have to come and sign in as late, you’ll be able to just go to class because your start time is now official…” (Ellen)

One folk model of ‘family’ in Whittlesea concerns the ways that parents and children are understood and described as interacting with each other. A representational model of the ‘normal family’ as being structured and formed around parents who take care of the birth, growth and nurturing of their children was implicit in the way teachers described the lived reality of a number of their ‘middle years children’. Those children, however, were dealing with disparate operational models of the family—variously ‘kids as carers’, ‘parents as kids’, ‘kids as interpreters for immigrant parents negotiating welfare agencies’ and ‘kids as breadwinners’. Getting inside the ways that people in particular places use their representational models and operational models of ‘family’ may provide a means for disrupting the formal arrangements that have been established around how families and children interact with school ‘start times’ and ‘the school day’. These insights bring awareness to the complexity of the day-to-day experiences of young people when they encounter institutions such as schools. The formality and rigid structures and rules of the education system at times do not cater to young people’s educational biographies, and the multitude of relationships between parents and young people who might be performing identities of kids as carers, parents as kid’s friends, and kids as interpreters and as breadwinners. Educational biographies and identities are shaped by complex family relationships that can make school life challenging but also give a sense of belonging and meaning to young people’s lives. Butler and Muir (2017) indicate in their study that young people’s narratives about caring for

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family members are common across ethnic backgrounds and lower socio-­ economic contexts. This highlights the complexity and multi-directional relationships between different generations (Cuervo and Wyn 2012), and shows how young people’s autonomy requires the support of family (Wyn 2009), even when those relationships complicate their school lives. Understanding the complexity of these relationships between young people and families is key when dealing with issues of educational engagement. Recent research on middle years dis-engagement across Australia ‘suggests that young carers are less likely to complete or do well in secondary school compared with young people without caring responsibilities’ (Hamilton and Redmond 2020). Hamilton and Redmond’s study compared ‘the school engagement of non-carers, young carers of a family member with disability, and young carers of a family member with a mental illness or using alcohol/drugs’ (Hamilton and Redmond 2020). Their analysis revealed the diversity of experience among ‘kids as carers’. School engagement of young carers of people with disability is not significantly different from that of non-carers, but school engagement among young carers of people with a mental illness or using alcohol/drugs is significantly lower. Among this latter group, young carers who are themselves with disability report particularly low levels of engagement. (Hamilton and Redmond 2020).

They concluded, therefore, that ‘improved support focused on young carers of people with a mental illness or using alcohol/drugs is needed to improve their school engagement’ (Hamilton and Redmond 2020).

Tracking Young People and Families

The middle years strategy I think really does capture a lot of work that has been done in previous years, so Whittlesea has been one of the drivers of what’s known as the Middle Years Development Instrument, the MDI. It’s the extension of what the AEDC, or the AEDI as it used to be called, was capturing for Prep students when they first started school. The AEDI is completed by the Prep teachers in schools and is basically measuring young people’s health, wellbeing, and preparedness and development as they start school. It’s done every three years; it’s now become a census. (Ashley)

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Understanding what young people and families need to support their health, education and well-being is vital to successful education policy, planning, development and implementation. In this context, the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) has operated as a nationwide data collection program since 2009, using an Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) established in 2003. The AEDC Census is conducted every three years, and gives a snapshot of children’s development at the time they commence their first year of full-time school. Data is collected relating to five key areas of early childhood development (domains): • Physical health and well-being • Social competence • Emotional maturity • Language and cognitive skills (school-based) • Communication skills and general knowledge Collecting this data over successive waves (2009, 2012, 2015, 2018) has enabled tracking of national progress on the healthy development of children. As the AEDC website observes: ‘The AEDC highlights what is working well and what needs to be improved or developed to support children and their families by providing evidence to support health, education and community policy and planning.’1 Inspired by the effectiveness of the AEDI as an instrument for tracking progress of children, the Whittlesea City Council worked with local education and employment stakeholders to develop the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI). The MDI surveys children in Years 5/6 and young people in Years 7/8. It considers five dimensions related to well-being, health and academic achievement (Whittlesea Youth Commitment, Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network, City of Whittlesea 2017, 14): • Social and emotional development • Physical health and well-being • Connectedness to adults and peers • School experiences • Use of after-school time.

1

 https://www.aedc.gov.au/about-the-aedc/why-the-aedc-is-important

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Three rounds of the MDI survey have been run: in 2013, 936 Year 5 students were surveyed; in 2014, 628 Year 8 students were surveyed; and in 2015, 995 Year 5 students and 644 Year 7/8 students were surveyed. Data from the MDI survey has enabled tracking of young people and their family’s level of engagement in education, and provided a basis for development of the report, Middle Years in Whittlesea: A Collective Response (Whittlesea Youth Commitment, Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network, City of Whittlesea 2017). Whittlesea’s Collective Response document notes how MDI data pointed to several issues to be further investigated and explored, specifically, how to: • Strengthen relationships with adults—at school, home and in the neighbourhood • Strengthen students’ sense of a positive school climate • Improve nutrition (eating breakfast) and sleep • Increase engagement in after-school activities This MDI and Collective Response material partly informed discussions during the action research process. Principals and youth workers saw real value in taking a regular snapshot of young people in the middle years to observe how they are faring in relation to the dimensions of health, well-­ being and academic achievement. It helped to suggest the value in ‘having a cluster of the identified transition people in schools working together around these kids, … bringing in people like the youth resource officers from the police, and the workers for the council…’. Key stakeholders use instruments such as the MDI for tracking middle years students’ academic achievement and the state of their health and well-being to support these students as they progress through the education system. In summary, then, young people are faced with more and more responsibility to excel academically, and families are under increasing pressure to select the ‘right’ school for their child. Pressures are also felt by schools and other government agencies to assist young people to do well academically, and to be healthy despite the growing inequalities and lack of resources experienced by many of these families. Families are fundamental to young people’s development and performance of a range of identities— some of which facilitate engagements with school, some of which pose profound dilemmas for engaging with school. In the next section, we look at how young people’s identities are shaped and patterned by the texture of their cultural lives. And we see how issues of mental health are understood in relation to family experiences and narratives.

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Institutionalised Identities Institutionalised Cultural Identities

Often the girls by Grade 6 or whatever fulfil that role…they cook the meals and they mind the younger siblings and… that’s the cultural role that needs to be fulfilled. (Ellen) …let’s also not forget our first Australian indigenous communities because they are massively overrepresented here. We’ve got like 25% of our kids at our… Campus identify as Aboriginal. So a really big issue is those kids being actively exited from schools because of non-­attendance. Their perception of that when they talk to us when they come to our school is that it wasn’t a culturally safe space, they didn’t feel wanted… (Fran) We can note here the impact that young people’s institutionalised cultural identities can have on the formation of their embodied, gendered, relational identities (e.g., as a girl, or as an Aboriginal young person) in and beyond school. Everyday routines and obligations for females in some families may compete/conflict with their ability to complete their school ‘homework’. Schools, as institutions, may also conflict with young Aboriginal people feeling that their cultural identity is understood or respected. When principals mentioned that some Indigenous students felt that school ‘wasn’t a culturally safe place, they didn’t feel wanted…’, it highlighted the need for schools to pay greater attention to integrating concepts like ‘cultural safety’ into their policies, personnel, principles and practices. Ideas about cultural safety originated in New Zealand with respect to making nursing practice better attuned with Maori cultural values and norms (Brascoupé and Waters 2009, 7). Ideas of ‘cultural safety’ or ‘cultural security’ have been incorporated into schools to facilitate the engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families in Australia (Miller et  al. 2019). Resources for schools have been made widely available across Australia by Reconciliation Australia, through its Narragunnawali program established in 2015. The program’s website indicates the sort of work that is being done to make schools culturally safe. (Reconciliation Australia 2020). That said, evidence of the effectiveness of ‘cultural safety’/’cultural security’ approaches in engaging young Indigenous people in schools is not well-developed beyond the early years sector. As Miller et al. (2019, 57) note:

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Research on factors influencing attendance and engagement in early childhood education has focused primarily on Indigenous children, families or community. In comparison, there is a dearth of research on the preparedness of mainstream educational contexts to receive Indigenous children and families, and to ensure cultural security via appropriate curricula and connections with community.

Reconfiguring middle years school policies, personnel and practices in terms of ‘cultural safety’ and ’cultural security’ principles is consistent with implementing the ‘maranguka’ framework of ‘caring for others’, described in Chap. 1. Translating them into particular places and contexts requires re-imagining what a culturally sensitive and caring school might be like, when schools too often demonstrate a lack of respect and care for Aboriginal people’s identities, values and norms.

Young People and Mental Health

When we assess our students we see family dysfunction or difficulties as being most prevalent amongst our kids and poor mental health as being…and that’s both kids with diagnosed mental illness as well as with kids with noticeable poor mental health which is evident in severe behaviour and so that incorporates all of the kids with significant behavioural issues…When we assess students’ alcohol and other drug use is prevalent in our cohort which is probably the more pointy end but it’s more around about 75% that use drugs and alcohol. (Fran) Parents use mental health sometimes incorrectly, they like to diagnose their children themselves. Children start to believe they may have—obviously there are elements of mental health issues that they may already have, but they believe that mental health is almost seen as an excuse for behaviour, “I’ve got a mental health issue, I’ve got Asperger’s, I’ve got autism.” But they’ve never been formally diagnosed as having either, it’s more the parents that will say, “My child’s had this” and they go to so many people before we finally get to see them. The kids have gone through so many different services, they’ve been involved with so many different people that they just disengage from that too because they don’t know who they’re seeing and what they’re seeing those people for. So, although mental health is very, very valuable and I’m an advocate for the openness in talking about mental health, but I think with that has come the negative sector where people just go, “Oh it’s mental health, let’s just blame mental health for that. (Beth)

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But it is not only schools that can affect the mental health of young people. Families are another institution that influences and shapes young people’s emotional and behavioural states and the narratives that students and parents use to describe and rationalise their sense of dis-engagement from school. Families that struggle to function well are more likely to be associated with negative mental health outcomes than those which have stronger bonds and observe family bonding rituals (Compañ et al. 2001). This is not to say that family difficulties are the main contributing factor to mental health and significant behavioural issues. Other factors, such as the use of drugs and alcohol often are part of the context (Children’s Commissioner 2018). Further, there is a sense in which ‘mental health’, ‘mental illness’ and other terms used by medical and psychological professionals (such as ‘Asperger’s’ and ‘autism’) have been appropriated by students and their parents to rationalise, and enact, behaviours which schools find problematic. Institutionalised identities, including those associated with mental illness, can lead young people on a journey of stigma and confusion. In these circumstances, young people’s decision to disengage from ‘schooling’ and ‘therapy’ can become a survival strategy.

Discussion: Embodied, Truly Networked, Posthuman Identities What sense can we make of these stories of some of the challenges and struggles that seem to characterise the opportunities for many young people to engage with the education opportunities that they encounter in this place? That many young people encounter in similar, though not necessarily comparable, places elsewhere. Places are where we come from. Places, also, often look different to, and from, different perspectives. From and to the people who live there. Whether by choice or not. From and to the people who work there. Whether they live there or not. From and to the people who neither live nor work there. Whether they would like to or not. People make judgements about places. Make judgements about the people who live in places. In many respects if we are to understand the ways in which identities are constructed for and by young people in these places, we need to understand education processes, structures and practices, schooling and school systems, institutional and governmental ambitions, and aspirations related

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to the purposes of schooling large populations of young people in overwhelmingly standardised ways. We also need to be able to think about the ways in which young people’s identities emerge from, and are shaped by the relationships, ecologies, places in which they and their families seek to fashion a life. This emergent identity is shaped by young people not only on their own terms, but also on the terms that diverse others set and expect. Where these others can be governments, businesses, communities, experts who have a range of interests and expectations about what it is that young people should be and what it is that they should become. In youth studies and education studies these subjects have extensive and diverse histories. Researchers from a variety of disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds have sought to identify, explain and analyse the ways in which such things as structure and agency; gender, sexualities, class, ethnicity and geography; embodiment, affect and emotion are entangled in complex ways in the identity work of being and becoming a young person who is expected and encouraged to participate in, and be engaged by, education in the middle years of schooling. In this final section we want to draw on some of these debates, and our own work, to think with three separate, but related, intellectual trajectories. First, processes of spatial globalisation and the ways in which we can think of different places in terms of what we have elsewhere called ‘wild and tame zones’ (Kelly 1999; Kelly and Kamp 2015). Second, Foucault’s work on the government of self and others, and the ways in which contemporary neo-liberal governmentalities seek to develop a form of personhood that we can understand as ‘entrepreneurial’, and the roles that schooling, schooling systems and governmental ambitions play in trying to make up youthful persons who look and feel and act like this. And third, various post-humanist understandings of human subjects, forms of identity and selfhood—including the work of Rosi Braidotti on what she calls forms of ‘nomad’ selfhood, a way of understanding identity that seeks to account for the joining of the ‘human’ and ‘more than human’ in places that are truly globally networked, and which, in turn, are characterised by different forms of, opportunities for, and consequences of, ‘mobility’ and ‘immobility’.

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Wild and Tame Zones 2 In a number of places we have referenced the work of Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) in Economies of Signs and Spaces to think about the spatial distribution and character of relative advantage and disadvantage—particularly at a time of marked transformations in spaces and places as a consequence of the entanglements of processes of globalisation, neo-­ liberal capitalism and the emergence of neo-liberal governmentalities that re-imagine and re-configure the nature of the relationships between markets, governments and individuals. Lash and Urry’s work is suggestive and generative in this context because of their introduction of the metaphor of ‘wild and tame zones’ into this discussion of ‘places’ in a globalising world. Nearly 30 years ago, Economies of Signs and Spaces made a significant contribution to the then emerging debates about processes of globalisation and the transformations these processes were/might be heralding. At that time Lash and Urry (1994, 281) argued that a ‘range of different kinds of socio-spatial entities are emerging which are not nation-state societies of the north Atlantic sort’. They were suggesting that the ‘idea’ of the nation State, as the obvious and legitimate source of authority in/over civil society, was being rendered problematic by the transformed transnational flows of signs and spaces characteristic of processes of globalisation. They suggested that we were witnesses to the emergence of ‘societies which are not coterminous with the nation-state’; ‘nation-states that are barely societies’; and ‘societies’ that are not states in the ‘conventional sense’. At that time they outlined the possible forms which these emergent entities might take, including the following: a ‘Europe of the regions’, in which socio-spatial groupings reflect both ancient and more recent attachments and conflicts: two Italys (North and South): two Englands (North and South): an Independent Scotland in Europe (Lash and Urry 1994, 282–283). The development of truly interconnected global cities is one other example of these emerging entities. Global cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, Sydney, were imagined as the ‘new homelands’ of ‘cosmopolitan subjects’ who exhibited little of the older attachments to ‘the Nation’, as a shared community of fate. These ‘reflexivity winners’ in the transformed world of transnational flows identify more with ‘neo-worlds’ such as ‘the art world, the financial world, the drug world, the advertising world, as well as the academic world’ (Lash and Urry 1994, 323). 2

 This discussion references elements of Kelly (1999) and Kelly and Kamp (2015).

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For Lash and Urry (1994, 324) the ‘double’ of cosmopolitanism points to the emergence of, and indeed, an increase in, large populations of ‘reflexivity losers’ occupying extensive ‘wild zones’ in these transformed spaces. The idea of ‘wild zones’ was suggestive, at that time and at one level, of collapsing empires (USSR), imploding nation-states (Yugoslavia), ungovernable First World Cities (Los Angeles), tracts of desertification (South East Africa) and countries dominated by narco-capitalism (Colombia). Lash and Urry (1994, 324–366) and Lash (1994, 127–135) characterise these ‘wild zones’ in terms of a deficit of forms of regulation (State, Market, Self), and the ‘flight’ to the ‘tame zones’ by those with the capacities to do so. These ‘tame zones’ are marked both by ‘economic, political and cultural security’ and by an ability to, more or less successfully, secure the borders of these zones. Often these practices of exclusion take less material or physical forms. Exclusion here is discursive, symbolic or imagined. At other times these boundaries are indeed physical and concrete. Exclusion, in this sense, is marked by the electronically surveilled walled enclaves of the reflexivity winners, the erection of border walls and fences and the use of detention centres to house asylum seekers and refugees from various ‘wild zones’.3 In these emerging socio-spatial entities, these ‘wild and tame’ zones, the winners and losers from these transformed flows often occupy proximal spaces. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by the emergence of a ‘patchwork’ of ‘enormous social and spatial inequalities, of ungovernable wild zones next to highly disciplined tame zones’ (Lash and Urry 1994, 325). As we have argued elsewhere, ‘moral geographies’ significantly shape young people’s experience of the education, training, work and life ‘style’ challenges and opportunities characteristic of the twenty-first century (Pike and Kelly 2014). The increasing urbanisation of the world’s population, and the growth of mega-cities means that these challenges and opportunities play out most powerfully in the diversity of the complex, ecological patchwork of wild and tame zones in these urban spaces (Resilient Cities 2013). Australia, for example, is one of the most 3  In another context or project it would be worth revisiting this argument in greater detail to think through and about such instances as the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US President, Brexit and the rise of right-wing nationalist leaders and governments in places such as Hungary, Italy, Brazil and the Philippines alongside, and at the same time, as there emerges a greater identification among some people and groups, including millions of young people with a global community of fate shaped by the climate crisis.

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urbanised countries in the world. Melbourne, one of Australia’s most heavily and densely populated cities, is often identified as the world’s ‘most liveable’ city and continues to attract young people from rural and regional areas seeking opportunities (ABS 2008, 2011, 2012; Gordon 2014). A recent Grattan Institute report suggests that global cities such as Melbourne ‘are essential to generating growth and to creating and distributing opportunities’ (Kelly and Mares 2013). That report examined a number of challenges for contemporary Australian cities that ‘could threaten national prosperity’—challenges that raise questions about a label such as ‘most liveable’ if we recognise and account for the complex patchwork of wild and tame zones that characterises urban environments such as Melbourne (Kelly and Mares 2013, 4).

Melbourne is only the most liveable city if you move in the right circle

For those outside a 10-km radius of the CBD, Melbourne’s liveability loses its lustre. Melbourne’s liveability is something to be celebrated, yet few of us actually question what the measure actually means. Liveable for whom? And how is this measured? The Economist Intelligence Unit assessment uses 30 criteria to produce a single score out of 100 (Melbourne scores 97.5 followed by Vienna at 97.4 and Vancouver,97.3). Included are assessments about the threat of terror and military conflict, the prevalence of petty crime and murder, humidity and temperature, sport, culture, consumer goods, private education, roads, public transport, healthcare and the quality of housing. The 30 values are combined to generate scores for five broad areas: stability, infrastructure, education, healthcare and culture and environment. A weighted average is then used to generate the overall score… …As the unit notes in its introduction, the survey has a broad range of uses, one of which is to help assign hardship allowances as part of relocation packages. It is an elitist measure of success. Ask Mary Agostino, from Whittlesea Council—one of the fastest-­ growing local government areas in the nation—what she thinks of the ranking system and she’ll tell you it’s a great marketing tool to flog Melbourne to highly paid executives, but as far as residents in (continued)

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(continued)

suburbs such as Thomastown, Lalor and Epping are concerned, it is next to meaningless. According to a survey of Whittlesea residents, 18% spend more than 2 hours a day getting to work, compared to a state average of 11.6%. The area also has higher than average rates of mortgage stress, unemployment and domestic violence. “You’ve got young people out here who can’t even access mental-­ health services, you can’t even access health prevention, and we are talking about a liveable Melbourne,” Agostino says. “For the people living on the outer fringe, it’s a different story.” Josh Gordon (2014) Patchworks of urban-based inequality, these wild and tame zones, are indicative of situations in which globalising transnational flows increasingly, and often, result in, and from, an absence of a local, regional or national ‘context for policy’ (Lash and Urry 1994, 325). Moreover, in transformed nation State/civil society/individual relationships, as articulated in neo-Liberal constructions of the ideal nature of these relationships, the socio-economic governance previously conceived as the domain of the State is to be ‘displaced’ by the institutional governance of market regulation, and the individualised management of the ‘self as enterprise’. This form of personhood shapes so much of what we imagine it is that young people should be and become, and the ways in which participation in schooling and engagement with education are fundamental to how it is that young people can become this type of person. The Self as Enterprise In various spaces during the last 20 years, we have developed a significant body of work that has examined the form of personhood that has The Business of Life

When we take [a] larger view of what it means to be an entrepreneur, we realize that we are talking about skills, attitudes, and disciplines everybody needs nowadays—qualities it takes to succeed in every field of work. We live in an entrepreneurial universe of franchise (continued)

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(continued)

businesses, contract work, combinations of full and part-time jobs, self-employed professionals, and professional partnerships. Today, the average person changes jobs, even fields of work, six times over the course of a lifetime. The boundary between a company job and self-employment is becoming blurred. No matter how much talent and training we have, we can no longer simply assume the job system is going to look after us. This kind of work environment requires all of us to think in an entrepreneurial way about who we are and what we are doing. We need to apply entrepreneurial, self-directive, self-promoting, me-­ incorporated thinking to every aspect of our lives—our participation in learning activities, the way we manage our careers, our finances and investments, how we market ourselves, our ability to treat our lives as business enterprises. An entrepreneurial perspective can help us become more adept at the business of life. Your Business Network (2000)

come to dominate the ‘horizons of identity’ during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century (see, e.g., Kelly 2006, 2013). In The Self as Enterprise (Kelly 2013) we worked to identify and locate—via the work and legacy of Max Weber and Michel Foucault among others—a range of incitements, encouragements and injunctions to develop particular ethical dispositions to the conduct of a working life. In a capitalism that has been variously described as postindustrial, information/knowledge based, flexible (Sennett 2006). Taking a lead from Weber’s (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, we argued that the essence of the spirit of twenty-first century, flexible capitalism is that the cultivation of self as enterprise is the calling to which individuals should devote themselves. That is, in the twenty-first century, flexible capitalism is energised by a spirit that sees in the cultivation of the self—as an ongoing, never-ending enterprise—an ethically slanted maxim for the conduct of a life. This spirit is analysable as an institutionally structured, individualised series of incitements to manage the lifecourse as an entrepreneurial DIY project. This is a project that requires us to know and govern ourselves in ways that facilitate the pursuit of this calling.

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Drawing on Foucault’s (1983, 1985, 1986) later work on the care of the self; the central part played by an analysis of the relationships between knowledge/power/subjects in this work; the focus on the ways in which forms of management and regulation and practices of the self interact to shape the ways in which we practise our freedom in neo-Liberal spaces; and a refusal to ground this analytic in a theory of the Subject enabled us to focus on the figure of the self as enterprise. We argued that the self as enterprise is required to think of itself, imagine the work that it should do on itself in a widespread, embracing set of normative terms that seek to position the individual person as entrepreneurial, active, autonomous, prudential, risk aware, choice making and responsible (Kelly 2006). In this sense, each one of us, as individual entrepreneurs of our own biographies and portfolios of choice and achievement, carry an increasingly onerous burden. Individualisation processes increasingly locate the self as the space/site in which the tensions, risks, contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities and ambivalences of globalised, rationalised capitalism are to be resolved and managed—or not (Kelly and Harrison 2009). This work on The Self as Enterprise emerged from earlier work in which we argued that the figure of youth at-risk, in its negativity, illuminated the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self (Kelly 2006). That is, the discourses that construct the figure of youth at-risk reveal the truths about whom we should, as adults, become. And how it is that young people should develop an enterprising, prudent, risk-aware orientation to this future, adult person through present behaviours, dispositions and practices of the self in settings such as the family, the school, communities, clubs, relationships, health and well-being practices. We argued there that the entrepreneurial Self is an adult subject, a subject made capable of conducting itself as an enterprise via the vast ensemble of experiences, practices and relations that characterise the processes of governmental self-­formation that constitute an institutionalised biography—­Childhood/ Youth/Adulthood. Importantly, for the discussion in this chapter about the ways in which young people’s identities are fundamentally implicated in the ways in which they engage with the middle years of schooling, the figure of the self as enterprise enables us to suggest that the management of the uncertainties and precarity associated with young people’s transitions from childhood to adulthood that have emerged in the past four decades illustrate a number of tendencies in the ways in which the problems of government in the Liberal democracies have been re-imagined. These problems

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have been re-imagined in ways that move beyond a Liberal welfare governmentality that imagined the possibility of a collective form of insurance against the range of risks associated with industrial modernity. Increasingly, solutions to these problems of government are imagined as residing in the capacity of various authorities to develop in young people a particular ethics of the self: a form of personhood that sees individuals as being responsible for conducting themselves, in the business of life, as an enterprise, a project, a work in progress. In that article (Kelly 2006) we presented a limited genealogy of the emergence of the figure of youth at-risk. One aspect of that genealogy is of interest at this time because of the work that it does in identifying the widespread emergence of the concept of youth at-risk at a time when various authorities, experts and agencies became concerned with the ‘problem’ of young people’s transitions from school to work, from childhood to adulthood—and the ways in which the middle and later years of schooling became both places where this ‘problem’ became apparent, and where the solutions to the problem could be found, located and enacted. The questions of Youth, of what to do with them, of how to school them, or police them, or regulate them, or house them, or employ them, or prevent them from becoming involved in any number of risky practices—sexual, eating, drug (ab)use or peer cultural—are questions that have a substantial historical aspect. In the Liberal democracies at the turn of the millennium, the crisis of Youth at-risk was a key marker in debates about Youth among intellectuals, social commentators, politicians, bureaucrats, religious groups, moral guardians and experts in various domains of expertise. Beth Swadener and Sally Lubeck (1995), for example, suggested that the truth of Youth at-risk rehearses, in part, the historical truths of Youth as delinquent, deviant and disadvantaged.4 However, as Gordon Tait (1995) had argued, a historically novel aspect of the truth of Youth at-risk was that, potentially, every behaviour, every practice, every group of young people can be imagined in terms of risk. What are young people at risk of not becoming? What forms of identity are they at risk of not performing? What might be the grounds on which concerns with particular forms of identity can be constructed? Youth at-­ risk; the behaviours and dispositions that position Youth at-risk; the forms of future adult personhood placed at risk by these present behaviours and 4  See also Withers and Batten (1995) and Batten and Russell (1995) for reviews of the extensive Youth at-risk literature from the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.

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dispositions; and the forms of institutionalised, intellectually grounded knowledge that generate discourses of risk around certain ideal constructions of human identity emerged as central concerns in the genealogy of the Self as enterprise. The genealogy of youth at-risk we undertook there suggested that such a view of Youth was to be found, for instance, in John Freeland’s (1991, 1992, 1996) identification of those factors that place this transitional process at-risk for certain populations of young people. Freeland’s (1991) commissioned report for the Australian Education Council (Finn) Review Committee (1991) of young people’s participation in Australian post-­ compulsory education and training, underpinned much of the discussion in chapter 7 of the review: ‘Participation in Education and Training by the Disadvantaged’. In that chapter, there was a special focus on the factors affecting the ‘educational participation’ of a ‘sub-group of the “at risk” population’, a group which was ‘classified as deeply disadvantaged’ and at-risk of not completing Year 10, or of transitioning into employment. There, Aboriginal youth, young people from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds, ‘some’ young women, homeless youth, long-term unemployed young people, young people in ‘isolated communities’, young offenders and disabled young people were constructed as identifiable, distinct populations of Youth at-risk (Freeland 1992, 134). Citing Coleman and Husen’s (1985) OECD report Becoming Adult in a Changing Society, Freeland (1996) imagined Youth as a ‘process of simultaneously “un-becoming” a child and becoming an adult’. Youth were understood, broadly and widely, as being at-risk ‘if their life circumstances threaten physical, psychological or emotional well-being and preclude or limit the normative developmental experiences necessary to achieve healthy adult functioning’ (Colthart 1996, 31). The ‘major categories of risk factors’ that jeopardise the achievement of, or transition to, ‘healthy adult functioning’ include: failure to complete Year 10: unemployment or being in marginal or insecure employment: engagement in behaviour likely to bring one into the criminal justice system: engagement in unsafe health practices: and being subject to a family environment which fails to provide adequate safety and/or fails to convey a sense of self-worth. (Colthart 1996, 31–32)

Freeland’s (1996) construction of at-risk and ‘vulnerable’ populations of young people rested on identifying and quantifying a range of factors

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that placed at risk those young people unable to ‘effect’ a ‘secure transition to adulthood’. Freeland (1996, 7) argued that Youth emerges as a transitional ‘stage of life’ in the context of post-Second World War changes in the patterns of teenage participation in education and the labour market. For the ‘vast majority’ of young people who were becoming an adult in the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘transition to adult independence occurred after the completion of ten years of schooling and with a trouble free entry to the labour market’. The ‘long term structural collapse of the teenage full- time labour market’ since the 1960s has, argued Freeland (1996, 7), ‘severely dislocated’ the process and experience of transition for all young people. This dislocation is, however, not ‘uniform’, and is marked by a complex of ‘interrelated social divisions based on class, gender, race, ethnicity and region’. This ‘combination of factors’, Freeland suggests, places a ‘significant proportion of teenagers at risk of not effecting a secure transition to adulthood’. From a position on the Left (broadly defined), Freeland (1996) stressed the importance of seeing the problem of at-risk Youth in ‘structural’ terms. That is, in terms of structural changes in labour markets, curriculum restructuring around notions of ‘quality and relevance’, structured training and entry-level employment opportunities for young people, and in terms of institutionally patterned relations of (dis)advantage in which class, gender, ethnicity, geography and disability structure life options and choices (Freeland 1996, 9–11). Yet Freeland’s (1996) construction of at-­ risk Youth is an instance of Left intellectual practice that unproblematically rehearses the historical construction of disadvantaged (at-risk) Youth in terms of lack and deficit. Disadvantaged, at grave risk Youth, Freeland (1996, 11) argues, ‘have access to fewer cultural resources and life cycle opportunities’ which they might mobilise in their ‘search for solutions to the problems of identity and transition’. In this view the ‘richer the socioeconomic and socio-cultural resources the broader the array of phenomena included in the analysis and understanding, the wider the range of possible courses of action available to the individual and the cultural group’ (Freeland 1996, 11). Constructing Youth at-risk in terms of deficit provokes a range of interventionist regimes that take as their object the transformation of the cultural resources of the disadvantaged. Such a transformation has as its aim the development of an individualised self that can imagine itself as an enterprise. It is this sort of person who ‘thrives’ in the complex and precarious worlds (education, labour, housing and health, relationships) of twenty-first-century capitalism.

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It is these sorts of discourses that continue to frame the ‘common-­ sense’ dimensions of many of the conversations about young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling in places such as Whittlesea. These discourses of young people and places in terms of ‘deficit’ position young people in the middle years that come from communities of relative disadvantage as problematic because of their class identity and ‘different’ cultural backgrounds. Particularly in this era of high stakes performance standards and the politics of school choice that dominate education policy. And which work to hold schools to account in new ways. The complexity of a problem such as student engagement in Whittlesea is reduced to focusing on ‘fixing’ young people from relative disadvantage, while glossing over systemic issues of poverty and concerns over high population growth that affect the community. Over the last 30 to 40 years, Australian education policy has reflected what some commentators identify as neo-liberal economic and political ‘ideology’ (Angus and Brown 1997; Angus and Seddon 2000) that rationalises school choice through marketisation, individualism and competition. This market rationality assumes that school choice will lead to better outcomes for schools and will encourage schools to attract students. Parents, then, will get to choose between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools that are identified through processes of national testing of literacy and numeracy and other measures of accountability (Angus 2015). The launch of the My School website in 2010 provides an example of these neo-liberal policies in Australia. The then Australian Labor Party (centre-left, social democratic) introduced the My School website to compare student performance on standardised National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests along with the social-economic status of students (measured using the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) across all schools (Angus 2015). This logic is difficult to escape when examining problems such as school engagement in places such as Whittlesea. In a place such as Whittlesea, young people face considerable challenges to engaging with the education system. Whittlesea’s population is forecasted to rise from 197,491 in 2016 (ABS 2016) to 234,989 in 2020, and to 388,417 by 2041 (City of Whittlesea 2019). According to Tanton et al. (2018), 68% of the population in Whittlesea live in families with dependent children and 17% of the population live in poverty. Yet educational policies hold the education system accountable for closing the gaps in school performance, despite the overwhelming challenges of a growing

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population and a high rate of poverty. The promotion of school choice globally has had a profound influence on how governments think about making schools more transparent and how market pressures can positively impact school performance (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). It is in this sense, that we have argued in a number of places (Kelly 2017, 2019) that the promise, the hope of re-making the world, can’t be invested in the autonomous, choice making, individualised human agent/ subject. That is neo-Liberal capitalism’s game. It owns that subject. Concepts such as identity, structures and agency need to be re-assembled in ways that are fit for our times, for thinking about young people, families, communities and schools, and for new ways of understanding what it is to be, as Braidotti (2013) suggests, a truly networked organism in our present and the future. Nomad Selves What happens when human exceptionalism and methodological individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. (Haraway 2016, 34)

We want to close this discussion through a relatively brief encounter with other ways for understanding human identities, human selves, forms of personhood, that are less invested in the ideas of human exceptionalism and methodological individualism that Haraway identifies. In Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation: Beyond neo-Liberal Futures? (Kelly et al. 2019), we engaged with a number of key theoretical concepts and methodological approaches that constitute much of the orthodoxy of contemporary youth studies. Part of the work that we did there was to unsettle and trouble orthodox ideas about structure, agency and youth transitions, and the ways in which these key ideas were framed by the practise of human exceptionalism and methodological individualism in orthodox youth studies. Much of that discussion was informed by Rosi Braidotti’s influential work on posthumanism, nomadic theory and nomadic subjects.5 As we suggested, the word nomadism seems to infer a sense of roaming about with no fixed address, no ‘home’. However, Braidotti’s (2011b) 5

 The following discussion draws on parts of Kelly et al. (2019, 123–150)

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project stresses the fundamental power differential among categories of human and nonhuman travellers or movers. Nomadism is, in this sense, no mere metaphor for belonging and homelessness and mobility. Rather, it refers to a multilayered theoretical framework and subjectivity with roots in feminism and feminist theory (Braidotti 2011a, 13). The nomad as a figure complements Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy that provides a critical commentary on subjectivity in relation to changes in the humanities, our social and political environment, understandings of sexuality, gender, bodies and relationships, systems of governance and our relationships with each other, ‘non-human’ Others and life itself (or what Braidotti calls Zoe). The suggestion is that we are more than the category ‘human’ denotes, and that we need to reach beyond ‘the human’ in order to understand ourselves in relation to the organic, the ecological, the animal, the technological. Braidotti’s work, alongside, but in different ways to the work of Haraway and others, seeks to find a way to move beyond ideas of human exceptionalism and methodological individualism. Braidotti asks us to consider the world in which we are enmeshed without positioning ourselves at the centre of the frame. From this perspective, posthumanism can be understood as: ‘the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-Humanism…elaborating alternative ways of conceptualising the human subject’ (Braidotti 2013, 36). The posthuman project, as we suggested, is an attempt to understand subjectivity as caught in a ‘complex field of forces and data flows’ not confined to our species but inclusive of non-human, non-anthropomorphic elements (Braidotti 2013, 60). In this sense, Braidotti (2013, 195) questions the use of the word ‘self’. What is needed, she argues, is a moveable assemblage, an understanding of human identities that is located in: an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable. Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building. (Braidotti 2013, 49)

Braidotti’s figure of the nomad collects up posthuman experience and interaction with human and non-human others as a way of framing ‘becoming’. Nomadism provides:

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a transformative account of the self—it’s no metaphor. It fulfils the purpose of finding suitable situated locations to make the difference between different locations. Being nomadic, homeless, a migrant, an exile, a refugee, a tourist, a rape-in-war victim, an itinerant migrant, an illegal immigrant, an expatriate, a mail-order bride, a foreign caretaker…these are no metaphors, but social locations. (Braidotti 2011a, 14)

The nomadic figure taps into the idea of assemblages and the complexities of our relationships with and to people, with and to place and non-­ human actors. This figure engages with experience, the lives we lead and the selves we shape in a flexible and precarious globalised workforce—the mail-order bride, the foreign care-giver. The uncertainty and precariousness of globalised, risky labour markets make for unsettled populations, and for peoples who live with the expectation of change and upheaval (of family, friends, pets, possessions, culture, roots) from one part-time or casual form of employment to another. The ambivalences, ambiguities, paradoxes of mobility are things that productively strain the boundaries of the subject of critical social theory. So, the question becomes, How are we always, possibly, mobile and immobile, citizen and foreigner, belonging and marginal, engaged and dis-engaged? For Braidotti (2011b, 8), the figure of the nomad directs us to think about, to place at the centre of our discussions about diverse challenges, including the challenges of schooling and young people, the ‘present condition of mobility in a globalised world’ (Braidotti 2011b, 3) Rather than subscribing to a linear idea of young people’s becoming that is embedded in the concept of youth transitions and educational engagement and pathways, Bradotti’s (2013, 61) posthumanism and nomadism allows us, as we argued, to imagine an experimental, networked, post-anthropocentric, bio-technologically mediated process of becoming. Here the body is key for rethinking transitions as that which we are asking our bodies to do: to become, continuously reinvented through different connections to place, people and purpose. This encourages us to think of the relational and affective dimensions of our encounters with multiple others. In this way the idea of movement and mobility is wedded to our bodies and to our continual and complex entanglements in time and space with humans, non-humans, the more-than-human. In ways that are connected to our thinking here about young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling, and the ways in which that thing that we are calling identity profoundly shapes this engagement, we

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re-imagined transitions as a process of dragging our experiences through a life in a constant state of relational becoming. These experiences differ, markedly, depending on the fields and choices, the bodies and beings, that people are tethered to and entangled with. The figure of the ‘nomad’ gathers up the political, economic, ethical, emotional, relational and spiritual dimensions of these experiences to offer a politics of location that shifts the debate beyond understandings of agency and structure, pathways, engagement and transitions. Understanding being and becoming, forms of personhood, the self, in this way is productive of a number of elements that might provoke us to think differently about the complexities of young people’s engagement in the middle years of school, including: 1. a commitment to a relational approach to understanding subjectivity in which humans are not the central node of becoming, but rather part of a process of becoming, and not only with human Others; 2. foregrounding an embodied sense of movement and mobility with which to re-imagine transitions and pathways, and; 3. an emphasis on locations which inform the histories that are tattooed on our bodies (Braidotti 2011a, 15).

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Kelly, P. and A.  Kamp. 2015. Where the Wild Things Are. In A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century, ed. P. Kelly, and A. Kamp, 142–150. Amsterdam: Brill. Kelly, P., P.  Campbell and L.  Howie. 2019. Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation: Beyond neo-Liberal Futures? Abingdon: Routledge. Lash, S. 1994 Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community. In Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. U.Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash. 110–173. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications. Miller M.G., K. Dawson-Sinclair, A. Eivers and K. Thorpe. 2019. Cultural Security in Australian Classrooms: Entanglements with Mainstream Education as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children Transition to School. In Culture in Education and Education in Culture. Cultural Psychology of Education, ed. P. Hviid and M. Märtsin. 57–78. Cham: Springer. Nayak, A. 2019. Re-scripting Place: Managing Social Class Stigma in a Former Steel-Making Region, Antipode, 51 (3). 927–948. Pike, J. and P. Kelly. 2014. The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food: Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pusey, M. 2003. The experience of middle Australia: The dark side of economic reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reconciliation Australia. 2020. Narragunnawali—Cultural Safety and Respect in the Classroom. https://www.narragunnawali.org.au/professional-learning/90/cultural-safety-and-respect-in-the-classroom Resilient Cities. 2013. 100 Resilient Cities Initiative. http://www.100resilientcities. org/#/-_/ Rizvi, F. and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. New York: Routledge. Sennett, R. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Swadener, B.B. and S. Lubeck. 1995. The Social Construction of Children and Families “at Risk”: An Introduction. In Children and Families “at Promise”: Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk, ed B.B. Swadener and S. Lubeck. 1–16. New York: State University of New York Press. Tait, G. 1995. Shaping the ‘At-Risk Youth’: risk, governmentality and the Finn Report. Discourse. 16 (1). 123–134. Tanton, R., D. Peel and Y. Vidyattama. 2018. Every suburb Every town: Poverty in Victoria. Canberra: NATSEM Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra and Victoria Council of Social Service. te Riele, K. 2004. Youth transition in Australia: Challenging assumptions of linearity and choice. Journal of Youth Studies. 7 (3). 243–257. Weber, M. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism: and Other Writings. London: Penguin. Wexler, P. 1992. Becoming Somebody. London: The Falmer Press.

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Whittlesea Youth Commitment, Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network, City of Whittlesea. 2017. Middle Years in Whittlesea: A Collective Response—A municipal middle years strategy for the City of Whittlesea. Whittlesea: City of Whittlesea. Withers, G. and M.  Batten. 1995. Programs for At-Risk Youth: A Review of the American, Canadian and British Literature Since 1984. Camberwell: The Australian Council for Educational Research. Wyn, J. 2009. The changing context of Australian youth and its implications for social inclusion. Youth Studies Australia. 28 (1). 46–50. Your Business Network. 2000. Are You a Career Entrepreneur? http://eriepa. ybn.com/print_this_article/1,3215,263,00.html.

CHAPTER 3

Belonging

Abstract  The chapter engages with the extensive research literature on young people and belonging—in schools, in communities, as members of an ethnic or religious group, as part of a collective somewhere, doing something. Brown, Kelly and Phillips draw on research undertaken in Melbourne, to discuss the ways in which school culture, school networks and ideas about resilience intersect in complex ways to shape young people’s belonging. The chapter explores ‘the trouble’ with the emergence of the concept of belonging as a means to understand and explain young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling, and the related movement in policy and educational discourses from thinking about young people at-risk, to thinking about, and being concerned with young people’s resilience. Keywords  Young people • Belonging • Identity • Middle years • Engagement • Risk • Resilience

Introduction The research literature on young people and belonging—in schools, in communities, as members of an ethnic or religious group, as part of a collective somewhere, doing something—is extensive. And we will engage with aspects of this literature in what follows. For now, the work of Emma © The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2_3

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Charlton et  al. (2018, 31) canvasses a number of themes that will give shape to what we want to discuss: The relationship between bodies, subjectivity and affect in educational spaces is complex, dynamic and messy. Central to this relationship are concepts of belonging: what it means to belong and not belong, who or what can belong or not belong, and the precarious nature of belonging otherwise. To belong in this sense is not inherently positive. Although not always negative, the inclusionary and exclusionary force of belonging can carry certain negative, discriminatory and restrictive expectations for young people that often go unnoticed within the most mundane and incidental moments of school life. These normative forces are so embedded within school rituals, practices and routines that many young people, teachers and members of school communities accept them without questioning their implications.

In this sense, we can start to imagine that Belonging implies conforming to expectations, particularly when our interest is with how young people engage in the middle years of schooling. What are the rules of engagement in this school? Rules that might be explicit or implied, or not even known or shared by different actors in school. What do I have to do to participate? Does this seem too hard at some times? Easier at others? What support do I get to enable me to belong? Or, do I have to do all, or most of the work to belong? What are the terms or measures of success? Are there affirmations of my sense of self? Or does school assault my sense of self? Belonging is also, always, about recognising and negotiating boundaries. Does it take a lot of effort (symbolically, mentally, physically) to traverse/cross these boundaries? To let me in? For me to stay? When we ask these sorts of questions, and seek to explore what some of the answers to them might be, we are very much entangled with many of the concerns about Identity that we introduced and discussed in the previous chapter. So, with these and other questions in mind, and with a sense of the ways in which these issues entangle with questions of Identity, this chapter aims to do several things. In the section that follows we introduce and discuss a number of episodes and/or moments from our work in Whittlesea that point to some of the challenges and opportunities that young people, and the adults, institutions, agencies and organisations that work with them, encounter as they seek to enact and perform answers to such questions (even if they may not frame and understand these enactments and performances in these exact words). In the discussion of these entanglements that closes this chapter, we draw on work that explores ‘the trouble’ with the emergence of the concept of Belonging as a means to

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understand and explain young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling, and the related, but also divergent, movement in policy and educational discourses from ‘risk to resilience’, the movement from thinking about young people at-risk, to thinking about and being concerned with young people’s resilience.

The Challenges for Young People in Belonging in Whittlesea Schools In the previous chapter’s discussion of Identity we introduced the idea that places are where young people live their lives and go to school, are where families, of differing circumstances and resources, seek to fashion a life for their children. Places, also, often look different to, and from, different perspectives—depending, in complex ways, on whether you live and work there, or whether you travel to and from a place for work, or for school, or for other purposes. Places are important not just for our sense of self, our identity, but also for our sense of Belonging. In this sense, as we have already indicated, places such as Whittlesea often provoke a range of strong, affective responses as ‘places’: in which to live, to work, to go to school, to visit, to belong. Stories about living, working and going to school in Whittlesea frequently reflect local residents’ and professionals’ notions of relative disadvantage, working class identity, limited mobility and constrained educational aspirations. Developing, and performing an identity, that is shaped by, is formed in, is practised in, a place like Whittlesea is often expressed and experienced as being part of belonging to a peripheral community cut off from not only the metropolitan centre of Melbourne but also its range of services and opportunities. In this section we build on the work in the previous chapter, and our conversations about the challenges and opportunities that shape young people’s engagement in the middle years of school in Whittlesea, to present and discuss a number of episodes and moments that are illustrative of the ways in which School Culture, School Networks and Resilience intersect in complex ways to shape this thing we call Belonging. School Culture Our intent here is to examine the ways in which social spaces, including schools, constitute cultural worlds, in which there are manifest and tacit, and at the same time, complex rules, rituals and roles. Some young people

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experience school culture in exclusionary ways, to the extent that they may feel isolated or victimised because they do not conform to the expectations of teachers, or other students. Young people experience the boundaries of belonging when they find themselves, or their family being marked out as different in a negative way. Episodes of boundary marking are bound up with experiences of disaffection with school. And this can, and does, affect people’s experience of transition into and beyond the middle years of schooling. Bullying

When you’re talking about bullying there are two things that come to mind with me immediately. One is the students’ definition of bullying, however there is also cyberbullying and that’s probably the biggest thing that schools have had to try and deal with in the last five years. (Deb) One of the things that is growing in the Whittlesea community is parents participating in cyberbullying. So, it’s not only the children but parents giving their six pence during a cyber tiff. This has resulted in bullying becoming multigenerational. (Ellen) And then you get onto Facebook—on your community site—and say something, then the community gets involved and everyone has a bit of a bitch about it. And then they come to us at 17 and we’re expected to re-engage them in education or employment and they’ve not been in school since Year 6, or they’ve sporadically been in school until Year 8. (Beth)

Bullying is a clear example of the cultural mechanisms of exclusion and boundary-marking which illustrates the complexities and entanglements of the social ecology in which middle years students live, and are involved in the project of ‘becoming somebody’. We heard in Whittlesea how school students may find themselves being ‘called out’ as different by their peers through either face to face encounters in the school setting, or via social media. These stories pointed to the significant problem of bullying in schools. It typically involves ‘intentional aggressive behaviour by a single person or a group against a peer who cannot easily defend himself/herself’ (Cantone et al. 2015). A systematic literature review of interventions to address bullying in schools (Cantone et al. 2015, 58) has revealed its characteristic features and various forms:

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Its nature is repetitive over time, lasting weeks and, at times, even months or years. Bullying can take on the following forms: physical (punching or kicking, seizing or damaging other people’s belongings); verbal (ridiculing, insulting, repeatedly mocking someone, making racist remarks); relational (leaving one or more peers out of aggregation groups) and indirect (spreading rumours or gossip about a student).

Cyberbullying is a technologically facilitated form of bullying. As Cantone et al.’s (2015, 58–59) study reveals, it is ‘characterized by the use of electronic forms of contact (e.g., phone calls, text messages, picture/ video clips, e-mails, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites), that allow the perpetrator to remain anonymous and intensify feelings of discomfort in the victim. Unlike bullying in the school setting however, cyberbullying can occur anywhere inside or outside the school as a physical space. In Whittlesea, we heard about the ways in which these forms of bullying were conducted, physically and virtually, by students against each other, and between parents via social media. These practices were seen as questioning, threatening or reasserting young people’s sense of belonging in the school community. Irrespective of the form it takes, bullying can, and does, lead some young people to disengage from school, because victimised individuals feel that school is a disheartening and unhelpful context. Subsequently, the challenge teachers and post-school educators face is to bring these young people back into school and employment pathways in their late teens after disengaging as a result of being bullied and feeling unsupported at an earlier stage of their schooling.

Disaffection

In our school my attendance is somewhere between 85 and 90% across the school. It’s really good. However, we would have five kids at the moment that haven’t been to school in two years. We’ve got one child that’s in Year 9 that’s had an attendance rate of 10% over their entire school life. Non-attendance starts for us as low as Grade 1 or Grade 2 and it’s for different reasons. That in itself is a major issue. Fran you’re nodding. Then you’ve got the other group of kids that disengage because they don’t like the fact that they’ve got art on Friday afternoon because they don’t like the art teacher because she’s a bitch. (Ellen) When our students report to us about why they have stopped attending school or had poor attendance in the past they will say that they didn’t receive adequate personal or learning support in their previous school and didn’t get along with the teachers and things like that come up. (Fran)

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A further dimension of school culture that impacts on engagement is the extent to which students feel supported by, and affinity with their teachers. Where this affective linkage is absent from the teacher-student relationship, students are more likely to become disengaged and disaffected with school. When Friday’s art class is felt as unwelcoming because a student perceives the teacher as ‘a bitch’, the lack of affinity results in a feeling of alienation and not belonging in that class. Episodes and remarks like these point to the relational nature of school identity—not only as it is negotiated and formed through relationships with peers, but also between students and teachers. Peer Pressure, Loyalty and Fear

And it’s notoriety within those groups as well isn’t it? It’s a fear of missing out. (Beth) Yeah, but also in some of our kids’ groups you’ll get severely punished if you’re not there for your friends. (Fran) That whole thing isn’t it, doesn’t matter how dysfunctional the family is, family is still family. (Ellen) Although emphasis is placed on helping students to develop resilience, this does not necessarily help students who experience difficulty in developing and demonstrating mastery of foundational learning skills like reading and writing. Becoming somebody in the school setting is made more difficult when a student is made to feel that they do not belong in the performative space of the classroom. Fear of being openly shamed as lacking those skills valued by teachers and other students in the school space provides a powerful incentive for some students to disengage and seek other forums in which to express and experience their sense of belonging and being valued. For students in the middle years this is often their peer group.

Affiliation and Acceptance

Yeah, and with our more difficult kids, like I say the more tertiary end, their connections with their community, which will often be their peer community, they will take precedence 100% over anything else. So if (continued)

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(continued)

there’s criminal activity that’s where they’ll be. If they’ve got a friend in court that’s where they’ll be. They’ll move around in these very supportive groups. (Fran) And it’s that adolescent thing as well, in terms of school that it is more important to be in with your mates than it is to do the right thing. Even if you know what the right thing is it’s much more important to have that acceptance of your peer group because they’re the ones who will support them most. And they do try really hard to resolve the issues that they have with each other, and sometimes they don’t have the resources to be able to put that next level in. But it is crucial. You see that all the time. (Ellen)

Peers—especially those outside of school and beyond a student’s family—often provide affective bonds and status affirmation that young people seek. In these networks of friendship (among ‘mates’ or ‘crew’) middle years students (whether ‘difficult kids’ or not) find their self worth underlined and strengthened. Belonging is experienced and expressed by being present during crises, by being a reliable support person, and by demonstrating competence in working through problems. These dimensions emerged strongly during conversations with principals and teachers. Within student speech forms (students describing their art teacher as ‘a bitch’), and behaviours (active dis-engagement from class, relations with peers), it is possible to discern ‘the informal logic of actual life’ (Geertz 1973, 17), in this case, a logic among some students that seemingly equates feelings of belonging with sentiments of feeling supported. The less students feel an affinity with, and support by their teachers, the more they feel, and become ‘disengaged’. The relational nature of belonging in schools points to the importance, then, of facilitating a sense of connectedness among students, between students and their teachers and with the social ecologies of their daily lives. As Halse (2018, 4) remarks: the belonging that arises through connectedness is an active social process of everyday life, it is necessarily always relational. This means it is produced through the co-constitutive interaction of individuals with other people, things, institutions and specific socio-cultural contexts.

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Transition

Middle year student transitions do not have to start on the first day of year seven. It might be that the younger year levels spend time in the secondary school to ease their anxiety. (Ellen) There was a program that was running somewhere in the south-east, I think, a couple of years back, where it did exactly this type of approach. (Ashley) It is going to be more easily done at six to seven, but there are no transitions for kids coming into schools at year eight or year nine. Basically, the reason that they move is because their family has relocated, the Department of Health and Human Services has relocated them, or they have had a bad experience. (Ellen)

A critical strategy for helping students to feel a sense of belonging in middle school is to provide them with appropriate transition support. To some extent this is done effectively in Whittlesea between primary and secondary schools, to prepare students as they move from Year 6 (the final year of primary school) into Year 7 (the first year of junior high school/ middle school). Such transition support is less effectively provided, however, when students move into a new school at a later stage (in Years 8 or 9), possibly as a result of moving into the neighbourhood from elsewhere. In these circumstances, young people’s experience of feeling that they belong in the community and in the school can be doubly challenged. Much attention has been focused on supporting transitions between schools, as a means of facilitating ongoing engagement of students across the middle years. Whereas until the late 1990s, most schools focused on administrative matters and easing the social passage of students from primary to secondary school, more recently there has been a stronger focus on curriculum and pedagogy so as to foster engagement and excitement among students as learners (Galton et al. 2003, ii). Furthermore, there is growing interest in interventions aimed at facilitating transitions between years. Here greater attention is being paid to assisting students with personal and institutional transitions. There are at least three dimensions to this that have been noted by researchers like Galton et al. First, students use their friendship groups for academic as well as social support as they transition from one school year to the next. Empowering students at transfer and beyond to have more say

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over the construction of seating patterns and working groups may help to facilitate learning progress. Second, supporting students who have developed a persona around not working (being a ‘dosser’ or a ‘drop out’) to recommit to learning has proved to be a critical intervention for fostering re-engagement in learning. Teachers and peers can be helpful in this regard. As Galton et al. (2003, iv) observe: ‘The process of disengagement can be reversed if pupils feel that significant others in the school are able to see and acknowledge some of their strengths’. Third, transitions within the same school are also important. This is notably the case as students transition through Year 7 through to Year 9: Schools give more attention to the exits and entrances years than to the in-­ between years; Year 8, for instance, is widely seen by pupils as unimportant and they adjust their effort accordingly. Moreover, there is no tradition of organising induction events that would help pupils look forward with excitement and confidence to the year ahead. (Galton et al. 2003, v)

Sending clear messages to students that every year is important in their learning journey, and developing rituals, rights and responsibilities that celebrate middle years students’ progression as maturing learners could help to support their continuing engagement in schooling. More recently, Comber and Woods (2018, 264) have shown how transition planning is part of a broader challenge of making schools places in which children and young people can express and experience inclusive practices of belonging. They observe: ‘belonging’, in the context of school education, is not a simple matter of transition, induction or readiness; nor is it only a matter of facilitation on the part of teachers. What is required is explicit, specific and focused attention to creating socially just spaces where all children can learn to belong and then engage with belonging in diverse ways. (Comber and Woods 2018, 264)

Comber and Woods (2018, 264) call for ‘belonging practices’ becoming ‘the focus of curriculum, thereby increasing the likelihood that children will come to understand the politics of different people negotiating being together in places’. These sorts of issues reflect the complexity of transition support, but are also suggestive of what Braidotti calls an ‘affirmative politics’. That is, through imagining and developing a ‘collective praxis’—between teachers

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and students, and between students as peers—it is possible to ‘creatively generate’ conditions within schools that affirm and actualise their potential as engaged learners who ‘belong’ in school (Braidotti 2016, 53). School Networks Feeling a sense of belonging in school is about more than the extent to which students feel supported by peers and teachers between schools and between years. This section considers several factors within the ecology of the school itself that affect students’ sense of belonging. The student-­ teacher relationship is critical, as previous research has shown (Nicholson and Putwain 2015). Beyond the relational support and intellectual challenge given by teachers, young people also need to feel that teachers can, and will, adapt their teaching and learning strategies to individuals’ particular learning needs as they are embodied in their individual circumstances. Students also need a range of resources that facilitate their engagement with school. And they need to access support services and professionals that can help them function effectively within school. We will look more closely at these factors in what follows.

One Size Fits All

I’d call it prescriptive learning where there is one curriculum that is delivered and everybody does it whether it’s suitable for them or not. So everybody’s going to do the Year 9 maths book in Year 9, whether they can do ‘place value’ or they know numbers or whatever. So there is a lack of tailored programs offered to meet the diverse learning needs of students. (Ellen) There’s the issue of when you have had a period of absence and you have returned to school. Kids just say, “I’m finally back at school, I’m attending and now I’m just lost because I’ve missed a term of school and I’ve got the problem of not feeling confident”. And the teacher is under pressure to get through the curriculum by a certain time. (Fran) It gets into such a cycle of “I haven’t come, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve fallen so far behind, I’m not coming back, I haven’t come for so long”. (Deb)

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Teachers are not always able to provide support tailored to each student’s living and learning circumstances. The constraints on their time resulting from policy-driven requirements to ‘get through’ a set curriculum within a specific time frame renders it difficult, if not impossible, to provide support to students who might have fallen behind the scheduled learning program. The narrowing of the curriculum is a topic which has consumed many hours of debate among teachers (Galton et al. 2003, 15). The challenge, and opportunity, is for teachers to consider how they might broaden the curriculum, introduce additional support classes, and develop new pedagogical approaches so that students who feel they are falling behind can remain interested and engaged. (Galton et al. 2003, 15–20). Students are less likely to feel that they belong in schools where a ‘one size fits all’ approach does not fit their particular learning needs. To the extent that some students feel they are not keeping up, and are uncertain about what to do in class, they become less engaged in networks of learning support and capability development. Unable to perform in ways expected of them, they increasingly feel that they do not belong in the mathematics classroom or the art class, and so they often ‘choose’ to remove themselves from it—before someone else makes that ‘choice’ and they develop attitudes in class and a persona of a ‘mess-abouter’ that becomes difficult to shake (Galton et al. 2003, 85–87).

Resources and Infrastructure

We know that the growing number and the growing distances between young people and services, and I include schools and infrastructure in that, is obviously having an impact. So how do we as a community help to support that? (Ashley) I’ve got a job advertised right at the moment because I’ve now discovered that if I have a social worker on my staff that I can use for debriefing, I can get up to four social work students from the university full time in my school. All I have to do is provide an hour and a half debrief time once a week. I can afford to employ somebody once a week if I can get the equivalent of three or four other workers in my school. So, schools make those decisions in terms of where we spend our money, do I have a youth worker, do I have a speech pathologist. I’ve got a speech pathologist on the early years campus because if I can resolve in Prep the (continued)

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(continued)

language issues then the chances of the kids being able to learn to read and speak and function, the investment pays me back 25 times. (Ellen) But what I’m saying is when the services are right in the community as in the school or the centre is the hub, then our families access it. So if we bring external providers in to provide for kids that are on mental health plans that their GPs have done, and we can deliver that service onsite by having a psychologist that works with the family onsite, families take up the option. (Ellen) We’re a part of the Doctors in Schools program, we’ve got the GP that refers to our in-house counsellor. Then you get Youth Support Advocacy Service Alcohol and Other Drugs Service into the school one day a week. Ice use is a very big problem for our school community. (Fran) We talked about the underdeveloped or patchy service sector to support the young people, particularly the differences from one end of the municipality to the other. I see the vastness of the city of Whittlesea and so those access issues, although it absolutely is improving, still have a considerable impact on the delivery of services to young people. (Brock)

The constrained ability of teachers to provide the support that students need is not solely due to crowded curriculum issues. Resources available to students and their families also impact on their ability to feel supported and to engage with school learning. One solution to this quandary involves the clustering of support services in the school setting, in the form of ‘full-service schools’ (Dryfoos 1994) or ‘extended school hubs’ (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development 2013). The basic idea of a ‘full-service school’ as proposed initially by Dryfoos is of a school-based health and education centre run in partnership with external support agencies. As Dryfoos (1994, 142) explains: A full-service school integrates education, medical, social and/or human services that are beneficial to meeting the needs of children and youth and their families on school grounds or in locations which are easily accessible. A full-service school provides the types of prevention, treatment, and support services children and families need to succeed… services that are high quality and comprehensive and are built on interagency partnerships which

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have evolved from cooperative ventures to intensive collaborative arrangements among state and local and public and private entities.

This sort of approach was explored by the Victorian Government in Australia, when it established the Extended School Hub (ESH) pilot project in 2010, and evaluated them in 2013. The aim of the ESH pilot was ‘to improve learning and development outcomes in schools with low socio-economic status by providing resources to strengthen partnerships and connections between schools, families, community-based agencies and business’ (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development 2013). As such, the ESH approach reflects a socio-­ecological model for fostering belonging by focussing not just on the student but their family and its connection with the local community. ‘Full-service schools’ and ‘extended school hubs’ offer examples of the ways in which schools can be re-imagined and co-designed so that they support positive learning and a sense of belonging in schools. These integrated service models offer a promising approach to address the ‘patchiness of service supports’ that some of the teachers and principals, community and health professionals, local government and police officials observed when we spoke with them during action research workshops in Whittlesea.

Access

…we’ve got a whole lot of data that you guys have collected over time based on kids accessing services and not accessing services. Fran you’ve got a whole range of kids that have been told that they’re not worth anything in their current schools that are now working with you so as they’re engaged. One of the things I don’t think we know is how many kids we’ve still got out there that have slipped through the gap. (Ellen) I think our families are desperate for support. They want to be able to access education. They’ve felt like they haven’t been able to, so getting access to a school and feeling welcomed by a school is a huge thing for our families. (Fran)

It is one thing to have the right mix of services and supports. It is another to be able to access them. And for some students and their

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families, issues related to access entangle with the extent to which they feel they do, or do not, belong in the school community. This is especially so in schools that enroll students who have ‘fallen through the gaps’. It points to another concern that school principals shared generally during the action research discussions: the importance of helping students to build their resilience (this is a theme that we return to in greater detail at the end of this chapter). Resilience One approach to building youth resilience that has gained considerable momentum over the last 30 years is the Social Development Model (SDM) of Catalano and Hawkins (1996) which informed the development of the Communities that Care (CTC) system (Hawkins and Catalano 2002). Researchers using this system have investigated the importance of strengthening ‘protective factors’ and minimising ‘risk factors’ in young people’s lives so as to build their ‘resilience’ as they transition through various developmental stages (Hawkins and Catalano, 2002; Fagan et al. 2019). Work on resilience using this approach has drawn from social work, social psychology and community development frameworks. Its focus has been on testing and developing community-based interventions to help build resilience in young people and their families, especially as a mechanism for addressing ‘youth behavioural health problems’. These problems are seen as including ‘anxiety, depression, delinquency, violence, substance use, risky sexual behaviours and school dropout’ (Fagan et al. 2019, 3) They are understood as often co-occurring, and following a predictable pattern ‘with an onset in early to mid adolescence, and a peak in prevalence during adolescence and early adulthood’ (Fagan et al. 2019, 3). The CTC system has been designed to address these ‘problems’. As Fagan et al. (2019, 7) explain: CTC is a comprehensive community-based system that assists community members to: (1) form broad-based and diverse coalitions whose goal is to prevent youth behavioural health problems; (2) understand, collect and analyse local data on the risk and protective factors that research has shown contribute to these problems; and (3) implement with integrity a set of EBIs [Evidence Based Initiatives] to target the most elevated risk factors and most depressed protective factors experienced by local youth.

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The SDM-based CTC system is conceptualised as an ‘intervention’ which researchers must implement with ‘fidelity’ to its constituent features if its ‘efficacy’ is to be scientifically assessed. Initiatives under the CTC system usually are developed and implemented by a coalition of local level partners, who seek to attune their approach to identified local needs, with a view to improving the resilience of young people and their families. It has been implemented mainly in the United States of America, but has also been pursued by researchers and community partners more widely, notably in South America, Europe and Australia (Fagan et  al. 2019, 253–257; Toumbourou 1999). In Melbourne, Australia, the CTC system has been used by some local Councils, such as Mornington Peninsula Council and the City of Yarra Council (Yarra City CTC 2020, Laidlaw and Gilbert 2019). The Mornington Peninsula Council has implemented three cycles of CTC interventions between 2012 and 2017. Its website describes its program in these terms: Communities That Care (CTC) Mornington Peninsula is a preventative approach to improving the health and wellbeing of children and young people on the Peninsula. CTC aims to promote the healthy development of children and young people by reducing risk factors and increasing protective factors in order to see favourable change in behaviour over time. (Communities that Care—Mornington Peninsula Shire 2020)

The CTC approach is associated with an intellectual movement known as ‘prevention science’. While it is usually implemented by researchers and community partners working in collaboration, there has been no consensus established among CTC researchers about methodologies for testing and evaluating its implementation. Fagan et  al. (2019, 123) acknowledge this: Intervention developers have historically been free to determine whether or not and how to evaluate prevention strategies, and whether or not and how to make their findings and products available to the public. The result is that some interventions that are currently being implemented have been evaluated in numerous, rigorous experiments, and shown to reduce youth behavioral health problems, some have been well evaluated and shown to increase or have no effect on their intended outcomes, and many have never been subject to rigorous evaluation.

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It is worth considering how the findings of ‘prevention science’ might help to develop socio-ecological approaches to building resilience among young people. While its community-based orientation is consistent with the approach we pursued in Whittlesea, the scientistic methodologies and ‘problematisation’ of certain youth behaviours is inconsistent with a critical posthuman focus on understanding and working with diverse and emergent identities as young people seek to ‘become somebody’. We return to this critique at the end of this chapter.

Young People Falling Through the Gaps of the Education System

We’ve got 220 kids that have for whatever reason have fallen through the gaps in the mainstream schooling system and have been exited or excluded and are out of school. (Fran) We get the sense that the kids that we’ve got in school, whether they or engaged or disengaged are just totally overwhelmed. They just feel swamped. There are too many things for them to try and filter through, and in many cases they don’t know where to start. (Ellen) We had a very interesting conversation about mental health and wellbeing, it sounds like a similar conversation as maybe you guys had here around what does that actually even mean? But increasingly conversations around anxiety and depression are through the roof. (Fran) We’re doing all those wonderful resilience building programs in our school, but when you get to be in Year 7 or Year 8 and you’ve had all the building resilience stuff but you can’t read, you’re going to be exposed publicly as not being able to have those basic skills of communication. (Ellen)

It is not only teachers who are challenged by dealing with the ‘crowded curriculum’. Students also become overwhelmed by the amount of material they are expected to address and the performances of skills that they are expected to demonstrate in the school setting. The experience of feeling ‘swamped’ by ‘too many things’ in school can be, and is, disorienting, in that young people often ‘don’t know where to start’. The difficulty and dis-engagement that this creates among students is revealed, in part, through the increasingly frequent conversations that principals and teachers have with each other about students’ affective states, including anxiety and depression. The need to improve students’ social and emotional skills

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to deal with the issues of anxiety, depression and mental illness has reached parity with the importance of students achieving successful outcomes in numeracy and literacy (Schonert-Reichl and Weissberg 2014; Weissberg et al. 2015). As Ellen mentioned, schools are designing programs to teach young people social and emotional skills. Schools are also using tools to measure and monitor student well-being in the middle years in Australia with instruments such as the MDI (Gregory et al. 2019). In a recent special edition on the politics of resilience: problematising current approaches in the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Humbert and Joseph (2019) identify both dominant approaches and alternative (critical or emancipatory) approaches to resilience. The contributors to the issue agree that ‘resilience relies on ideas of self-organisation, adaptation, transformation and survival in the face of adversity or crisis’ (Humbert and Joseph 2019, 215). Different approaches to the politics of resilience (see Berkes et  al. 2000; Adger 2000; Bourbeau 2018; Gunderson et al. 2002) lead to a range of understandings and views of resilience. Common themes in resilience-thinking and interventions include those related to external threats such as financial and ecological crises (McKeown and Glenn 2018); cultural changes and values in times of uncertainty in the context of the emergence of the ‘alt right’ in the USA (Michelsen and De Orellana 2019); and resilience in the face of a ‘plurality of disruptions’, but not necessarily in relation to an external event such as the GFC or climate change (Wandji 2019). Further, Lindroth and Sinevarra-Niskanen (2019) argue that Indigenous people are expected to bounce back from adversity but only with the assistance of international organisations and only on their terms. In the next section, we problematise the concepts of resilience and belonging in relation to young people’s engagement in the middle years.

Discussion: From Risk to Resilience and the Trouble with Belonging In this section we want to draw on elements of previous work that we have done in the space of youth and education studies that has tried to problematise some of the ways in which the concepts of belonging and resilience have become so dominant in education discourses during the last ten years or so. Our intent here is not to argue that if we, and other others, talk about, and think about, young people and belonging, or young

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people’s resilience, that they, that we, are somehow wrong-headed. Rather, it is to ask questions about the problem space that is constructed when certain understandings of belonging, of resilience, of young people, and of schooling are put to work in certain ways at certain times, including, as is our interest here, when communities try to make some sense of the ‘problem’ of young people’s engagement in the middle years of school. The Trouble with Belonging 1 The work that we have done has been shaped by some unease about the theoretical or political limits and possibilities of the idea of ‘belonging’. In youth studies and education studies researchers from backgrounds in sociology, psychology, cultural and education studies have variously mobilised the concept of belonging in doing research with, about and for young people. Why, we might ask, has there been the emergence of an interest in ‘belonging’ at this moment in the thinking that shapes these fields? For example, it is apparent that the issues and agendas that shape Youth Studies at the start of the twenty-first century indicate a significant shift from concerns—during the 1970s to the early 1990s under the influence of the Birmingham (UK) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS]—with ideas such as resistance, rituals, styles, and subculture (see for example, Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Walker 1988; Willis 1977). Shifts and developments in the field since then have witnessed the emergence of a preoccupation with concerns about young people and risk, youth transitions, evidence-based best practice, generation (X, Y, Z, millennials), adolescent brain development, resilience and belonging (see, e.g., Furlong 2017). The nature of the problems that engage the interests of those who do work in this field has certainly changed in that time. Why? ‘Belonging’, as a concept, as a referent for intellectual politics, seems a long way from the concept or the politics of ‘resistance’, for example. Whether, that ‘resistance’ is through ‘rituals’ or ‘style’ or ‘subculture’. How is it, we might wonder, that at the start of the twenty-first century, we have come to think about youth issues through the concept of belonging? What does a focus on belonging produce? What does a focus on belonging divert us from? These sorts of questions can lead us in a number of directions, including, for instance, to a space in which we recognise that ‘to belong’ is not 1

 This section draws on aspects of Kelly (2018).

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an un-problematic ‘good’. That is, the idea of ‘belonging’ points to the need to negotiate the complex, often difficult, often deeply emotional, embodied and cognitive effects, and affects, of the rules, the norms, the institutionalised practices and processes, the play of power relations, that shape the diverse spaces and relations of young people’s belonging. These demands and expectations to belong, particularly in the institutionalised spaces of schooling, tend to make individual young people responsible for the more or less successful negotiation and performance of these relationships. This focus on belonging often tends to reduce this hard work to a set of positive psychological feelings and outcomes, or, in their absence, toxic psychological effects that are imagined to echo in young people’s immediate and longer-term futures. What happens, we might wonder, to the ‘outsiders’, the ‘out-riders’, the ‘non-joiners’, the ‘misfits’, the ‘fringe dwellers’, the ‘loners’, if we make a ‘virtue’ of belonging? And, a virtue that seems to take pride of place in current processes and practices that try to understand and respond to young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling. Elsewhere (Kelly 2011), we used Tim Winton’s (2008) award winning novel Breath to think about such things as being young, taking risks and the relationships between what we called ‘prudential foresight’, and ‘reflexive hindsight’ in thinking about what we do, or did and why we do what we do, or did what we did. In this sense, Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror, for some young people, of being ordinary, and the ways in which surfing, sex and drugs provide the means for the story’s main characters, Pikelet, Loonie, Sando and Eva, to identify, confront and challenge the limits shaped by this terror—sometimes with damaging consequences. In Breath, a middle-aged Bruce Pike (Pikelet) explores his memories of his youth when he became entangled in a complex (damaging) series of relationships with the older, ex-champion surfer Sando and his (damaged) partner Eva. In these recollections, risk, danger and harm—to be found in increasingly reckless surfing adventures, drug use and sexual experimentation—are far from being things to be rationally calculated with a prudent eye to future consequences. Rather, they breathe energy, excitement, meaning and purpose into life-worlds that, for the young Pikelet and Loonie, are dominated by the imagined institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work in the relative isolation of the fictional, small, rural, working-class town of Sawyer on the southern coast of Western Australia.

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We argued that there is much in this tale that can enable us to re-think the roles that ‘risk’ plays in making some sense of what it is to be young. At the same time, as we have come to imagine, Breath is also an allegory of anti-belonging, a tale of rejecting—for various reasons, and with some costs, but also with some benefits—the norms of belonging in these particular times, places and spaces. With these provocations in mind, we want to highlight the normative, moral dimensions to belonging that are fundamentally about conforming to existing practices and relations, rather than disrupting or unsettling them. This is a theme taken up by Emma Charlton et al. (2018) in their account of a moment in a school drama class in which the terms of belonging are set, and made explicit, through the interactions of the teacher, young people and the materiality of the ‘drama space’—including the key role played by a large gym mat and what that mat allows and enables, disallows and prohibits. In their discussion, they raise a number of concerns about the hetero-normative dimensions of belonging in this space, and the ways in which moments like this can be imagined in terms of the ‘chain of signifiers’ that shape a ‘politics of who or what “belongs” in the spaces of school, and, most significantly, the precarious nature of belonging otherwise and who is authorised to resist’ (Charlton et  al. 2018). What Charlton and her colleagues argue is that we should pay attention to the material, the symbolic, the discursive, the gendered and the sexual character of the relationships, practices and processes, and power relations that shape the terms on which belonging and not belonging, is possible in institutionalised spaces such as schooling. Belonging, then, can be understood, as a normalising state, a normalising process, a normalising assemblage of relations and practices in which some shoulds, and some oughts, take precedence over other shoulds and other oughts. Spaces, and the regulation and management of young people’s behaviours and dispositions, are always moral (see Kelly and Pike 2017; Pike and Kelly 2014). In The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food (Pike and Kelly 2014) we argued that Foucault’s (1978, 1985, 1986, 1991) work on governmentality and the care and practices of the self, enabled us to examine the ways in which young people are encouraged and/or directed to behave in ways that are considered healthy and civilised in school dining spaces and in other spaces—for example, around the family dinner table—that are joined to school dining rooms by particular ideas of health and civility. In this sense, government is always a moral project

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that is articulated in what we might understand as substantial, national, policy pronouncements about young people, health and well-being and public health crises related to obesity and eating disorders; and in what might be called the more mundane, everyday project of feeding, say, 400 young people a nutritious, filling and appetising meal in a comprehensive school in South Yorkshire (Pike and Kelly 2014, 9). Arts and practices of government are invested in, and with, an array of purposes and outcomes that the subjects of government ‘should’ be concerned with, and ‘should’ be concerned with in quite particular ways. Governmentality studies over the last 30 years or so, reveal that neo-liberal governmentalities invest in subjects who, ideally, should be capable of making choices and accepting responsibilities that align with the moral imperatives of government. The subjects of neo-liberal government are imagined as being ethical beings, persons who have developed the capacity to make choices about more and more aspects of their lives, and recognise their responsibilities for the outcomes of these choices (Pike and Kelly 2014, 9). Understood in this way, we can identify and map the lines of force that shape particular spaces in ways that highlight their moral character, the choices made and not made, the demands to make certain choices, and those who benefit, those who pay some cost, for these ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’. There is, in this sense, a particular crafting, a particular bundling, a particular gathering of relations, practices, processes and forces that shape young people’s belonging and engagement in the middle years. Phillip Wexler (1992, 11) argued in his critical social-psychological account of Becoming Somebody, that school settings and relations constitute intense ‘interactional economies’ in which the identity work of ‘becoming somebody’ is the product of ‘interactional labour’ in concrete local settings. Such ‘work’ is very much ‘action in the public sphere’, and it is work in which belonging might be more or less important. It may even be—as Christine Halse et al. (2018) argue in an account of their research with young Australians in primary and secondary schools—‘dirty work’. The research they report on is concerned with exploring the ways in which young people imagined, and talked about, the thoroughly ambiguous figures of the ‘refugee’ and the ‘asylum seeker’. Halse and her colleagues consider the ways in which young people in schools, like all of us at different times and places, are caught up in a more or less intense, ‘politics of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011) that often involves the ‘dirty work of boundary making’ (Crowley 1999). As we will argue at a later point, a

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‘political economy of youth’ would situate this ‘dirty work’ of boundary-­ marking and belonging in wider entanglements of relations, practices, interests, and class, gender and ethnic positions. This politics of belonging is fluid and uncertain, but can condense around particular positions under particular circumstances. In the work that Halse et  al. discuss, ours is a time of heightened concerns—in Australia, in the US, in the UK, in the EU, in India, in China, elsewhere—about the figures of the ‘refugee’, the ‘asylum seeker’, and the ‘stranger’. In many respects, belonging is profoundly important at a time of intense struggle of what it means to belong, to not belong, and the symbolic, psychological and material consequences of these struggles. The work of belonging, in this sense, at these and other moments in time, is also work that, always, excludes. Belonging, reflexively, works to include, and to exclude, not always in the same ways, or with the same consequences. But there are always those who belong, and as a consequence of those people being made to belong, being able to belong, others will not, others cannot. The ‘idea’, and the ‘practice’ of belonging makes little sense without a reference to its Other. This ‘politics of belonging’, the often ‘dirty work’ of boundary making and marking, the ambiguous, but often explicit dimensions of finding yourself—as an individual, or as a member of a group—included or excluded, on the right side, or the wrong side of a wall (existing, yet to be built, metaphorical) produce significant questions about what education and youth studies should do with ‘belonging’? Our response in this space includes a proposition that we need to think about young people, belonging, schooling, and engagement in the middle years of school in terms of a political economy of youth (see Kelly 2017, 2018). As we have suggested elsewhere, a political economy of youth, or a political economy of schooling, might include some interest, some understanding of belonging, but it would also try to do so much more. As Sukarieh and Tannock (2016, 1283) suggest, in their contribution to the debate about a political economy of youth in the Journal of Youth Studies, a political economy of youth should: look well beyond youth and young people in and of themselves. This is not just because of the wide range of social and political actors involved in ­shaping the meaning and salience of youth, but also because … [i]nvocations about youth are often made in the context of social struggles and political agendas whose central concerns may only be symbolically or indirectly connected to the lives of individual young people.

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How might ‘belonging’ become a part of a political economy of youth that is, at various times, interested in the ways in which young people make a life, but also with the relationships, practices, even ‘structures’, that shape the living of young people’s lives, and which might, in the living of these lives, be obscured, strange, even alien, to these same young people? How do we trace the patterns of belonging in ways that might, for example, extend far beyond the moment of a drama class or a gym mat, beyond the ways in which young people act, behave and think in response to the directions of their teachers? These processes and practices and relationships are always experiences that are energised by the lines of force that give shape to a political economy of youth. We can analyse these lines of force, and the assemblages that cohere around and along them, in different ways if we move to a more ambiguous sense of belonging. Of what it means: of what, and who, and how it includes; of what, and who, and how it excludes.

From Risk to Resilience In a much larger discussion of the movement from ‘risk’ to ‘resilience’ in Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation: Beyond Neo-liberal Futures? (Kelly et  al. 2019, 178–207), we grappled with the ways in which the concept of resilience—of whether a young person possessed the qualities that would enable them to be resilient, would enable them to ‘bounce-­ back’ in the face of the ‘inevitability’ of life’s challenges—had come, in a range of ways, to occupy the discursive space formerly occupied by the concept of ‘youth at-risk’. Our aim there was to problematise that movement from ‘risk’ to ‘resilience’ and to contribute to the re-thinking of the concept of resilience. Our approach was framed by an intent to unsettle the ‘problem space’ in which an array of youth issues have come to be understood through an interest in young people’s resilience. As Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose (2009, 251) have indicated, ‘resilience’, understood as: a mental, psychological or neurobiological capacity, has recently become the subject of considerable research…this research turned away from the usual focus on the reasons why individuals exposed to various forms of ‘traumatic events’…suffered unpleasant psychological consequences, to concentrate instead upon the reasons why some, subjected to those same conditions, do not.

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This recent interest and focus on resilience emerges from influential research from the 1980s and 1990s on resilience and attitude—including Seligman’s (1990[2006]) work on attributional style and learned optimism, and Langer’s (1989[2014]) research on mindlessness and mindfulness. In subsequent work resilience researchers have worked to identify those core variables that might indicate whether someone is a resilient individual, or is somehow pre-disposed to succumb to the challenges that life inevitably presents. In this period resilience psychologists tried to identify a variety of variables that could be used to measure an individual’s capabilities for persistence, positivity and determination. Do we, for example, fail under pressure, or are we inspired by challenges? Do we demonstrate ‘personal competence, high standards, and tenacity?’ (Campbell-Sills and Stein, 2007, 1020). Or do we not? Among other things, this work suggested that specific resilience-related variables could be reduced to ten (in some cases, eight) key factors or traits. These factors found ongoing form in the Connor-Davison Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), which has come to be hailed as the ‘gold standard’ in resilience research and policy (Campbell-Sills et al. 2006; Sexton et al. 2010; Windle et al. 2011). Mainstream accounts of this idea of resilience—that finds expression in spaces and places including Departments of Education and Training, and agencies such as the Victorian (Australia) non-government health promotion organisation VicHealth—often seek to identify and measure the individual psychological, emotional and physical characteristics of young people’s resilience. To identify and measure the capacities of individual young people to ‘bounce’ back in the face of challenges, adversity, crisis and trauma. As a VicHealth report on young people’s resilience suggests, resilience: can be defined in various ways, but a common thread running through the scientific literature involves coping in the face of adversity. Various definitions of this emerging concept have been offered in recent years, usually proposing that resilience is either a process or an outcome. Definitions of resilience range from being broad and outcome-focused, like the standard dictionary definition of “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”…to the more concentrated and process-­oriented “a dynamic process leading to positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity”…The latter definition is further distinguished from the former in that it proposes “adaptation” rather than recovery. This definition is therefore preferred, as it acknowledges that recovery is characterised by a transition to a new state of functioning, rather than a return to

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the pre-trauma state. In the context of SWB (Subjective Well Being) Homeostasis Theory, resilience refers to the process by which the set-point for wellbeing is recovered following a departure from its usual resting state. (VicHealth 2015, 16, original emphasis)

The VicHealth (2015) report, Community survey of young Victorians’ resilience and mental wellbeing provides a useful means to explore these more orthodox understandings of resilience, and its apparent ability to be characterised, and calculated and mobilised in interventions with young people. Embedded in this way of characterising resilience are notions of Subjective Well Being (SWB), of the normal adaptive capabilities of humans, and of the dimensions of human experiences that provide challenges for/to these adaptive capabilities. The report’s authors, Melissa Weinberg and Adrian Tomyn argue that SWB ‘can be defined scientifically as a normally positive state of mind that involves the whole life experience’. In this context SWB is ‘recognised as having “trait”-like properties and is best conceptualised as a stable, enduring positive mood that reflects how people feel about themselves at the most global, abstract level’. In contrast, ‘“state” happiness or wellbeing is a short-term, transient emotional response, usually directed at something good or pleasant’ (VicHealth 2015, 14–15). This view of SWB is framed by something called Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis Theory: the suggestion that SWB ‘is not free to vary over the entire range of values offered by a particular measurement instrument’. The orthodoxy here suggests that SWB is maintained around a “set-point” and is remarkably stable across time’. This theory of homeostasis suggests that ‘each person has a biologically determined level of SWB that is actively maintained and controlled within a narrow, positive range of values around a “set-point”.’ Indeed, ‘the purpose of homeostasis is to defend the affective core of SWB, which is proposed to be a stable, genetically endowed, positive mood’ (VicHealth 2015, 15). For Weinberg and Tomyn the ‘empirical evidence’ reveals that ‘individual SWB set-points normally range between 70 and 90 points on a standard 0 to 100-point scale. Moreover, the distribution of set-points within this range is normal, thus yielding a theoretical population mean score of 80 points’ (VicHealth 2015, 15). Understood in these ways SWB, and orthodox understandings of resilience, are amenable to identification and calculation through the use of an array of instruments and scales.

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In this report on their survey of 1000 young Victorian women and men aged between 16 and 25 years, Weinberg and Tomyn employed an instrument that included items from the ten-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC 10). As they acknowledge, a concern in ‘measuring resilience is that, by most definitions, resilience can only be demonstrated in the face of adversity, making the ethical exploration of it problematic’. In this context ‘measures usually approximate actual resilience by capturing “perceived resilience”, or by having participants rate their level of agreement with statements that typically describe resilient people’. For their purposes the CD-RISC 10 is claimed to be ‘one of the top-rated resilience tools’ for a variety of reasons, including: ‘its strong psychometric properties’; the items ‘load onto a single factor that represents resilience’; the ‘endorsement of the item statements reflects a general ability to bounce back from challenges encountered in life’; and, importantly, it ‘has been shown to be capable of capturing changes following interventions designed to increase resilience’ (VicHealth 2015, 16–17). The uses of these forms of calculation and measurement enable Weinberg and Tomyn to make a number of claims about the subjective well-being and resilience of the young people that they surveyed. These include identifying and measuring and commenting on the apparent relationships between the following: Gender, Well-being and Resilience Male and female Victorian youths reported similar scores for subjective wellbeing. However, male respondents reported higher scores on the CD-RISC 10 than females. Specifically, they reported significantly higher scores on every individual item of the CD-RISC 10 except for “I am able to adapt to change”. Though the difference is statistically significant, it would be premature to suggest that efforts be directed towards improving the resilience of females based on these findings alone. (VicHealth 2015, 11)

Age, Well-being and Resilience Young Victorians aged 22 to 25 years reported lower average personal wellbeing than younger Victorians sampled, with significantly lower scores in the domains of Standard of Living, Health, Community Connection and Future Security.

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Young Victorians in the 22 to 25-year-old age group reported higher average resilience scores than people in the 16 to 17-year-old age group. (VicHealth 2015, 11)

Education/Employment Status, Well-being and Resilience There were no statistically significant differences in average subjective well-­ being scores for Victorian youths based on whether or not they were students. However, there was a significant difference for resilience, with non-students reporting significantly higher scores on the CD-RISC 10 than students. Among students only, those studying at high school have, on average, significantly higher subjective wellbeing than those studying at TAFE, while those studying at university have significantly higher average resilience than people attending high school. Young Victorians involved in paid work reported higher wellbeing and higher resilience than young Victorians not involved in paid work, while people in full-time work reported higher resilience than people employed on either a part-time or casual basis. (VicHealth 2015, 11)

Household Composition, Well-being and Resilience There were significant differences in average wellbeing and resilience scores according to young people’s household composition, with those who live with their parents reporting average SWB above the normal range. On the other hand, young people who live with their children, live alone or live with other adults (e.g., in shared accommodation), report average SWB below the normal range. People who live with their children only report significantly lower average resilience than people who live with their partner and children. (VicHealth 2015, 12)

Household Income, Well-being and Resilience Both wellbeing and resilience scores tended to increase with increasing levels of income up to an annual household income of $250,000 to $500,000. The lowest reported average personal wellbeing belonged to the group who reported an annual household income of between $15,000 and $30,000 per year. (VicHealth 2015, 12)

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Social Support, Well-being and Resilience Average personal wellbeing and resilience were significantly higher among young Victorians who responded “Yes, definitely” to the question “Can you get help from friends, family or neighbours when needed?” Average SWB for young people who responded “Sometimes”, “Rarely” or “Not at all” was well below the normal range, placing them at a higher risk of depression. This is a very concerning finding given that approximately one in four respondents reported feeling this way about the availability of social support. (VicHealth 2015, 12)

These sorts of understandings of resilience, of what it is and how it can be measured, what an intervention might target, and what impacts this intervention might have dominate education policy and practice conversations about young people, resilience, participation and engagement in, and the outcomes of, schooling. However, there are other spaces and places in which the concept of resilience is used in ways that move beyond these individualised, psychologised accounts. One point of departure can be found in spaces marked out in discussions about resilient cities—for example in a 2015 special issue of Urban Studies, titled Governing for urban resilience. A related space is the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC). Melbourne (Australia) is one of those 100 cities in a global network. In these alternative imaginings of resilience, there are concerns with ‘shocks’ and ‘stresses’, and the abilities of communities and cities to respond to these ‘inevitabilities’. But this responsiveness, this resilience, is something that is framed in more ecological, more networked, terms. Importantly, resilience appears here as something that is more collective, more social. Something, that appears in the spaces beyond an individual’s capabilities and responsibilities.

100 Resilient Cities

100 Resilient Cities—Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the twenty-first century. 100RC supports the adoption and incorporation of a view of resilience that includes not just the shocks—earthquakes, fires, floods, etc.—but also the stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day to day or cyclical basis. (continued)

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Examples of these stresses include high unemployment; an overtaxed or inefficient public transportation system; endemic violence; or chronic food and water shortages. By addressing both the shocks and the stresses, a city becomes more able to respond to adverse events, and is overall better able to deliver basic functions in both good times and bad, to all populations. (http://www.100resilientcities.org/about-us#/-_/) Resilient Melbourne The City of Melbourne’s (CoM 2015) Resilient Melbourne: Preliminary Resilience Assessment: Identifying the Focus Areas for Melbourne’s Resilience Strategy, introduces the City’s involvement in 100RC. 100RC defines urban resilience as ‘the capacity of individuals, communities, businesses and systems in a city to survive, adapt and grow, no matter what chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience’. ‘Chronic stresses’ weaken the fabric of a city on a day-to-day or cyclical basis—examples include high unemployment, an overtaxed or inefficient public transportation system, endemic violence, and chronic food and water shortages. ‘Acute shocks’ are the sudden, sharp events that threaten a city, such as earthquakes, floods, disease outbreaks and terrorist attacks. (CoM 2015, 4) Melbourne’s Resilience Melbourne is home to some 4.3 million people and spans nearly 10,000 km2. It is growing rapidly, with a population of about 7.7 million people projected for 2051. Although consistently rated as one of the world’s most liveable cities, Melbourne remains vulnerable to a range of chronic stresses that weaken the fabric of communities, including unemployment, growing social deprivation, domestic violence and diminishing housing affordability. It is also vulnerable to acute shock events such as heatwaves, bushfires and flooding, all of which are expected to worsen and become more frequent as a result of climate change. Increasing globalisation, diversity and social inequality may also increase the risk of other shock events such as influenza pandemics or civil unrest. In a city administered by 32 local governments, these shocks and stresses cannot be dealt with comprehensively by a single agency, or by each local council acting independently. The Resilient Melbourne project offers a collaborative approach. (CoM 2015, 4)

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In these ideas about community and urban resilience we can see a movement from risk avoidance and mitigation, to approaches aimed at preparing individuals, organisations, communities and cities to be able to deal with, and respond to, the inevitable challenges of an uncertain, even dangerous time in human and planetary history. In approaches that draw on the work of Foucault, Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose (2009), in Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience, and Pat O’Malley (2013), in Uncertain Governance and Resilient Subjects in the Risk Society, have examined the ways in which these forms of resilience thinking have emerged as a near universal style of thinking in academic and policy spaces such as urban planning, bio-security studies and planning, anti-terror studies and planning. For example, in their discussion of particular institutionalised, state-based responses to a variety of risks, harms and dangers that characterise the first decades of the twenty-first century, Lentzos and Rose (2009, 245) identify a logic of resilience that: is not merely an attitude of preparedness; to be resilient is not quite to be under protection nor merely to have systems in place to deal with contingencies. Resilience implies a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary. Perhaps the opposite of a Big Brother State, a logic of resilience would aspire to create a subjective and systematic state to enable each and all to live freely and with confidence in a world of potential risks.

In a similar vein, O’Malley (2013, 191), in summarising his accounts of the ways in which largely individualised and psychologised accounts of resilience have spread through, and taken flight from, military forces and businesses around the globe—especially in the US where ‘battleground’ research has become largely focused on how to train and make up ‘resilient warriors’—suggests that in many of these accounts: The aim is to produce subjects…who are capable of dealing with all situations of high uncertainty…the new resiliency approach aligns far better with the neo-liberal imaginary of each subject being the ‘entrepreneur of oneself’ in an environment that is highly uncertain. This subject, in a sense scientifically designed, approaches uncertainty as a challenge and opportunity.

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O’Malley (2013, 192) examines the forces at play in a post 9/11 world in which diverse authorities came to ask, in various ways, how: ‘could uncertainty be sustained as a liberal condition of freedom when it had become the enemy of Western, liberal security?’ In part, the answer was to be found in: ‘creating new, resilient, subjects scientifically designed to ‘thrive’ on chaos and make every threat a challenge and opportunity. Thus, in the mythology of resilience, may the neo-liberal dream of freedom in uncertainty be imagined into existence in the twenty-first century’. In thinking about the work that resilience thinking attempts to do in imagining, and responding to, various contemporary youth issues— including in places such as Whittlesea where the concern is with young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling—we can, once again, focus on the normative and moral dimensions of this mode of thinking. In doing this ‘troubling’ we can identify quite specific understandings of such things as: young people, their families and their communities, of the ‘trouble’ we find ourselves in; of the various rights, roles and responsibilities that attach themselves to various individuals, communities, organisations, agencies, departments and institutions; of the strategic relations that are imagined as gathering these individuals, groups, organisations and communities together to do work with young people; and of how these relationships are made to ‘stick-together’ so that young people’s wellbeing and resilience can be developed. In this way, from the standpoint of what might be called a ‘moral economy’ (Kelly and Pike 2017) of resilience, we can ask questions about the work that concepts of resilience are made to do. About how this work understands the young people who need to be made resilient. About the different forms, types and consequences of responsibility and obligation that become attached to this resilience work. What we are calling socio-ecological models of resilience—models that owe more to the forms of resilience-thinking found in places such as the 100 Resilient Cities framework, and less to the forms of resilience-­thinking that focus on such things as Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis Theory— open up less individually focused, more relational ways of thinking about young people, about resilience, and about the ecologies that might promote and/or limit what individuals, groups and communities might want to think about when they say that resilience, for example, is important in encouraging and enabling young people’s engagement in the middle years.

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References Adger, W. 2000. Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24 (3): 347–364. Berkes, F., J.  Colding and C.  Folke. 2000. Introduction. In Navigating Social-­ Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change, ed. F. Berkes, J. Colding and C. Folke, 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourbeau, P. 2018. On Resilience: Genealogy, Logics, and World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, R. 2016. Posthuman Affirmative Politics. In Wilmer, S.E. and A. Zukauskaite ed Resisting biopolitics: Philosophical, political and performative strategies, New York, Routledge: 30–56. Campbell-Sills, L., S.  Cohan, and M.  Stein. 2006. Relationship of resilience to personality, coping, and psychiatric symptoms in young adults, Behaviour Research and Therapy 44(4): 585–599. Campbell-Sills, L. and M. Stein. 2007. Psychometric analysis and refinement of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC): Validation of a 10-item measure of resilience, Journal of Traumatic Stress 20(6): 1019–1028. Cantone, E, A.  P. Piras, M.  Vellante, A.  Preti, S.  Daníelsdóttir, E.  D’Aloja, S.  Lesinskiene, M.C.  Angermeyer, M.G.  Carta, and D.  Bhugra. 2015. Interventions on Bullying and Cyberbullying in Schools: A Systematic Review. Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health;11(Suppl 1 M4): 58–76. Published online 2015 Feb 26. 10.2174/1745017901511010058 Catalano, R. F. and J. D. Hawkins. 1996. The social development model: A theory of antisocial behavior. In J.  D. Hawkins (Ed.), Cambridge criminology series. Delinquency and crime: Current theories: 149–197. Cambridge University Press. Charlton, E., L. Coll, L. Harrison, L. and D. Ollis. 2018. Incidental moments: The paradox of belonging in educational spaces, in Halse, C. (Editor) Interrogating Belonging, Palgrave Macmillan, London: 31–50. Comber, B. and A. Woods. 2018. Pedagogies of Belonging in Literacy Classrooms and Beyond: What’s Holding Us Back?, in Halse, C (Editor) Interrogating Belonging for Young People in Schools Palgrave, London: 263–282. Communities that Care—Mornington Peninsula Shire. 2020., accessed online at https://www.mornpen.vic.gov.au/Community-Services/Youth-Services/ Youth-Programs/Communities-That-Care. City of Melbourne (CoM). 2015. Resilient Melbourne: Preliminary Resilience Assessment: Identifying the Focus Areas for Melbourne’s Resilience Strategy. Crowley, J. 1999. The politics of belonging: Some theoretical consideration. In A. Geddes & A. Favell (Eds.), The politics of belonging: Migrants and minorities in contemporary Europe: 15–41. Aldershot: Ashgate. Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. 2013. Evaluation of the Extended School Hub Pilot Project Final Evaluation Report: Executive Summary May 2013, accessed online at http://www.communityhubs.org.au/ wp-content/uploads/2017/10/extended-school-hub-evaluation.pdf.

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Dryfoos, J. G. 1994. Full-service schools: A revolution in health and social services for children, youth, and families. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Fagan, A, J.  Hawkins, D.  P. Farrington and R.F.  Catalano. 2019. Communities that Care: Building Community Engagement and Capacity to Prevent Youth Behaviour Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. 1978. The history of sexuality: Volume 1 an introduction. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. 1985. The use of pleasure. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. 1986. The care of the self. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. 1991. Governmentality. In G.  Burchell, C.  Gordon, & P.  Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmental rationality: 87–104 Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Furlong, A. (Ed.). 2017. Routledge handbook of youth and young adulthood. Abingdon: Routledge. Galton, G. et al. 2003. Transfer and Transitions in the Middle Years of Schooling (7–14): Continuities and Discontinuities in Learning, London, Queen’s Printer. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New  York, Basic Books Gregory, T., D. Engelhardt, A. Lewkowicsz, S. Luddy, M. Guhn, A. Gadermann, K.  Schonert-Reichl and S.  Brinkman. 2019. Validity of the Middle Years Development Instrument for Population Monitoring of Student Wellbeing in Australian School Children. Child Indicators Research 12 (3): 873–899. Gunderson, L., C.  Holin, L.  Prichard and G.  Peterson. 2002. Resilience. In Encyclopedia of global environmental change volume 2, the earth system: Biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change, ed., H. Mooney and J. Canadell, 530–531.Chichester, UK: Chichester. Hall, S. and T.  Jefferson (Eds.). 1976. Resistance through rituals. London: Hutchinson. Halse, C. (Editor) 2018. Interrogating Belonging, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Halse, C., R. Black and C. Charles. 2018. Young People on Asylum Seekers: The ‘Dirty Work’ of Boundary Making in the Politics of Belonging, in Christine Halse (Editor) Interrogating Belonging, Palgrave Macmillan, London: 117–140. Hawkins, J.D. and R.F. Catalano. 2002. Investing in your community’s youth: an introduction to the Communities That Care system. Channing Bete Company, South Deerfield, MA. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen. Humbert, C. and J.  Joseph. 2019. Introduction: The Politics of Resilience: Problematising Current Approaches. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 7 (3): 215–223. Kelly, P. 2011. Breath and the truths of youth at-risk: allegory and the social scientific imagination, Journal of Youth Studies 14, 4: 431–447. Kelly, P. 2017. Young People’s Marginalisation: Unsettling What Agency and Structure Mean After Neo-Liberalism, in P. Kelly and J. Pike (eds.). 2017. Neo-­

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and criminal justice no. 122. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi122. VicHealth. 2015. Community survey of young Victorians’ resilience and mental wellbeing. Full report: part A and part B, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Melbourne, Australia. Walker, J. 1988. Louts and legends. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Wandji, D. 2019. Rethinking the Time and Space of Resilience Beyond the West: An example of the Post-Colonial Border. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 7 (3): 288–303. Weissberg, R., J.  Durlak, C.  Domitrovich, and T.  Gullotta. 2015. Social and Emotional Learning: Past, Present, and Future. In Handbook of social and emotional learning: Research and practice, ed. J.  Durlak, C.  Domitrovich, R. Weissberg, and T. Gullotta, 3–19. New York: Guilford. Wexler, P. 1992. Becoming somebody. London: The Falmer Press. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to labour. London: Saxon House. Windle, G., K. Bennett and J. Noyes. 2011. A methodological review of resilience measurement scales, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 9, available at https://hqlo.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1477-7525-9-8?site= hqlo.biomedcentral.com, retrieved on 6 October 2017. Winton, T. 2008. Breath. London: Picador. Yarra City CTC. 2020. accessed online at https://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/ctc. Yuval-Davis, N. 2006. Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214. Yuval-Davis, N. 2011. The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 4

Time

Abstract  Schooling is a time-based institutional process. This chapter examines young people’s experiences of, and enactments of time in relation to young people’s engagement in the middle years in Melbourne, through concerns about timetables, networked time and sleep time. Brown, Kelly and Phillips’ analysis of time in its disciplinary, institutional, and metaphorical forms, and how these forms shape young people’s engagement with the middle years of school, references: Foucault’s examination of the disciplinary possibilities of clock time in the ways that schools order time and space; Giddens’ work on time and the colonisation of young people’s futures; and the material and embodied challenges that emerge from Hochschild’s powerful metaphors of ‘quality time’ in a ‘24/7’ world. Keywords  Young people • Middle years • Engagement • Institutional time • Metaphorical time • Disciplinary time • Giddens • Foucault • Hochschild

Introduction The regulation and management of individuals and populations is an activity that requires human experience to be subdivided, so to speak, by time and space. Regulation occurs across different ‘time zones’. In schools these ‘zones’ include the timetable, the school day, the school week, the © The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2_4

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school term, the school year, and out-of-school-hours. And in different spaces such as the classroom, the staff room, the head teacher’s office, the canteen, the school yard, the playground… In a number of fields, and from a variety of disciplines, there is a long tradition and trajectory of intellectual work that has highlighted the ways in which we can understand that these ‘time zones’ and ‘spaces of government’ are not natural phenomena. We are thinking here of the intellectual legacy that has drawn on and extended the work of Foucault to argue that ‘time’ and ‘space’ have to be thought about and brought into being, ‘made real’, as times and spaces appropriate to particular tasks and objectives. Time and space have to be made productive and purposeful. In this way, schools—with their timetables that break the day up into governable bits, and the curriculum that divides knowledge up into knowable bits— have been built as spaces in which the ‘making up’ of desirable behaviours and attitudes in young people might be readily accomplished (Montero and Kelly 2016). In addition, in spaces and in ways that might not be identifiable as ‘Foucauldian’, we, as individuals, as organisations, businesses, community agencies, government departments, have developed lots of ways of talking about and thinking about time, lots of time-based metaphors: time rich, time poor, time is money, free time, school time, work time, quality time, childhood-youth-adulthood, Being (the present) and Becoming (the future). The richness and diversity of ‘metaphorical time’ can be understood, we will suggest, as a consequence of complex social, cultural and economic processes in which capitalism, including in its neo-Liberal forms, has identified more imaginative and productive ways of ‘colonising’ time— welcome to a 24/7 world—and of commodifying time and ‘slicing and dicing’ periods of time in more ‘efficient’, ‘productive’ and ‘profitable’ ways. Metaphorical, or discursive, time always has some connection to what might be called ‘material time’. Organisations, institutions, communities, families and individuals make time, ‘do’ time, operate, are shaped by, and need to conform to the diverse ways in which time is ‘sliced and diced’, commodified, colonised, imagined. Schools, in this sense, are time-based organisations. Schooling is a time-based institutional process. School time can be inflexible and/or flexible, and more or less so at different times, for different purposes. In addition, there are ‘times in a life’ when we require young people to conform to ‘inflexible time’. But at certain ‘times’ these demands, for certain young people, might be just too hard to conform to.

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Material time is, in this sense, always, embodied. We feel, experience and perform time. We can feel ‘tired’ (‘I didn’t get enough sleep!’), ‘wide-­ awake’, ‘alert’, ‘hungry (‘Surely, it’s lunch-time.’), ‘busy’, ‘out of time’. These ideas about time—in its metaphorical, material and institutional forms—point to the work that this chapter will do with ‘time’. In the first instance we will again introduce and discuss a number of episodes and/or moments from the work we did in Whittlesea. Our discussion of time in its metaphorical, material and institutional forms, and the ways in which these forms shape the ways in which young people engage with the middle years of school, will reference work that examines the disciplinary possibilities of clock time in the ways that schools order time and space; time and the colonisation of young people’s futures; and the material and embodied challenges and opportunities that emerge from powerful metaphors such as ‘quality time’, ‘work/life balance’, and a ‘24/7’ world.

The Character of Time in Whittlesea In our preceding discussions of Identity and Belonging—and the ways in which our conversations at Whittlesea revealed, and brought to the surface, diverse understandings of the ways in which adults, agencies, organisations and communities imagined these things as shaping young people’s engagement in the middle years of school—we wanted to locate these discussions in a place that experiences relative disadvantage and marginalisation on the outer, northern fringes of metropolitan Melbourne. Place and embodied, networked lives that are lived in a place, were important in situating concepts such as Identity and Belonging that, at the same time, we imagined as having some relevance for other, embodied, networked persons, in other places. In this chapter we present a number of episodes and moments that are fundamentally concerned with the ways in which young people’s feelings about, experiences of, and enactments of time were understood and thought about in discussions about young people’s engagement in the middle years in Whittlesea. Of primary concern here are the demands ‘time’ places on young people and their families, as it is ‘sliced and diced’ efficiently and productively, even profitably, by the schools, agencies and organisations in the places they and their families live their lives. Our interests in what follows are with Institutional Time and Embodied Time.

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Institutionalised Time Time tables constitute a form of regulating time zones in the social space of schools. Our action research workshops revealed how teachers are acutely aware of the way in which time is structured by the parameters of ‘the school day’, as a quantum of hours during which learning and developmental activities can be conducted. Imagining ways in which the school day might be disrupted, opened up possibilities for some teachers of adding hours to the school timetable or altering school start times. But these conversations unearthed insights about how such changes might be perceived by students (and teachers themselves) as unattractive, or unhelpful. Similarly, discussions about how to improve the ‘quality’ of school time revealed a quandary connected with binary assumptions about the ‘quality’ versus the ‘quantity’ of time, and how expressing ideas about this is entangled with notions of students’ abilities for ‘time management’ and teacher practices, and their underlying value sets. Inflexible School Timetables

So, you just have to be creative and flexible with what you do, don’t you? (Ellen) I have certainly done that. (Fran) But, that is the challenge, isn’t it, because I can imagine—even thinking about my own kids, if saying to them, “You are going to actually be at school an extra hour-and-a-half every day, but in that extra hour-and-a-half your wellbeing is going to improve,” It doesn’t sound that attractive to me. (Chris) Teachers and principals who are involved with assisting children from diverse backgrounds, and in ‘alternative’, non-mainstream schools where students had fallen through the gaps in mainstream schooling, spoke to the possible benefits of creating greater flexibility in the school timetable, so as to keep students engaged with school activities. To the extent that teachers can be creative, it may be possible to reconfigure the school day so as to make it more flexible, more engaging. But simply adding hours to the school day for what teachers might think of as beneficial for engaging students may not actually be viewed positively by students themselves (or teachers). In this sense, time is also ‘ambiguous’. It doesn’t look the same, feel the same, ‘flow’ the same for all people in a given context.

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Changing School Start Times

If we’re serious about middle years and older kids, then why on earth are we not starting the school day for these kids at 10 o’clock or 10:30 or whatever and running it later? That’s another issue to do a research project on in its own right. (Ellen) But we keep doing that, we keep skipping over that. (Ashley) That’s exactly right. (Ellen) School principals and school nurses recognise that middle years students typically require more ‘sleep time’ than adults, and that the set ‘start time’ for school (usually around 8.40 am) is often not well aligned with the physiological and psychological—the embodied and affective—dimensions of young people’s lives that we discuss in the next section. Schools ‘keep doing’ start times in line with the parameters of ‘the working day’ (9 am to 5 pm), even though research evidence indicates a need to reconfigure the school day so that it starts at a time more attuned to the needs of students rather than working adults. Some schools have introduced ‘staggered start times’ to better link school start times with students’ particular needs. The tension here is how elastic ‘institutional’ time is. Or, indeed, how ‘elastic’ are school leaders in their understandings of the entanglements of institutional and material time? Quality of School Time

Is the issue more to do with the quality of the time that people are spending at school or is it the length of time, or the start or finish times? Because the issue for me, as I understand it, is that teachers feel really challenged to be able to devote the appropriate amount of time to the health and wellbeing of the kids, which is a completely different issue. To me, that is the crucial bit. It is about teacher practice, or even the ‘value set’ that underpins teacher practice, about what is important and the prioritisation of the wellbeing of the students. You can have schools start at three in the morning if you like, but if the way in which the teachers are instructed to go about their work doesn’t change, then I very much doubt that that is going to make any difference whatsoever. (Chris)

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Industrial practices, and their associated values and imposed routines, can (and do) constrain the way that teachers might play with time to create more ‘quality’ learning experiences during the school day around ‘the health and wellbeing of the kids.’ To some degree, the constraints associated with creating more quality time in school can be understood in terms of Foucault’s (1991) ideas about governmentality. That is, although teachers and youth workers see themselves as ‘challenged’ by ‘the way in which the teachers are instructed to go about their work’, there is a sense in which they willingly participate in these work practices and conduct themselves in terms of these ‘time management’ rationalities. Disrupting the routines, rationalities and values underlying these teaching practices could, in this sense, be part of the way in which more ‘quality time’ might be introduced into the school day. This would shift the focus away from seeing ‘time’ as something that ‘kids’ have to better manage, and towards the complex system of values and imperatives—the governmentalities—that guide teaching work. Time, in this sense, would be better understood as part of the socio-ecological context in which schooling occurs and can be re-shaped. There is a clear sense in which teachers understand how school time is bound up with and entangled in, wider networks that link into, and affect, the school space as it is experienced by young people, their families and teachers. Education departments effectively set boundaries around the possibilities for negotiating school start times. Family commitments can (and do) impose obligations on some students and teachers in relation to their ability to arrive ‘on time’ at school. Negotiating School Timetables

…we could say, “This is our cohort, this is what they need, we’re going to disrupt the whole way we deliver education because we can” because we had the green light from the department and we could do it that way. Big mainstream schools find it very difficult to change any of those things. (Fran) I’m good at working things around to get the results I want, but I need to consider the teachers’ working conditions, for example, when they have to have their lunch breaks, etc. So, there are defined boundaries now about what the earliest start time is, what the finish time is, when lunch is. So that’s another layer that probably needs to be addressed. (Ellen)

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The possibilities for negotiating a largely inflexible school timetable are shaped within a series of networks and bureaucratic layers. Principals in ‘alternative’, non-mainstream schools have been able to agree to greater flexibility around the timetable and start times for their ‘cohort’ with the Victorian State Government Education Department. ‘Mainstream’ schools, on the other hand, work with more rigid timeframes. Yet, our research showed how, even in mainstream schools, some principals manage to ‘work things around’ so that they can achieve some of the flexibility they need, despite the ‘working conditions’, ‘boundaries’ and ‘so many other regulations’ that are ‘layered’ onto the environment in which the school day starts and operates. The seeming malleability of official school policy directives points to the way in which school principals can, and do, effectively operate as ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980). That is, to the extent that principals exercise discretion in the way they manage their school start times and finish times, and are able to respond to the needs of particular student cohorts, formal policy settings need not constitute a barrier for reconfiguring school timetables.

Embodied Time Sleep is seen by many researchers and teachers as a key requirement for young people’s healthy development. How to address and configure young people’s need for ‘sleep time’ can best be understood in a socio-­ ecological context. Young people’s family and cultural contexts influence the times at which they eat, sleep and engage with social media. Issues related to mental health, drug use and addiction may also affect young people’s sleep patterns. As lack of sleep can impact school performance, some schools are looking at how they can provide students with opportunities to catch up on ‘sleep time’ during ‘school time’

Time, Families and At-risk Kids

Yeah, well it depends. We’ll enrol a student into a particular group depending on their needs. Our most high risk kids, the ones that have been disengaged for the longest amount of time and are the most un-­ regulated, might start at one o’clock in the afternoon and do a three hour class. Most of our kids start at 9:30 because we’ve found that to be a good in-between start time. (Fran) (continued)

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(continued)

That’s the same with us as well at VCAL level and Cert 3 level. (Beth) And I might be being really naïve, Fran but I reckon that is just such a simple fix across the board. We tried to do that here, and because we are a P to 9 the issues for families in terms of the other things you brought up (like older kids having responsibility for dropping off little brothers and sisters at school in the morning) there was a gap associated with what they were going to do, picking up at the end of the day. (Ellen) Family circumstances—such as middle years school children having to ‘drop off their little brothers and sisters’ at primary school—can (and do) affect the ease with which some students are able to arrive ‘on time’. Schools that are focused on assisting the ‘cohort’ of ‘most at risk’ kids have altered their start times, and the length of the school day, to accommodate the issues these students experience in their family networks. More ‘mainstream’ P-9 schools (from primary school to Year 9) are attracted to this sort of tailored flexibility, but some school leaders spoke in ways that suggested an inability, or unwillingness, to implement what could be ‘such a simple fix across the board’.

Families and Children’s Sleep

They don’t get a good night’s sleep, they don’t eat any food until midday. (Ellen) Three o’clock…(Deb) And for many because of cultural reasons they don’t have dinner until 10 o’clock at night. I can remember having a taxi ride to the airport a couple of years back and got talking about this guy’s children and his family and I said, “How long are your days?” and then somehow it came out that, “Yes, the family waits for me to get home from my shift to have dinner” and that can be 10 o’clock at night…(Ashley)

The informal logic of family life is built around ideas and values that concern obligations and responsibilities, and these inform the social ecologies in which school attendance and governance operate. Our research revealed in some families that, for work reasons or cultural reasons, evening meal times might be delayed until as late as 10 pm. These family

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practices effectively constrain the sleep time available to students. If students in these households subsequently ‘sleep in’ or get up ‘late’, then they may not have their first meal for the day until midday or even 3 pm. The interplay of family obligations, work routines, and the possibilities for getting the sleep that middle years students require, are part of the social ecology which affects the extent to which students are able to engage with teaching and learning activities during ‘the school day’. School Performance and Sleeping at School

They have mentors or tutors or coaches on site that help them with the things they need. They might just come here to have another hour’s sleep, a cup of coffee or breakfast or just a place to rest. (Ellen)

A number of Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) reports on Whittlesea’s middle-years children revealed that almost a quarter of the young people surveyed said that they do not get a good night’s sleep more than three times a week. Participants also took account of research showing that if young people do not get a good night’s sleep, especially in their teenage years when they need to sleep longer and get up later, then they’re not going to function, they’re not going to perform effectively at school. It is in this context that principals are making provision for assisting students to start the day with ‘coffee or breakfast’, even ‘another hour’s sleep’. Some research—largely from a psycho-medical perspective—suggests that young people in the middle years that do not get enough sleep are at risk of misusing alcohol and drugs, and of experiencing low academic success. This research argues that early school start times are part of the problem of young people not getting enough sleep (Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2018). The challenges facing young people in the middle years in communities such as Whittlesea with care providers working long hours, and young people at-risk of homelessness or drugs and behavioural issues, mean that young people don’t meet the recommended regular 9 to 12 hours of sleep per day for ages 6 to 12, or the 8 to 10 hours of sleep per day for ages 13 to 18 to promote their health and well-being (Paruthi et al. 2016). This research claims that sleeping the recommended hours is associated with longer concentration spans and retention of information, and provides benefits to a young person’s overall health and well-being. A lack of sleep is associated with lapses in concentration and learning and

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behavioural issues (for teenagers this includes an increased risk of self-­ harm and suicidal thoughts and attempts) and both a lack of sleep and oversleeping is associated with risks such as hypertension, diabetes and depression to name a few (Paruthi et al. 2016). Mental Health and Sleep Patterns

But we know developmentally with young children and young people what the general population needs, and that’s what you’re talking about, the whole school community, and then you have the element of how poor mental health affects your sleep. So what we see at the more pointy end is significant sleep problems because of anxiety and drug use, but those patterns start from early on and the patterns of non-­ attendance start from Grade 1. (Fran) The lack of sleep thing has also been coming up a lot in the last few years… in terms of gaming and social media and everything else. (Beth)

Professionals working with young people in Whittlesea pointed to young people’s mental health issues which are entangled with the stressful environment in which ‘the whole school community’ operates. Issues connected to drug use, anxiety, the impact of social media and gaming mean that young people—especially those identified as ‘more at risk of disengaging’—experience difficulty in establishing and maintaining regular patterns of sleep and school attendance. These themes recurred in the remarks of principals of schools working with at-risk young people, and a case manager at a local polytechnic working with young people disengaged with education and training, at risk of becoming homeless, and/or who have drug and alcohol issues, behavioural issues, or criminal backgrounds. Schools are critical spaces for addressing these complex issues. Their role in relation to drug education, for instance, has long been recognised as valuable. This is partly because, as local level partners, ‘they can link young people, families and community organisations with drug education professionals and information’ (Phillips 2000, 2005, 155, 2010). But if these links are to be effective in assisting young people with issues such as anxiety, homelessness and drug use, it will be necessary to attend to the fluidity, variability and gendered nature of young people’s experiences of these issues. Similar considerations need to be brought to bear when

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teachers, parents and social professionals look at the variable and gendered ways in which young people use social media, for instance, and how this affects their sleep patterns.

Discussion: Engagement and the Ambiguities of Metaphorical, Material and Institutional Time In this section our discussion of ‘metaphorical’, ‘material’ and ‘institutional’ time—and the ways in which these forms of time shape young people’s engagement with the middle years of school—will draw on work we have done over a number of years in spaces such as The Self as Enterprise: Foucault and the Spirit of 21st Century Capitalism (Kelly 2013), The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food: Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners (Pike and Kelly 2014), and Young People and the Aesthetics of Health Promotion: Beyond Reason, Rationality and Risk (Montero and Kelly 2016). In those spaces we identified and examined the disciplinary possibilities of clock time in the ways that schools order time and space; we explored time and the colonisation of young people’s futures; and we discussed the material and embodied challenges and opportunities that emerge from powerful metaphors such as ‘quality time’, ‘work/life balance’, and a ‘24/7’ world. In the discussion that follows we want to draw on this work and deploy it in new ways to think about the challenges of imagining and responding to the complex entanglements of time, of young people and their families, and of communities, agencies and institutions in the middle years of schooling. Our aim here is to suggest that in examining these entanglements—through ideas of ‘quality time’, ‘institutional time’ and ‘disciplinary time’—time isn’t necessarily what it seems. Quality Time For large parts of the first decades of their life, and on a daily basis, young people’s time—metaphorically and materially—is time that adults have sovereignty over, is time that is largely determined by the adult worlds of work, and the institutionalised clock time of these worlds. These times demand that young people conform to them, come to understand and live their lives by and through their various in-flexibilities. In The Self as Enterprise (Kelly 2013, 163–184), for example, we explored the idea that in contemporary worlds of work—in a form of

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capitalism variously named as neo-Liberal, as ‘flexible’, as ‘knowledgebased’, as ‘informational’—the self is the ‘enterprise’ that we are all required to work on, endlessly, in order to be employable. In these worlds of work, that are profoundly entangled with the worlds of schooling, this form of personhood requires that we be, or become (through various forms of education and ‘training’), enterprising, autonomous, prudent, risk aware and responsible for making choices, and for the consequences of choices made, or not made. Part of the approach to telling that story there was to engage with the possibilities that irony and ambiguity offer the social sciences in thinking about the ambivalences that characterise what it is to be human, and which Zygmunt Bauman has argued are manifestly heightened in liquid forms of capitalism that are 24/7, are globalising, are colonising of all aspects of human lives—including compulsory and post-compulsory schooling. The possibilities of irony and ambiguity took on a particular character in the discussions about the seemingly elusive possibilities for something that many of us call ‘Work-Life-Balance’ (WLB). This elusiveness emerges in a form of capitalism that demands more and more of our time, demands the commitment of more of our bodies, minds and souls to the productive expectations of the organisations that employ us. The possibility and promise of WLB is embedded in metaphorical and material dimensions of time that can usefully be explored through the irony and ambiguity that attaches to a concept such as ‘quality time’: a concept that loiters at, or just below, the surfaces of many of the conversations that we presented earlier in this chapter. In a chapter titled, 24/7 and the Problem of Work-Life-Balance, we suggested that a key theme in twenty-first century workplaces is the struggle over time and space that is made known through the concept of WLB. WLB involves a contest between competing interests and relationships that is governed by the mutability of time and space that is a fundamental characteristic of what Richard Sennett (2006) calls flexible capitalism. Twenty first century capitalism has the capacity to flexibilise time and space, to time-shift, to transform industrial age notions of time and space (work time and work space), to enable particular groups of workers to work from home, to work on the move, to stay connected, to be online, to be available—24/7. For many workers digital work spaces and work practices have become un-tethered from a particular time and place/space. Global computer networks, mobile/cell phone networks and data devices that have the capacity to access these networks, all facilitate the transformation

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of our understandings of time and space as these shape our experience of working, of being-at-work, of not working, of not-being-at-work. When does work end, and life (away from work) begin? Does it make sense to even ask such a question in 24/7 flexible capitalism? Or should we ask other questions about time and space in contexts where we already fret about managing time, being time poor, finding time, spending time, sharing quality time (with a partner, a child, a dependent parent)? The irony and ambiguity that might attach to these questions, and any answers to them, is important in how we can explore the entanglements between time understood in terms of 24 hours/7 days a week, the problem of WLB, and the structuring of human relationships, identities, and belongings. This ambivalence is well illustrated in Arlie Hochschild’s (2001) influential and best-selling The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Against a suggestion that the domestic space (home) is a haven in a heartless world—a place and space that the male breadwinner might return to after a hard day at work and declare Honey I’m home!—Hochschild (2001, 44–45) tellingly recounts research interviews in which, as the subtitle of her book suggests, work becomes home, and home becomes work. In this way of both imagining, and juggling family and work life, the figure of a tired, harassed, often emotionally drained parent or partner escapes a domestic space of often ‘unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony and managed cheer of work’. In this sort of scenario, some ‘people find in work a respite from the emotional tangles at home. Others marry their work, investing it with an emotional significance reserved for family, while hesitating to trust loved ones at home’. Linda Avery—described by Hochschild as a friendly 38 year mother of two who works as a shift supervisor at one of the AMERCO plants she conducted research in—embodies many of the tensions, ambiguities, even contradictions that emerge in discussions about the colonisation of time/ space by 24/7 flexible capitalism. Linda is in her second marriage. Her current husband works an opposite shift in the same factory as a technician. She has a 16-year-old daughter from her previous marriage and a two-year-old from her current relationship: I walk in the door and the minute I turn the key in the lock my older daughter is there. Granted, she needs somebody to talk to about her day…The baby is still up…and that upsets me…My daughter comes right up to the

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door and complains about anything her stepfather said or did. (Cited in Hochschild 2001, 37)

The home shift, in this situation, is no haven. Indeed, Linda, like many others in her situation finds a different set of relationships at work: I usually come to work early just to get away from the house. I get there at 2.30 pm, and people are there waiting. We sit. We talk. We joke. I let them know what’s going on, who has to be where, what changes I’ve made for the shift that day…There’s laughing, fun, joking. My coworkers aren’t putting me down for any reason. (Cited in Hochschild 2001, 37–38)

At work, re-organisations, re-engineering and downsizing produce the conditions of precariousness and uncertainty that can result in many of us working scared. In non-work relationships divorce, relationship break ups, re-marriage and step families, the rising incidence of single person households, or households comprising singles co-habiting, produce the conditions in which many of us might find in work-spaces a ‘haven’ from the intensity of personal relations that have become less permanent, more fragile and, as a consequence, more demanding of relationship skills. Here precariousness and uncertainty in relationships means many of us live, if not scared, then at least anxious. In this sense, we can see the demands on young people to live their lives, go to school, develop a sense of self, belong, in times and spaces and relationships that are profoundly entangled with other complex orderings of adult time, and space, and work, and relationships. The ironies and ambiguities here enable us to ask questions about how time is understood, experienced and mobilised to regulate aspects of our lives when we increasingly talk about time in terms of 24/7. Some of these questions can be broached via Hochschild’s discussion of quality time. For Hochschild (2001), Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management stands as a metaphor for industrialised time: for time and motion that is governed by regularised, rationalised, calculated efficiencies that are directed and controlled by systems, processes, supervision and surveillance. Hochschild (2001) argues that the metaphor of quality time— which is emblematic of so much of what many of us think about in settings in which we consider that our lives are time poor—performs a similar function in trying to grasp some of the complexities of what we might call, post-industrial, post-family time.

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Quality time, suggests Hochschild (2001, 50), represents the application of a low-grade Taylorist view of time in the domestic realm. In this space the objects of Taylorist principles are children, partners/spouses, dependents, leisure activities—all of which are subjected to a view of productivity in relationships in which less can be more. In this view, quality time ‘holds out the hope that scheduling intense periods of togetherness can compensate for an overall loss of time in such a way that a relationship will suffer no loss of quality’. Hochschild has little doubt that a quest for, and investment in, quality time is just another ‘way of transforming the cult of efficiency from office to home. Instead of nine hours a day with a child, we declare ourselves capable of getting the “same result” with one intensely focused total quality hour’. Oftentimes the management of time is, as Foucault would argue, a disciplinary practice. Other times the management of time indicates something about how the self is able to marshal, manage and exercise some control over the array of spaces, activities, practices that give time its character. To make quality time, to bring it into being, to find space for it, to organise those who will participate in it, to manage its durée, requires a particular set of skills, capacities, behaviours and dispositions. The manufacturing of quality time is an ongoing project, and it requires those who are tasked with the responsibility for imagining, finding, making and managing it, to be entrepreneurial, to locate it within a larger enterprise in which the practices of the world of paid work benchmark how it should be done, when it should unfold, what it should achieve. As Hochschild (2001, 211–212) notes, ‘these brief respites of “relaxed time” themselves can look more and more like little segments of job time, with parents punching in and out as if on a time clock’. Institutionalised Time Time—what it is, how it is calculated and counted, how it is imagined, how it is experienced—isn’t, in all respects, ‘universal’. We can acknowledge this even if we don’t want to think about its relative relativity (metaphorically, scientifically), or that in its unfolding there are ‘universal’ dimensions to time. A significant determinant in the unfolding of time during the last 400 years has been the ongoing, unfolding institutionalisation of time, and the roles that this institutionalisation has played in unfolding processes of modernisation, and the roles that these processes of

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modernisation have played, reflexively, in the ongoing, evolving institutionalisation of time. At the height of intellectual debates about the postmodern, postmodernity and postmodernisation, the work of UK sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) was useful in providing a framework for categorising the modern, modernity and modernisation against which claims for the ‘post’ could be referenced (Lyotard 1984). In order to understand the social conditions under which it becomes possible to think in terms of ‘incredulity’ towards the project of modernity; or to question, in terms of anxiety, or uncertainty, our contemporary conditions of existence, requires, according to Giddens (1990, 3), an understanding of the ‘nature of modernity itself’. Giddens’ (1990, 16) strategy for apprehending the ‘nature of modernity’ rested on two moves. First, he argued for a multidimensional institutional model of modernity. Second, he argued for an account which acknowledges the ‘extreme dynamism and globalising scope of modern institutions and the ‘nature of their discontinuities from traditional cultures’. Within this framework Giddens (1990, 55–63) outlined four ‘organisational clusters’ as being constitutive of a multi-dimensional, institutional account of modernity: capitalism, industrialisation, apparatuses of surveillance and the sovereignty of nation states. The usefulness of Giddens’ account of modernity to our discussion here becomes more apparent with the move to add additional constitutive elements to his framework. For Giddens (1990, 3) the task was to construct an understanding of the processes, or ‘facilitating conditions’, which energise the emergence and development, on a global scale, of the ‘organisational clusters’ of modernity. Giddens’ (1990, 16–17, original emphases) strategy for understanding these transformations rested on identifying the ‘dynamism of modernity’ as being a consequence of things such as the following: ‘the separation of time and space’, and their ‘recombination’ in various forms so as to ‘permit the precise time—space “zoning” of social life’; the ‘disembedding’ and ‘reembedding’ of social systems and relations; and the ‘reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations’ as a result of the ongoing generation of expert, knowledge about these social relations. Giddens (1991, 16, original emphasis) argued that in pre-modern social orders, time and space were largely ‘connected through the situatedness of place.’ That is, the ‘modes of time-reckoning, and the ‘ways of situating oneself and others spatially’ were fundamentally connected with a ‘special awareness of place’. In these pre-modern configurations of time-­ space, ‘when’ questions were ‘connected not just to the “where” of social

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conduct but to the substance of that conduct’. For Giddens (1990, 1991) the emptying of time, or the emergence of the idea of an empty dimension of time, precedes and is a necessary precondition for the emptying of space. The development of the mechanical clock and its spread throughout the population was crucial to the development of the notion of a uniform, empty dimension to time. This development enabled processes of standardisation and routinisation, across time and space, through the capacity to precisely ‘zone’ time. Time as something to be filled, or utilised, or commodified became fundamental to the ordering processes of modernity. These processes, and their contested (historically, culturally, nationally) and contingent nature, are expressed metaphorically and materially in terms such as: Time is Money; Time Wasting; The School Day; The (Long) Weekend; A Productive (Working) Life; Leisure Time. For Giddens (1991, 17), the universalisation of clock time ‘facilitated, but also presumed, deeply structured changes in the tissue of everyday life’. Such changes could not only be local, they were also globalising. This capacity to precisely and universally zone time facilitated the separation of time from space and, further, the separation of space from place. The processes of modernity are facilitated by, and indeed, further facilitate, both the separation of time and space, and their reintegration in various configurations. The emergence even dominance, of relationships which do not rely on physical copresence; the regularised structuring of relations between absent Others; the ordering of localised interactions through the (abstracted) institutional structuring of empty time-space zones are indicative of the ways in which the possibility of engineering numerous time-­ space configurations are implicated in the dynamism of modernity. As Giddens (1990, 20) argued, these empty dimensions to time and space work to sever the intimate relationships between social activity and place (as a context of copresence). In doing so, the capacity to endlessly reconfigure relations of time-space opens up the ‘possibilities of change by breaking free from the restraints of local habits and practices.’ This potential is expressed most powerfully in the modes of rationalised organisation which structure modern institutions, and their capacity to plan, organise and coordinate (govern) aspects of the local and the global in a manner which ‘routinely affects the lives of many millions of people’. The relatively recent emergence of near universal, compulsory schooling is one highly consequential practice for regulating, educating, training, and ‘making up’ young people that becomes thinkable in certain useful ways within this account of modernity. The interrelationships

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between the institutional dimensions of modernity are evidenced in the dynamic structuring and ordering of those processes which shape the schooling, education and training of populations of young people. Further, schooling can be thought of in ways which construct this enterprise as an instance of the manner in which ‘abstract systems’ lead to both the ‘disembedding’ and ‘reembedding’ of social relations. Schooling can be thought of in terms of processes which ‘lift out’, or disembed, social relations from particular settings of presence as a consequence of the abstracted coordination of the activities and relations of large populations across differing configurations of ‘empty’ space and time—13 (plus) years of schooling; age grading; the timetabled day; the school year; the subject lesson; the national curriculum. Yet, as a consequence of this capacity for the abstracted ordering and regulation of the activities of large populations across time and space, social relations grounded in copresence become reembedded. Schools, classrooms, playgrounds, neighbourhoods and peer groups emerge as settings and relations fundamentally structured by relations of co-presence, as a consequence of the regulatory practices mobilised in schooling as an abstract system. Such contexts and relations of copresence become highly consequential in the identity work of young people for longer and longer periods of their lives. The capacity of modern school systems to order and regulate the activities, capacities and dispositions of the nation’s Youth is a powerful expression of this ability to rationally organise large populations across time and space, and to do so with particular ‘productive’, ‘disciplinary’ objectives in mind. Disciplinary Time 1 In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (1995) adds accounts of the little practices, the forms and performance of ‘disciplinary power’ that provide the mechanisms that energise the processes identified by Giddens and others in more sociological accounts of the institutionalisation of time. In a discussion of the ways in which discipline requires the minute control of activities to enable their productive, efficient conduct Foucault (1995, 150) examines a number of ways in which time enables discipline to function. Understood in particular ways, time provides a mechanism by which bodies can be made productive with a certain degree of efficiency. 1  The discussion in this section draws on and develops work first published in Kelly (2013, pp. 163–184), Pike and Kelly (2014, pp.123–127), Montero and Kelly (2016, pp. 24–29).

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Discipline requires, and makes possible, a rationalised control of time and of activity. For example, he references an early nineteenth century time-­ table that orders, quite precisely, the activities and practices laid down for the commencement of the day in the Écoles mutuelles (mutual improvement schools): ‘8.45 entrance of the monitor, 8.52 the monitor’s summons, 8.56 entrance of the children and prayer, 9.00 the children go to their benches, 9.04 first slate, 9.08 end of dictation, 9.12 second slate, etc’. Foucault (1995, 151) also charts the emergence of these rationalities and mechanisms in the machinery of marching that is identifiable in mid eighteenth century accounts for controlling the timing and the movements of the well drilled, marching soldier: The length of the short step will be a foot, that of the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step will be two feet…as for the duration, that of the small step and the ordinary step will last one second, during which two double steps would be performed; the duration of the marching step will be a little longer than one second.

In these articulations of bodies, actions, order and time, Foucault (1995, 152–153) suggests that a sort of ‘anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined’. In these precise plans an ‘act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulation is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed’. It is in these ways, in the relations between particular understandings of bodies, of ends/purposes, of the techniques available, or which might be invented, for achieving these outcomes, that time ‘penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power’. In identifying, formulating and putting into play these little practices, the proper use of the body—‘which makes possible a correct use of time’—means that ‘nothing must remain idle or useless…A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture’. Utility and efficiency call forth new articulations between bodies and objects (weapons, machinery, tools, pencils, slates): ‘Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex’. These arguments come from that part of Discipline and Punish that is concerned with Docile Bodies, and Foucault’s discussion of new problematisations of the productive capacities and possibilities of embodied labour

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emerging at the rise of rationalised capitalism. Foucault (1995, 135) opens his discussion of the docile body, as he often does, with a compelling account of a particular historical figure: in this case the ‘ideal figure of the soldier as it was still seen in the early seventeenth century’. This figure, according to the seventeenth century account cited by Foucault (1995, 135), is imagined as emerging, almost ready-made, from an existing social stratum or class: The signs for recognizing those most suited to this profession are a lively, alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach, broad shoulders, long arms, strong fingers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet, because a man of such a figure could not fail to be strong and agile.

Foucault (1995, 135–136) suggests that a century later—in an Ordnance from March 1764—it is possible to discern a transformation, not so much in the emphasis on the body of the soldier, but in the ways in which it is imagined that the soldier’s body is something that can be made: ‘out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed’. In this shaping of the soldier: Recruits become accustomed to ‘holding their heads high and erect; to standing upright, without bending the back, to sticking out the belly, throwing out the chest and throwing back the shoulders; and to help them acquire the habit, they are given the position while standing against a wall in such a way that the heels, the thighs, the waist and the shoulders touch it, as also do the backs of the hands, as one turns the arms outwards, without moving them away from the body … Likewise they will be taught never to fix their eyes on the ground, but to look straight at those they pass … to remain motionless until the order is given, without moving the head, the hands or the feet … lastly to march with a bold step, with knee and ham taut, on the points of the feet, which should face outwards’.

In these sorts of developments, Foucault (1995, 136–138) argued that the human body ‘was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’. In this process a ‘“political anatomy”, which was also a “mechanics of power”, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines’. Understood in this way, discipline ‘produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile” bodies’. A

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docile body is not a ‘servile’ body. Rather, it is a body ‘that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’. As Foucault suggests, the emergence of a political economy of discipline was not the first time that the body had been subjected to scrutiny, supervision and training. Disciplinary mechanisms had long existed in such places as ‘monasteries, armies, workshops’. However, it was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that discipline became generalised as a formula of rule. Foucault (1995, 136–137) argued that the techniques of discipline operate at a particular scale, a scale that does not imagine the body, ‘en masse, “wholesale”, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it “retail”, individually’. At this scale, discipline seeks to work at the ‘level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity’. At this level, at this scale, discipline brings into view and focuses upon a particular object: ‘it was not or was no longer the signifying elements of behaviour or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization; constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs’. In this sense, discipline is less concerned with a lively, alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach and so on, and is more directed to the determination of those practices capable of effectively and efficiently, economically, producing these comportments. It is in these ways that discipline operates in, or is concerned with, a particular modality, a modality characterised by ‘an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement’. Foucault devotes a great deal of space to exploring the little practices, the micro-physics of discipline that enable discipline to be enacted and exercised. In doing so, many have suggested that he crafted a sense of human action and being-in-the-world that is always constrained, is always determined, by power. If bio-power and discipline are everywhere, then what? Where is the outside of these relations? How can this power be resisted? However, Foucault pointed to certain ways to think through the aims, the objects, the limits and possibilities of discipline. Discipline, suggests Foucault (1995, 170) ‘makes individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise’. It is through the cultivation and practice of particular behaviours and dispositions that persons—in schools, in factories, in offices, in fast food outlets—can become particular types of person, particular subjects. But, in doing this sort of work, discipline is ‘not a triumphant power,

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which because of its own excess can pride itself in its omnipotence’. Rather, discipline is a ‘modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy’. In schools, in factories, in families, in prisons, the little practices of discipline are ‘humble modalities, minor procedures, as compared with the majestic rituals of sovereignty or the great apparatuses of the state’. Docile bodies, by definition, were once, are always, unruly bodies. Unruly bodies, minds and souls always threaten to escape utility and the rationalities, the modes of ordering that make utility possible. Foucault (1995, 153–154) argues that discipline produces the possibility, even requires for its efficient function: ‘a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than uses; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces’. This ordering, rationalisation and emptying of time ‘means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were exhaustible’. In this sense discipline arranges a ‘positive economy of time’. The ‘more time is broken down, the more its subdivisions multiply, the better one disarticulates it by deploying its internal elements under a gaze that supervises them, the more one can accelerate an operation, or at least regulate it according to an optimum speed’. What we witness in various developments is the ‘regulation of the time of an action that was so important in the army and which was to be so throughout the entire technology of human activity’. So important, indeed, for thinking about and putting into practice much of what we have come to know as universal, compulsory schooling—and our subdivisions of this universality into periods such as early childhood, the early years, the middle years, and the post-compulsory years (the last of these should, increasingly, be seen as a ‘redundancy’). In spaces such as The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food: Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners—where we examined, among other things, the spatial and temporal ordering of school lunchtimes, the table arrangements, the segregation of children on the basis of whether they have packed lunches or school dinners, the queuing systems, and the modes and manners of entry and exit into the dining room (Pike and Kelly 2014): and in Young People and the Aesthetics of Health Promotion: Beyond Reason, Rationality and Risk—where we highlighted the ways in which time and space were organised and managed to enable the diverse elements of a Year 11 road safety health education/health promotion to work in effective, and affective, ways to minimise the risks that young

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people might take as car drivers and/or passengers we put Foucault’s ideas about time, discipline and bodies to work. As we argued there, and as we hinted at in the introduction to this chapter, the regulation and education of young people, is not just about the imposition of your will in ‘the real’. Government is also, always, technical. It depends on being able to think and act in ways that promise to make government possible. In this sense, government is fundamentally about ‘timetables’, ‘committees’, ‘structures’, ‘rules’, ‘resources’,…This sense of the ‘arts of government’ as being, to a significant degree, a ‘technical’ enterprise, a series of practices in which the means for producing the ‘right disposition of things’ (Foucault 1991) are always limited; always, to some extent, contextual; always subject to economic considerations; also, inevitably, extends to the ‘subjects’ of government. To those children and young people who need to be guided, directed, encouraged, cajoled to develop, and put into play, a variety of behaviours and dispositions—in relation to things such as diet and food practice, road safety, sexualities, alcohol and drug use. As Nikolas Rose (1999) demonstrates, modern practices of government are dependent on making the subjects of government knowable. For governmental programs to deliver the ‘right disposition of things’ we need to know who is to be governed, and we need to construct an understanding of their behaviours, attitudes, desires, habits and hopes—all in relation to the problem of government that is being addressed by a particular strategy: ‘Are we to be governed as members of a flock to be led, as children to be coddled and educated, as a human resource to be exploited, as members of a population to be managed, as legal subjects with rights, as responsible citizens of an interdependent society’ (Rose 1999, 41). Governmentality studies have demonstrated that the ‘ideal’ subject of Liberal government is the self-reflecting, self-fashioning individual who has developed the capacity to control the impulsive, passionate and desiring aspects of human behaviour (Kelly 2013, Pike and Kelly 2014). This capacity is something that is not seen to be innate. It is a capacity, or human behaviour, that has to be encouraged, incited and produced through education and moral training. In liberal and neo-liberal mentalities of rule the capacity for self-control has been, and is, used to ‘differentiate—the child from the adult, the man from the women, the normal person from the lunatic, the civilized man from the primitive’ (Rose 1999, 44). The historical development of mass compulsory schooling, and the practices and processes that give it structure, that give form to a school

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day—‘from breaks for recreation in the playground supervised by the teacher as moral exemplar, to the introduction of literary education to inculcate the habits of self-reflection and inwardness’—can be understood as ‘technologies of moral training’. The promise of such technologies was that ‘the child acquired the habits of self-observation and self-regulation in everyday existence outside the classroom’ (Rose 1999, 45). Government, also, does not take place in some ‘pre-existing thought world’ with its own ‘natural divisions’ (Rose 1999, 32). As Rose (1999, 32) argues, government is an activity that requires human experience to be subdivided, so to speak, by time and space. Government occurs across different ‘time zones’. In schools these ‘zones’ include the school day, week, term, year, and out-of-school-hours. And in different ‘spaces of government’ such as the classroom, the staff room, the head teacher’s office, the canteen, the school yard, the playground, the school dining room. These ‘time zones’ and ‘spaces of government’ are not natural phenomena. They have to be thought about and brought into being, made real, as times and spaces appropriate to particular tasks of government. In this way, schools— with their timetables that break the day up into governable bits and the curriculum that divides knowledge up into knowable bits—have been built as governable spaces in which the making up of desirable behaviours and attitudes in young people might be readily accomplished. At the end of our discussion on the problem of time in discussions of work-life balance, or WLB (Kelly 2013), we argued that in twenty-first century, flexible capitalism time is empty, and it can be filled, used in a variety of ways. In these times the use of time says much about the practise of freedom by a self that is understood as an enterprise. The irony and ambiguity of thinking, that we have to choose to spend our time ‘wisely’, signals a different view of time, a different understanding of time to the rationalised, disciplined, efficient view of Taylorist time. Under these conditions we are compelled to be our own time and motion experts (in a Taylorist sense); or managers of time/space portfolios (in a globalised, shareholder capitalism sense). These portfolios—comprising differing packets of time/space which are managed for us; in which we might be under more or less surveillance and discipline; in which we have more or less flexibility to manage ourselves, our relationships, our work, our leisure—become a measure, an indicator of our abilities to make and exercise choices in the 24/7 world of flexible capitalism. For example, it is only in a 24/7, always on, always connected, flexible environment—where sleep is the human equivalent of electrical appliances in stand-by mode—that we

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can be considered time poor or time rich. Indeed, the idea of time sovereignty (Bunting 2004)—which is suggestive of a certain capacity to exercise some control over packets of time/space—may be a powerful indicator of the degree to which individuals are able to flexibly manage and regulate significant relationships in their lives. Imagining ourselves in these ways creates a moral obligation to govern ourselves, in spaces that have expanded to 24/7, in ways that make the most of time, to be able to exercise some sovereignty over different packets of time/space, in order for time to be useful, to be productive given the particular character of these episodes of time—quality time, down time, recovery time. So, in the more flexible spaces of twenty-first century capitalism, in which the self ought to imagine itself as an enterprise, then the ‘beeping wrist watch, the courses in time-management and the like inscribe the particular temporalities into the comportment of free citizens as a matter of their self-control’ (Rose 1999, 31). And, also in such things as school days, after school activities, childcare and all those other activities and relations and processes that structure packets of time/space, and which we have to continually account for in the conduct of our daily, weekly, monthly, yearly lives. We want to suggest, at the end of our time here, that when we are concerned with young people’s engagement and dis-engagement in the middle years of schooling our thinking about time might need to stretch, might need to become more capacious. These enlarged, possibly more ecological understandings of time, might then be able to recognise and respond to the entanglements of ‘metaphorical’, ‘material’ and ‘institutional’ time in young people’s lives, their families’ lives, the communities, the schools, the organisations and institutions that are caught up in, and which shape these entanglements.

References Bunting, M. 2004. Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling our Lives. London: Harper Collins. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 2018. Schools Start Too Early. https:// www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html. Foucault, M. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmental rationality, ed., G.  Burchell, C.  Gordon, & P.  Miller, 87–104. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New  York: Random House. Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Hochschild, A.  R. 2001. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Henry Holt. Kelly, P. 2013. The Self as Enterprise: Foucault and the “Spirit” of 21st Century Capitalism. London: Routledge. Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/10.7758/9781610447713. Lyotard, J.  F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Montero, K. and P.  Kelly. 2016. Young People and the Aesthetics of Health Promotion: Beyond Reason, Rationality and Risk, Routledge, London. Paruthi, S., L. Brooks, C. D’Ambrosio, W. Hall, S. Kotagal, R. Lloyd, B. Malow, K.  Maski, C.  Nichols, S.  Quan, C.  Rosen, M.  Troester, and S.  Wise. 2016. Recommended amount of sleep for pediatric populations: a consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 12 (6): 785–786. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-1601. Phillips, S.K. 2000. Community-based approaches to drug issues: Some lessons learned and future implications. Youth Studies Australia 19 (3): 39–43. Phillips, S.K. 2005. Designing Local Solutions to Global Issues: Developing School Teachers Skills for Culturally Specific Drug Education. In Globalising Public Education: Policies, Pedagogy and Politics, ed. M. Apple, J. Kenway and M. Singh, 151–170. New York: Peter Lang. Phillips, S.K. 2010. Community-based Approaches to Drug Abuse Issues: Some Lessons Learned and Future Implications. In Youth Work and Youth Issues, ed. R. White, 487–496. Hobart: ACYS Publishing. Pike, J. and Kelly, P. 2014. The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food: Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusions

Abstract  In their concluding chapter Brown, Kelly and Phillips each contribute closing remarks about future options for thinking about young people’s engagement in the middle years. Phillips explores the value of socio-ecological models and integrated life-course service frameworks. He suggests ‘maranguka’ offers a model for ‘caring for others’ and of collaboration between services to improve young people’s engagement. Brown engages with the concepts of the ‘precariat’, ‘nomad self’, ‘affirmative ethics’, ‘endurance’, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to frame support for young people as they work towards affirmation in the middle years. Kelly canvasses the posthuman literatures on ‘complexities’, ‘entanglements’ and ‘convergences’. He suggests that a ‘posthuman ethics’ provides a framework for disruptive thinking to remake education processes for the trouble we find ourselves in. Keywords  Young people • Well-being • Life-course • Precariat • Nomad self • Engagement • Complexities • Entanglements • Posthuman politics • Ethics

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2_5

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Storytelling Storytelling is never a seamless process of tell, listen, think. It is always a complex, often messy process of knowledge production in which different histories, different perspectives, different purposes, different values, beliefs and attitudes, and different politics shape and produce the knowledge that emerges from the storytelling-listening-making encounter. In this sense, telling stories is always a collaborative encounter. At the very least this ‘telling’ is an invitation for one human to engage another human in the construction of meaning and knowledge, possibly even something that might be called the truth. Most often in Euro-American social scientific knowledge practices (Law 2004) the idea of ‘story-telling’ is displaced by the idea of valid, evidence-­ based, reports and accounts that deny their story telling attributes in favour of claims to truthfulness, validity, representativeness, and generalisability. And while these can be appropriate genres and forms of knowledge production, they are not the only possibilities, and they might not be the most productive possibilities at all times, for all purposes. This book emerged from a variety of knowledge practices that included: an application process for a small grant to conduct the project—a process that involved many meetings, discussions and the ‘fabrication’ of a story about what we would do that was ‘attractive’ to the funding body; meetings and plans about how the action research workshops would be conducted, who would participate, what would be the outcomes, the ‘deliverables’; the conduct of the workshops and the telling of diverse stories about the complexities of young people’s engagement and dis-engagement in the middle years of schooling—complexities that have shaped the accounts that we have presented under the banners of Belonging, Identity and Time; and the discussions, conversations, stories we have told each other about the book we are writing, the stories we would tell, the audiences for these accounts; for these stories. One of the things that we have tried to do, more or less successfully, in the doing of these knowledge practices is recognise and acknowledge the differences, as well as the similarities, that the three of us bring to these processes, and to our different entanglements with the ideas, the practices, the histories, the trajectories that have emerged to shape the stories that we have told here. Which is why, in this space, the Conclusions to these stories, we want to allocate some space to each of our voices, as individuals—who are not

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‘isolated’ and ‘autonomous’, but are ‘networked’ and ‘connected’ in diverse ways to diverse others (human and non-human)—who want to answer a question that came to figure prominently in our discussions: ‘So what?’ ‘So, what does this mean for thinking about young people’s engagement in the middle years if we think about, for example, time in particular ways?’

Scott’s Conclusions Seeing Through Listening The perspectives and perplexities voiced during our action research in Whittlesea (in outer northern Melbourne) speak to the importance of creating integrated, intersectoral and intergenerational support systems for and with young people and their families in the middle years. We saw how ‘the middle years’ need to be understood not simply as a discrete developmental stage but within a relational and, to some degree, life course perspective, so that supports and (re)investments are put in place earlier than ‘the middle years’ and well beyond them also. Without this socio-­ecological approach and life course perspective, it is difficult to co-create the environment(s) necessary to empower and enable young people as they transition from ‘childhood’ through ‘adolescence’/’youth’/’middle years’ to ‘early adulthood’ and beyond. In the stories that participants shared we recognised that a person’s development is not a linear process. Nor is it simply a ‘human story’. When inflected through the sort of post-human lens that Braidotti’s work offers, personal development is a complex identity formation journey which involves advances, slips, retreats, transitions, adjustments, and learning within a web of unfolding embodied relationships and feedback loops with other people, nonhuman others, and life itself. During our action research conversations we ‘saw’ this web of entanglements through ‘listening’. We heard how some young people are assuming adult roles as carers for their siblings and their parents, and how this affects their timely school attendance. We heard that some young girls are expected to cook at night for their families. We heard of evening meal times in some families occurring as late as 10 pm, and that in some households children may not have time for breakfast before they go to school. We heard about the ways young people can experience a sense of marginalisation—through physical and cyber bullying, through difficulty in

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accessing transport to school activities and youth services, through feeling ‘not wanted’ and culturally ‘unsafe’ in some schools. We heard how families vary in the degree to which parents are interested in education and support their children to participate in school learning. We heard school leaders acknowledge how they do not always talk with each other to share insights and seek opportunities for collaborative approaches. Resonances The issues that emerged in Whittlesea, and the recurring themes of Identity, Belonging and Time, are far from unique. They resonate with those reported in wider research literature nationally and internationally on contemporary challenges faced by ‘middle years’ children and ‘adolescents’, and how these young people might be best supported to develop healthy and positive life trajectories and outcomes. Research on middle-years young people in Australia, for example, has been advanced recently through the Australian Child Wellbeing Project (ACWP), which investigated factors affecting health and well-being in the middle years. Reporting on this research, Stephen Bartos (CEO, Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth) observed: Early intervention when children are very young—from birth to three years of age, while their brains and skills are developing rapidly—can dramatically improve life prospects. Basics such as good nutrition, language development, and physical, cognitive and social skills can be helped by family and supported by social and early-child development programs. Less recognised is the importance of the second stage of rapid brain development, early adolescence. Between the ages of eight and 14, a period sometimes called the “middle years”, a person’s brain goes through changes almost as radical as those in the first two years. If we want to maintain momentum from initiatives to foster development in early years, and intervene to prevent problems and set future, positive life courses, this time represents an important second chance. (Bartos 2017)

This suggests that when children live in disadvantaged communities and experience poverty, bullying and social and economic injustice, then their embodiment, the development and functioning of their bodily processes and systems, their health and well-being can be/will be shaped by ecologies characterised by ‘trauma’ and ‘toxic stress’ (Shonkoff and Garner 2012).

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The ACWP project has helped researchers and policy makers in Australia to see, as Steve Bartos observes, that ‘although most young people in the middle years are doing well, a significant number experience low well-­ being and lack opportunities most take for granted. Almost one in five reported going hungry and were more likely to miss school as a result. Many are bullied and marginalised’ (Bartos 2017). The Final Summary Report of the ACWP investigation pointed to a ‘significant proportion of young people in their middle years [who] have low wellbeing, and are missing out on opportunities at this crucial time.’ These young people have ‘high levels of health complaints, experience of bullying, low levels of engagement at school, low levels of subjective wellbeing, low levels of social support’ (Redmond et al. 2016, 1). Our conversations in Whittlesea with local police, teachers, youth workers, social workers, principals and State government education officials allowed participants to imagine and logic-model a range of disruptive interventions that might facilitate young people, families, schools and social professionals to collaborate in making engagement with school a little more flexible, empowering and a positive experience. For example, we considered how bus timetables might be flexed to allow staggered school start times for some middle years’ students, so they could better balance their sleep time, home time and school time. We imagined investing in youth workers and social workers as part of the school staff team, to create possibilities for collaborative, interdisciplinary work with children and families so that school, family and cultural relationships would positively support (re)engagement with school life. We played with ideas about how school spaces could be reframed to create a stronger sense of belonging in a safe emotional and learning space as young people transition from primary school to high school. What we recognised in these conversations was the importance of developing intersections at a local level between all of the stakeholders involved with ‘middle years schooling’. Such insights are echoed in work noted in our Introduction (Grogan et al. 2013) which has emphasised the value of developing socio-­ecological and integrated service frameworks that involve support across the life course, early intervention at every age and stage, services working collaboratively, accessible and inclusive services and supports attuned to identified needs within communities. Similar issues are highlighted in international literature on ‘middle years’ and ‘adolescent’ young people. The Report of the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing has drawn on a large and varied body

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of scholarly work on understanding and addressing the issues that ‘children’/’middle years’/’adolescents’ experience in different places and spaces around the world. It includes studies that take different methodological approaches to knowledge production—from analyses of large data sets on young people’s health, learning and employment (Patton et al. 2012; UNESCO 2015; UN 2014), to studies informed by youth-led and community-based participatory research methods (Jacquez et  al. 2013), and studies that critically examine the concepts and practices used to facilitate youth civic engagement (Shaw et al. 2014). These studies point towards the same conclusion; namely, as the Executive Summary of the Lancet Commission report puts it, investments in adolescent health and well-being can ‘transform global health for generations to come’. In calling for this investment it reverberates with similar arguments by other researchers about integrated and youth-inclusive approaches: The most powerful actions for adolescent health and wellbeing are intersectoral, multilevel, and multicomponent and engage and empower young people themselves to be part of change and accountability mechanisms. (Lancet 2016)

Back to ‘Maranguka’: And Beyond In reading a book such as ours the sceptical reader may well ask ‘So what?’ What are the implications of the perspectives, concepts and arguments we have presented for youth-focused practices and policies? Part of the answer seems to lie in acknowledging and understanding the embodied and relational nature of young people’s growth and development. Seeing young people’s engagement/dis-engagement with ‘school’ time and school spaces in this way enables all of the stakeholders—young people themselves, parents, teachers and social professionals—to understand the value of developing collaborative, place-based approaches to supporting each other so they can live, learn and work as capable, empowered citizens. We have sought to show how a socio-ecological approach can help to do this. Part of the answer also seems to touch on how all of us co-create, and are co-created by, the web of meanings, symbols and values within which we find ourselves suspended—to adapt the words of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973). This means attending to not only the

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culture(s) that shape us but also the ways in which we can collaborate in (re)shaping the culture(s) in the places where we live. Doing this effectively and meaningfully requires all stakeholders to question, disrupt and reframe how they might work with and for each other. Reinvestment policy approaches (like the Maranguka Just Reinvest project) have demonstrated the power of investing early in the life journey of young people, and using available resources to foster the co-creation of a culture of ‘caring for each other’ (‘maranguka’). The challenge in addressing middle-­ years school dis-engagement is to draw people and investment resources together so that, in particular places, key stakeholders can co-design nurturing and supportive communities, not just ‘engaging’ schools. And here we might remind ourselves that the Australian Aboriginal concept of ‘maranguka’ is not only a model for ‘caring for others’. It is also a model of self-governance which empowers the community to coordinate the right mix and timing of services that include a multi-disciplinary team working in partnership with relevant government and non-government agencies. The next step (and challenge) beyond co-design involves collaborative implementation of practices, policies and processes in ways that allow co-­ evaluation of the extent to which collaborative investments and initiatives can, and do, impact upon the socio-ecology of young people and their families. The success of these interventions ultimately will be measured by the extent to which ‘middle-years’ young people feel safe, feel a sense of belonging, in the various social spaces where, in and through time, they live, form their identities, move, learn and work, as they ‘become somebody’.

Seth’s Conclusions The Promise of Education On my way to our weekly meetings for writing this book, I walked past an advertisement plastered on a wall. The ad had a dark green background with the words ‘NEXT’ written in ocean blue to what looked like a white page torn out of a book with the question written in bold, uppercase, large black font at the top of the poster, ‘HOW ARE WE PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF LIFE & WORK’. At the bottom written in smaller black font was the statement ‘We want your voice in our next conversation for RMIT’s future to 2025 and beyond. Find out what we’ve already

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achieved’ with a web address below. Melbourne is one of the largest university cities in the world. I passed by many of these university ads daily, but what drew my attention was the graffiti written clearly in a ballpoint pen under the question of how are we preparing for the future of life and work? ‘UNDEREMPLOYMENT + LABOUR HIRE EXPLOITATION  +  CASUALISATION  +  UNABLE TO GET A HOME LOAN OR RENTAL  =  HOMELESSNESS.  Welcome to Australia.’ The response spoke truth to power. The promise of education is clear in the advertisement that this university is preparing people for life and work and gives an indication of its success in this regard. Though, what often gets ignored, or is silenced in these discussions are the difficulties that young people face in obtaining employment. The matriculation of young people through the education system is filled with political, economic and cultural disruptions with many young people transitioning into independent adulthood much later now than in the past. The experiences of young people becoming an adult are dislocated and not the same depending on a range of social divisions based on ability, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, geographical location and race (Freeland 1996). But the message is clear as displayed in the advertisement for this university that public and private educational institutions along with other agencies and organisations must respond to the challenges of employability. The issue of student engagement is complex, particularly with the challenges that young people in the middle years will grapple with in times of uncertainty and insecure work. In my conclusion, I engage with Standing’s (2009, 2011, 2012, 2014) work on the formation of a ‘precariat class’ that creates ‘losers and winners’ in a new global class structure. This, along with a socio-ecological approach to using the SDGs in place-based contexts, together with Bradiotti’s project on the nomadic subject and a model of ‘affirmative ethics’ help frame my thinking around the ways in which Belonging, Identity and Time shape young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling (Braidotti 2014, 2019b). The Precariat Standing (2011), in his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, refers to a new emerging class of people that face a life of insecurity and meaningless work. This global class structure is made up of global citizens, who are:

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• a part of the top one-thousandth percent (global elite) who do not answer to national or state governments; • a larger elite that have millions of dollars at their disposal; • a secure salaried class with a non-wage remuneration package with benefits that may include pensions, paid holidays, accommodation, a car, food, and electricity; • a group of professionals who are multi-skilled, free-lance workers, live opportunistically through their contacts and will likely burn-out from being overstressed; and • the precariat class who are on part-time work with no secure occupational identity or narrative, where they need to continually apply and reapply for new employment opportunities and often have qualifications beyond what is necessary for their job, lack unemployment benefits, and live with chronic economic uncertainty (Standing 2014).

This precariat class has replaced the old, shrinking proletariat class with secure labour. Standing (2012) refers to the precariat as denizens who inhabit a local space where they have lost their civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights and are left pleading for benefits and public services. For Standing (2014), the precariat is a new dangerous class that is producing a chasm, a divide leading to the castigation of migrants and other marginalised groups. He divides the precariat into three factions: 1. the old working class who lack high level school qualifications and long for a past where previous generations had secure work with pensions and benefits; 2. migrants and ethnic minorities who Standing referred to as the ultimate denizens because they are denied rights everywhere; and 3. the educated young and their parents who are worried about their children falling into the precariat class, this faction holds progressive values and strives for ecological sustainability. Standing (2014, 12) argues that the precariat must overcome three struggles to transform the global class system: redistribution, recognition and representation. The main struggle is for ‘a redistribution of key assets of economic security, control over time, quality space, real liberating education, financial knowledge and financial and other capital’. These resources are paramount to creating the conditions necessary ‘for personal development and work in a socially and ecologically sustainable “good society”’ (Standing 2014, 12). The mass protests, demonstrations and

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occupations post-GFC (Global Financial Crisis) have drawn recognition to problems of growing inequities and, inequalities and chronic insecurity. However, the precariat is only recently engaging with democratic politics, finding new forms or representation for a fair redistribution of assets that ‘could be the vanguard of a new progressive era’ (Standing 2014, 12). Standing (2011) calls for a ‘politics of paradise’ that involves a progressive strategy to address the problems of redistribution of wealth and income security. This involves combating the commodification of education, particularly universities and schools focused on human capital preparation; more pathways that make it easier for migrants to gain citizenship; making jobs more appealing rather than enforcing punitive measures for those who are unemployed; setting up ‘collaborative bargaining’ (see Standing 2009) that considers the full range of work and aspirations of the precariat; giving individuals a basic income; redistributing security and financial capital; recovering public spaces; and leisure grants that shift the thinking about leisure being a waste of time to being an integral part of contributing to our health and well-being. At a global level, the struggles of the precariat impact on the ways we think about young people and the problems identified by the key stakeholders in Whittlesea. The excerpts taken from the key stakeholders around the complexities of the middle years, of finding places to belong, of developing a nomadic self (see Braidotti 2013), of managing time, speak to the overwhelming problems many young people in these localities face. But reimagining places such as Whittlesea will require both local and global responses to the growing inequities and inequalities, high levels of poverty, precarity, and ‘violence’ towards vulnerable and marginalised groups of people, particularly refugees. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) In addressing the issue of poverty, along with the issues mentioned above, the SDGs aim to improve health and well-being, make education accessible to all and reduce inequality, while dealing with environmental problems such as climate change, deforestation and the plastic contamination of our waterways (UNESCO 2020). The SDGs provide a framework for our work in Whittlesea around student engagement in the middle years, more specifically, • Goal 4 ensuring inclusive and quality education for all,

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• Goal 5 achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls and • Goal 8 promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all. These goals, although framed through a neoliberal lens, call for governments and international organisations and networks to act on these goals locally, nationally and globally (Adelman 2018). The SDGs emerged at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro (United Nations Development Programme 2020). The SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals which started in 2000 to establish measurable objectives to grapple with issues of hunger and poverty, access to primary education and disease prevention to name a few (UNDP 2020). Places such as Whittlesea are profoundly shaped by the changing world of work, digital disruption and disappearing youth labour markets. More and more young people find themselves in precarious employment or marginalised from education, training and work. The promise of the socio-­ ecological approach in terms of the SDGs is how it disruptively connects to existing networks and initiatives, and introduces ‘socio-ecological thinking’ into these place-based interventions, so that: • young people flourish during the middle years of schooling and beyond, and continue on their secondary school journey to successfully complete secondary schooling; • become critical, creative and disruptive ‘agents of change’ in their communities; • and are supported in achieving this by key stakeholders working collaboratively to create pathways into meaningful, fair and ecologically safe work and living arrangements for young people in Whittlesea. In collaboration with the HWLLEN, and a range of key stakeholders from the WYC, we investigated and co-designed innovative responses to the challenges experienced by young people and their families, schools, and communities, and addressed the ways in which young people engaged and disengaged with schooling during their middle years. The research developed a conceptual model, and a model for collaborative practice, framed by a sense of the need to identify and explore innovative and disruptive socio-ecological understandings of young people’s well-being,

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resilience and enterprise. During the four action research workshops, the participants developed key tools for guiding not only the implementation but also the evaluation of their surprising alliances and disruptive interventions. The knowledge produced from the project impacted the key stakeholder’s organisational and operational practices. After the project concluded, the key stakeholders moved to adopt the learnings and integrated the models into their three-year, Whittlesea Youth Commitment (WYC) Action Plan Program (2020–2022). Nomad Subjectivity and Affirmative Ethics The challenges outlined in the SDGs, and for young people in the middle years living in Whittlesea, call for new ways of thinking that sit outside the conventional theories and ways of understanding these problems. Braidotti’s (2014, 181–182) engagement with nomadic subjectivity challenges us to ‘think through and move across established categories and levels of experience’ in understanding the complex ways that young people’s imaginaries simultaneously propel and resist deep transformations (Braidotti 2014, 163). A nomadic subject ‘is a collective assemblage, a relay-point for a web of complex relations that displace the centrality of ego-indexed notions of identity’ that involves non-human actors and technological media (Braidotti 2014, 171). Braidotti (2014, 173) argues that: It is crucial in fact to see to what extent processes of becoming are collective, intersubjective and not individual or isolated: it is always a matter of blocks of becoming. “Others” are the integral element of one’s successive becomings. A Deleuzian approach favours the destitution of the liberal notion of the sovereign subject and consequently overcomes the dualism Self/Other, Sameness/Difference, which is intrinsic to that vision of the subject. Subjects are collective assemblages, that is to say they are dynamic, but framed: fields of forces that aim at duration and affirmative self-realization. In order to fulfil them they need to be drawn together along a line of composition. This is rather like pitching a musical tone.

In her book Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti (2019b, 116) states that becoming-posthuman is ‘at the heart of a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a common and shared world, a territorial space’. This ‘accounts for multiple ecologies of belonging’ (Braidotti 2019b, 116):

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The posthuman convergence is a shared trait of our historical moment, but it is not at all clear whose crisis this actually is. Because we cannot speak of an undifferentiated humanity (or an undifferentiated ‘we’) that is allegedly sharing in a common condition of both technological meditation and crisis and extinction, extra work is required of critical thinkers. In response I stress the importance of materially embedded differential perspectives, allowing for diversity and heterogeneity of approaches. (Braidotti 2019b, 116)

A female, refugee, middle years student will view the world differently and have many challenges in regards to belonging, identity and time in comparison to a white, male, middle years student living in poverty. Becoming-posthuman will involve offering alternative ways of belonging, of experiencing success, of coming together. It may require nomadic interventions that ‘relocate young people’s identities on new grounds’ that support young people in sustaining multiple belongings in contexts that reward ‘Sameness’ (Braidotti 2014, 181). These interventions, along with a focus on posthuman subjectivity, provide a response to the ‘profit-­ minded knowledge practices of cognitive capitalism’ and entail ‘addressing issues of inequity, discrimination and exclusion’ (Braidotti 2019b, 113). In defining posthuman knowledge, Braidotti (2019b, 113) stresses ‘the inhuman(e) and the dehumanized aspects of this predicament, as well as the perpetuation of structural injustices on dispossessed people and classes’. Adopting an affirmative ethics model can help to address issues with the posthuman convergence of different groups in posthumanism and post-­ anthropocentrism. An affirmative ethics model constructs missing people in three steps. First, ‘by agreeing on a cartography of the condition that we are in’ what Braidotti (2019b, 118) refers to as a ‘posthuman convergence’. Second, ‘by developing adequate schemes of knowledge about these conditions, most notably about the power relations these involve’ (Braidotti 2019b, 118). Third, ‘by defining a platform of action on multiple scales in the real world’ (Braidotti 2019b, 118). For Braidotti (2019b, 118), the ‘missing people form a “we-are-in-this-together-but-we-arenot-one-and-the-same” kind of people’…forming ‘a transversal subjectivity’. Braidotti (2019b, 118) states: When we bring to bear the missing people upon the Critical PostHumanities, we accomplish two things. First we are re-segregating the critical discourses that at the moment are not in dialogue, notably the posthuman platform in

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its array of techno-studies and multiple forms of posthumanism, and postcolonial, anti-racist and indigenous theories. Second we are reactivating the disjunction between Major and minor knowledge…so as to counteract the perpetuation of patterns of discrimination against the feminist, queer, migrant, poor, decolonial, diasporic, otherwise-abled Humanities and diseased Humanities, to mention just a few. Incidentally, also missing from the field are non-nationally indexed Humanities.

Bringing together these missing people, may provide a dialogue to create new ways of thinking and new methodologies for explaining and examining these perplexing issues of belonging, identity and time in the middle years. An affirmative ethics model and a socio-ecological approach helps reshape our thinking about communities such as Whittlesea and Bourke, and how to grapple with this wicked problem of student engagement in the middles years in a highly technologically advanced, globalised world, experiencing exasperating levels of inequality and poverty, precarious work and catastrophic environmental crises.

Peter’s Conclusions Complexities In Smashed! The Many Meanings of Intoxication and Drunkenness, (Kelly et al. 2011) my colleagues and I engaged with the vast, and diverse, media, community, policy and academic commentary, debate and research on how to define intoxication and drunkenness, how to measure intoxication, what getting drunk means to those who drink (including young people, men and women, and people from different cultural backgrounds), and where responsibility lies for many of the individuals, social, medical and legal consequences of intoxication and drunkenness. In doing this work we wanted to acknowledge, foreground, and work with the complexities and ambiguities that characterises this debate and commentary. It seems that ‘everybody’ knows something about these issues; everybody has an opinion (personal and/or professional) about these issues. Complexity and ambiguity were not going to disappear in doing this work, so how do we work with complexities and ambiguities? Similar questions arise at this time. Annemarie Mol and John Law (2002, 1), in their Complexities: An introduction, provide one point of entry to engage with these questions by

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suggesting that over the past few decades, in many branches of the social sciences, there has been ‘a revolt against simplification. The argument has been that the world is complex and that it shouldn’t be tamed too much’. It should be apparent, given what we have discussed throughout this book, that I/we have some sympathy for this position. At the same time, Mol and Law, are themselves, cautious about both complexity and simplification and, what these mean for what we can know—about intoxication and drunkenness, about young people, about the middle years of school, about Belonging, Identity and Time. This caution shapes questions such as the following: If things are too complex can we make any sense of them? If we simplify things too much, what do we leave out? To begin the task of dealing with the always present dilemmas of simplification and complexification, Mol and Law (2002, 1) suggest a starting definition of complexity: ‘There is complexity if things relate but don’t add up, if events occur but not within the processes of linear time, and if phenomena share a space but cannot be mapped in terms of a single set of three-dimensional co-ordinates’. This sort of definition enables us to say that the many aspects of young people’s engagement in the middle years that we have identified and discussed bear some relation to each other but in no way add up to a coherent, non-problematic, unified whole. And, that across different co-ordinates of time, space and place an array of events, ideas, forms, processes and practices of knowledge production and translation attempt to make sense of young people’s engagement in the middle years. In doing so they produce not something that is simple and agreed upon, but multiple things that are complex, ambiguous and ambivalent. Things that are subject to constant and ongoing debate; about meanings, measurements, consequences, responsibilities, obligations and rights. Mol and Law (2002, 7–13) sketch a number of ‘tactics’ for dealing with complexity in the work that social scientists do as we write about the things that interest us—including the things that are of interest here. At one level they suggest that lists of things can be made without necessarily imposing an order on them, without necessarily seeking ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ and ‘correlations’. In this way of ordering things, lists ‘assemble elements that do not necessarily fit together into some larger scheme’. In looking for, and thinking about, the ways in which Belonging, Identity and Time are entangled in shaping young people’s diverse engagements with the middle years, we have made lists of moments, episodes and events in the conversations that we had about these things. We have also written in

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ways that try to include multiplicities: Mol and Law suggest that when we seek to pay due attention to ‘a variety of orders—modes of ordering, logics, frames, styles, repertoires, discourses—then the dichotomy between simple and complex starts to dissolve’. Finally, and in thinking about how some of these tactics and knowledges might travel from here, Mol and Law make a distinction between mapping and walking. Mapping is a mode of ordering that makes—sometimes forces—connections and relations between things. A map, in some instances and at a particular scale, may assist us to make sense of a direction, to find our way, to structure a journey. But at a different scale, and for different purposes, that same map may be less useful, may obscure or not include detail that would be necessary to make it more useful. Walking, on the other hand, suggests a different relationship to the ways we encounter the world and its complexities. Walking, in both a literal and a meta-sense, is a way of encountering and making sense of the world in which a map may be useful. But a map, and an itinerary that is shaped by the map, may also divert us from a trajectory, a path, a direction that might reveal something that we hadn’t expected; hadn’t, in our focus on following the map, imagined might be of value, might be worthwhile. If we want to work with the proposition that young people’s engagement in the middle years of schooling is shaped by, emerges from, and, in turn, adds something to complex ecologies of well-being, resilience and enterprise, then we need to invent, draw on, and play with knowledge practices such as making lists and multiplicities, and walking and wandering in these ecologies. These, and other, knowledge practices promise to open us up to new ways of imagining and working with the sense that in complex ecologies things are entangled with other things. And that, at the same time, entanglements both, produce complexities, and make it difficult to dis-entangle and simplify these complexities. Entanglements Entanglement is a way of thinking (into existence) the worlds we humans and non-humans inhabit that we have used a good deal in this book. And we have, largely, expected readers to take what we mean at face value. In the ways in which we are using this word, this concept, we tend to draw on the work currently being done in the humanities and social sciences in fields such as feminist posthumanities, new materialisms, and scholarship

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on the Anthropocene. The concept of entanglement has other meanings in fields such as quantum physics and various biologies. In quantum physics, entanglement is suggestive of correlation, of things being connected, of things not being independent, of the observed being profoundly shaped by the process of observation—even if at the quantum level these things and their correlations start to look and act pretty strangely to those of us who live in, and understand, ‘reality’ at the non-quantum level (Macdonald 2019; Wilczek 2016; Vutha 2019): Quantum entanglement is the physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.1

In biologies, entanglements go by names such as holobionts, symbionts and sympoiesis (Gilbert 2017; Haraway 2017). Sympoiesis, for Haraway (2017, M25) is a ‘simple word’ that ‘means “making with”. Nothing makes it itself; nothing is really auto-poietic or self-organizing’. For Scott Gilbert (2017, M73) entanglements raise profound questions about how we understand the ‘individual’: When you think of a cow, you probably envision an animal grazing, eating grass, and perhaps producing methane at her other end. However, cows cannot do this. Their bovine genome does not encode proteins with enzymatic activity needed to digest cellulose. What the cow does is chew the grass and maintain a symbiotic community of microorganisms in her gut. It is this population of gut symbionts that digests the grass and makes the cow possible. The cow is an obvious example of what is called a holobiont, an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts. The notion of the holobiont is important both within and beyond biology because it shows a radically new way of conceptualizing “individuals”.

Entanglements, here, are suggestive of relationships and connections that go all the ‘way down’, so that we start to question ‘Where does the “human” start and stop?’ (Swanson et al. 2017, M5). These ideas about entanglements are deeply troubling for ideas of the discrete, unique 1

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

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‘individual’. Entanglement, further, raises fundamental questions about ‘human exceptionalism’ when what it is that we usually understand as the ‘human’ is, indeed, an organism that is home to billions of other organisms who have been deeply implicated in sympoietic co-evolution (symbiogenesis), in shaping many of the ‘traits’ that we have, over time, come to imagine as being distinctly human. My knowledge of quantum physics and biology are, possibly equally, limited. Humans are not, solely, quantum particles. But we are, fundamentally, biological. And we, and the relationships that shape us—in different ways, at different levels, and with regard to particular issues or problem spaces (young people’s engagement in the middle years of school)—can usefully be engaged through the idea of entanglement. In feminist posthumanities, new materialisms and scholarship on the Anthropocene translations of this idea of entanglement, have travelled via various routes and processes—often with a lineage that draws on the work of Foucault and Deleuze (see, for example, Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015; Braidotti 2013; Swanson et al. 2017). As Stacy Alaimo (2012, 476, see also Alaimo 2010) argues: As the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific and substantial, what was once an ostensible bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainties where practices and actions that were once not even remotely ethical or political matters suddenly become so.

My own engagement with these concepts is also filtered through my entanglement with Foucault’s work: in particular his work exploring the ways in which the ‘human’—and the diverse ways in which the human is made known and managed in relation to problems of/for government including, sexuality, madness, punishment, the economy, the self, young people and schooling—has been variously ‘configured’ at different ‘moments’, in relation to different ‘events’ (Kelly 2018). In this work, the concept of dispositif or ‘apparatus’ enables us to join up these emergent concerns with ‘entanglements’—and the ways in which these ideas profoundly trouble concepts of the individual, of agency, of structure—to concerns with the institutional dimensions of human biographies, and the relationships between power/knowledge/subjects in structuring and shaping these institutionalised biographies (Foucault 1980).

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So, in using this idea of entanglement in trying to explore and decipher the complexities that should be seen as being at play in shaping young people’s engagement in the middle years of school, I/we have tried to include the excluded, complexify the complex, identify the impossible diversity of elements (human and non-human, material and immaterial, symbolic and institutional) at play in particular places in different configurations of time and space—including the present as it is becoming known as the Anthropocene. Crisis and Disruption In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 2015, 5) passed a resolution titled Transforming Our World: The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Paragraph 14 of that resolution names our present: Our world today 14. We are meeting at a time of immense challenges to sustainable development. Billions of our citizens continue to live in poverty and are denied a life of dignity. There are rising inequalities within and among countries. There are enormous disparities of opportunity, wealth and power. Gender inequality remains a key challenge. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, is a major concern. Global health threats, more frequent and intense natural disasters, spiralling conflict, violent extremism, terrorism and related humanitarian crises and forced displacement of people threaten to reverse much of the development progress made in recent decades. Natural resource depletion and adverse impacts of environmental degradation, including desertification, drought, land degradation, freshwater scarcity and loss of biodiversity, add to and exacerbate the list of challenges which humanity faces. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. Increases in global temperature, sea level rise, ocean acidification and other climate change impacts are seriously affecting coastal areas and low-lying coastal countries, including many least developed countries and small, island developing States. The survival of many societies, and of the biological support systems of the planet, is at risk.

Michael Koziol (2018) asks: The question used to be, ‘what will you do when you grow up?’ The question now is, ‘what will you do when the robots grow up’.

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It can be argued that concerns with the period of time known as the ‘middle years of schooling’ are profoundly entangled with a number of things including, the ‘disappearance’—in many of the OECD neo-liberal democracies—of youth labour markets since the 1970s; the ongoing digital disruption of capitalist modes of production and labour markets (What will we do when the robots grow up?); and in various jurisdictions, the emergence of the concept that compulsory schooling should extend until ages, 16, 17 and/or 18. With these emergences, the ‘middle years’ becomes a ‘thing’, and the challenges for engaging young people during this time— as distinct from merely participating—becomes a ‘problem’ (in a Foucauldian sense). Rosi Braidotti (2019a), for example, has suggested, in a number of spaces including in her recent Posthuman Knowledge (2019b): that we are currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction, between an advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities.

This convergence should be deeply troubling for us all. For what it is that we think it means to be a young person in the context of the ongoing institutionalisation of human biographies. For what ‘education’—in its broadest sense—‘promises’. For what governments, schools, organisations, agencies, businesses, communities imagine the ‘purposes’ of schooling (early years, middle years, senior years) to be. For what we imagine the relationships between education/schooling and the ‘world of work’ might look like if what we know as/of work is being profoundly troubled by digitalisation processes, the emergence of widespread precarity in a so-­ called ‘gig economy’, and by processes of globalisation in which demands for ‘cheap labour’ (Moore 2016) remake places on a constant and uncertain basis, and global scale. For what education/schooling should do, and look like, if it was fit for the purposes of confronting the disaster of the sixth mass extinction. Seth’s discussion of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for global and place-based action points to a significant trajectory to interrupt this convergence. This is work we both continue to think about and respond to. I want to finish though with a different trajectory (which colleagues and I are working on in Kelly, Goring and Noonan [in press]).

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Greta Thunberg is the now 17-year-old Swedish young woman who, in 2018, started a very personal form of activism by going on strike from her high school every Friday, and picketing the Swedish parliament to take more action on climate change. Her action has since evolved into global strike action—School Strikes 4 Climate (SS4C)—every Friday by thousands of young people around the world. Since the start of 2019 Greta has addressed various forums including the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2019. Videos of her various speeches have attracted millions of views on YouTube. This is some of what Greta had to say at Davos: We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly… Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. (Thunberg 2019)

The very fact that Greta has been on strike, the very fact that hundreds of thousands of other young people continue to participate in SS4C, indicates that to this point we haven’t been acting in that way, and many, if not most of us, think that the crises of earth systems, if we acknowledge these crises, can be addressed in a ‘business-as-usual’ approach. Business-as-usual in relation to many aspects of the ways we live, the ways that we think about, and ‘do’, schooling, education, work, is no longer sustainable—if it ever was. At the close I want to come back to the concept of Maranguka, of ‘caring for others’. Not to appropriate an indigenous practice or ethics. And not to say that the teachers, the principals, the youth workers, the community workers, the police and health workers in Whittlesea, and elsewhere, don’t ‘care for others’; don’t have an ethics of care to the young people that they obviously share concerns about, hold hopes for. Rather, the story of the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project was used to open this book because it illustrated the ways in which surprising alliances of individuals, groups, agencies, institutions could disrupt a ‘business-as-usual’ sensibility in relation to a seemingly ‘wicked problem’. Concepts, methodologies, ideas, relationships, practices, processes were, it seems, all up for grabs in this whole-of-community engagement with the historical and contemporary, the abstract and embodied,

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the up-close and distant complexities, and entanglements that characterised the ‘problem’ of young people’s behaviours and practices and criminality in Bourke, and the rationalities, practices and processes—historical and contemporary, abstract and embodied, up-close and distant—that were available to be mobilised, in relation to this problem. There seems to be much to learn from the project—more so in the context of the convergence that Braidotti so powerfully identifies. In this sense, my final contribution comes from Braidotti (2013, 192) who identifies an ‘affirmative politics’ that is informed by a ‘posthuman ethics’: The pursuit of collective projects aimed at the affirmation of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday life, is a strategy to set up, sustain and map out sustainable transformations. The motivation for the social construction of hope is grounded in a sense of responsibility and inter-­ generational accountability…Hope is a way of dreaming up possible futures: an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded not only in projects that aim at reconstructing the social imaginary, but also in the political economy of desires, affects and creativity that underscore it.

This politics, this ethics, can provide a framework for disruptive thinking and action in the business of engaging young people in the middle years of an education process that has to be remade to be fit-for-purpose for the trouble we find ourselves in.

References Adelman, S. 2018. Sustainable Development Goals, Anthropocentrism and Neoliberalism. In Sustainable Development Goals: Law, Theory and Implementation, ed. D.  French and L.  J. Kotzé, 15–40. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Alaimo, S. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, S. 2012. States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (3): 476–493. Bartos, S. 2017. Children’s Forgotten ‘Middle Years’, Ages Eight to 14, Are Crucial to Well-Being. Sydney Morning Herald, February 8. https://www.smh. com.au/opinion/childrens-forgotten-middle-years-ages-eight-to-14-are-crucial-to-wellbeing-20170208-gu85li.html Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Braidotti, R. 2014. Writing as a Nomadic Subject. Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. Braidotti, R. 2019a. Posthuman Knowledge. Accessed February 24, 2020. https:// www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/rosi-braidotti/ Braidotti, R. 2019b. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press Foucault, M. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, 194–228. New  York: Pantheon. Freeland, J. 1996. The Teenage labour Market and Post-Compulsory Curriculum Reform. Paper presented at ‘Making it Work: Vocational Education in Schools Conference’, Melbourne, Victoria, March. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gilbert, S. 2017. Holobiont by birth: Multilineage individuals as the concretion of cooperative processes. In Arts of living on a damaged planet, ed. A.  Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt, M73–90. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Grogan, P, K.  Colvin, J.  Rose, L.  Morstyn, and C.  Atkins. 2013. Building the Scaffolding—Strengthening support for young people in Victoria. Accessed May 5, 2020. http://vcoss.org.au/documents/2013/04/Building-theScaffolding-VCOSS-YACVic.pdf Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. 2017. Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble. In Arts of living on a damaged planet, ed. A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt, M25–50. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Jacquez, F, L.M. Vaughn, and E. Wagner. 2013. Youth as Partners, Participants or Passive Recipients: A Review of Children and Adolescents in Community-­ Based Participatory Research (CBPR). American Journal Community Psychology. 51 (1–2): 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-012-9533-7 Kelly, P. 2018. Three Notes on a Political Economy of Youth. Journal of Youth Studies 21 (10): 1283–1304. Kelly, P., J.  Advocat, L.  Harrison, and C.  Hickey. 2011. Smashed! The Many Meanings of Intoxication and Drunkenness. Melbourne, Victoria: Monash University Publishing. Kelly, P., J. Goring, and M. Noonan. In Press. School Strikes for Climate: Young People, Dissent and Collective Identities in/for the Anthropocene. In Youth Collectivities: Cultures, Objects, Belonging, ed. B.  Schiermer, B.  Gook and V. Cuzzocrea. Abingdon: Routledge. Koziol, M. 2018. What will you do when the robots grow up? The Age, February 28, 2016. p. 11.

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Lancet. 2016. Our future: a Lancet commission on adolescent health and wellbeing—Executive Summary. Accessed May 5, 2020. https://www.thelancet. com/commissions/adolescent-health-and-wellbeing Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Macdonald, F. 2019. Scientists Just Unveiled The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement. Accessed July 13, 2019. https://www.sciencealert.com/ scientists-just-unveiled-the-first-ever-photo-of-quantum-entanglement Mol, A. and J. Law. 2002. Complexities: An Introduction. In Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. J. Law and A. Mol, 1–22. Durham: Duke University Press. Moore, J. (ed). 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Patton, G., C.  Coffey, C.  Cappa, D.  Currie, L.  Riley, F.  Gore, L.  Degenhardt, D. Richardson, N. Astone, A. Sangowawa, A. Mokdad, and J. Ferguson. 2012. Health of the World’s Adolescents: A Synthesis of Internationally Comparable Data, The Lancet 379 (9826): 1665–1675. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(12)60203-7 Redmond, G., J. Skattebol, et al. 2016. Are the kids alright? Young Australians in their middle years: Final summary report of the Australian Child Wellbeing Project. Flinders University, UNSW Australia, Australian Council for Educational Research, www.australianchildwellbeing.com.au. http://www. australianchildwellbeing.com.au/sites/default/files/uploads/ACWP_Final_ Report_2016_Short.pdf Shaw, A, B. Brady, B. McGrath, M.A. Brennan, and P. Dolan. 2014. Understanding Youth Civic Engagement: Debates, Discourses, and Lessons from Practice. Community Development Journal 45 (4): 300–316. Shonkoff, J. P, and A.S. Garner. 2012. The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress. Pediatrics 129 (1): e232–e246. https://doi. org/10.1542/peds.2011-2663 Standing, G. 2009. Work and Occupation in a Tertiary Society. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 19(3): 49–72. Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Standing, G. 2012. The Precariat: from Denizens to Citizens? Polity 44(4): 588–608. Standing, G. 2014. The Precariat. Contexts 13(4): 10–12. Swanson, H., A.  Tsing, N.  Bubandt, and E.  Gan. 2017. Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies. In Arts of living on a damaged planet, ed. A.  Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt, M1–14. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thunberg, G. 2019. ‘Our house is on fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urgesleaders-to-act-on-climate

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Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. United Nations. 2014. The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet. Synthesis report of the Secretary-General on the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. New York: United Nations. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2020. Background on the goals. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/background.html United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). 2015. Educational for all 2000–2015: achievements and challenges. Paris: UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). 2020. Sustainable Development Goals. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/ United Nations General Assembly. 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ post2015/transformingourworld/publication Vutha, A. 2019. What is Quantum Entanglement? Cosmos, May. https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/what-is-quantum-entanglement Wilczek, F. 2016. Entanglement Made Simple. Quanta Magazine, April. https:// www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/

Index1

A Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, 2, 6, 14, 41 Adger, W., 79 Alaimo, S., 142 Allam, L., 4, 5 Angus, L., 54 Anthropocene, 15n5, 29, 141–143 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2, 47, 54 Australian Child Wellbeing Project (ACWP), 11, 128, 129 Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), 38, 39 Australian Early Development Index (AEDI), 38, 39 Australian Education Council (Finn) Review Committee, 52

B Bartos, S., 128, 129 Batten, M., 51n4 Belonging access, 76 boundary marking, 84 Breath, anti belonging, 82 bullying, 67 conforming, 64, 82 dirty work of boundary marking, 83, 84 disaffection, 68 normalising belonging, 82 politics of belonging, 82–84 School Culture, 22, 65–72 School Networks, 22, 72–76 Berkes. F., 79 Bourbeau, P., 79

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Brown et al., Belonging, Identity, Time and Young People’s Engagement in the Middle Years of School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52302-2

151

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INDEX

Bourdeusian, 11 Boylan, R. L., 6 Braidotti, R., 22, 28, 29, 44, 55–57, 71, 72, 127, 132, 134, 136, 137, 142, 144, 146 affirmative ethics/politics, 132, 137 nomadic self, 134 Posthumanism, 55–57 Brascoupé, S., 41 Brown, L., 54 Butler, R., 36, 37 C Campbell, C., 35, 36 Campbell-Sills, L., 86 Catalano, R., 76 Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 107 Charlton, E., 64, 82 Children’s Commissioner, 43 City of Melbourne (CoM), 91 City of Whittlesea (CoW), 16–19, 39, 40, 54, 74 Coleman, J., 52 Collier Charitable Fund, 15 Colthart, A., 52 Comber, B., 71 Communities that Care - Mornington Peninsula Shire, 77 Compañ, E., 43 Complexities, 23, 33–38, 54, 57, 58, 66, 71, 112, 126, 134, 138–140, 143, 146 Crowley, J., 83 Cuervo, H., 38 Cultural safety, 41, 42 Narragunnawali, 41

D De Orellana, P., 79 Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, 74, 75 Doll, B., 11 E Education enterprise skills, 14 the promise of, 131–132 Employment precarious, 15, 135 unemployment, 4, 15, 16, 48, 52, 91, 133, 143 Entanglement, 3, 22, 23, 29, 45, 57, 64, 66, 84, 103, 109, 111, 123, 126, 127, 140–143, 146 F Fagan, A., 76, 77 Families aspiration and motivation, 10 dysfunctional, 10, 68 kids as carers, 34–38 kids as Interpreters and Breadwinners, 37–38 parenting, 10 parents as Kid’s Friends, 34–38 poverty, 10 tracking young people and families, 38–40 ‘trouble’ with families, 34–36 Feldmann, K., 11 Folk models operational models, 35 representational models, 35

 INDEX 

153

Foucault, M., 22, 23, 44, 49, 50, 82, 92, 100, 104, 113, 116–121, 142 apparatus (dispositif), 142 discipline, 100, 116, 118–121 governmentality, 22, 44, 82, 104 the moral project of government, 82 Foundation for Young Australians (FYA), 14 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 13 Freeland, J., 52, 53, 132 Furlong, A., 80

Harrison, L., 50 Hawkins, J., 76 Hebdige, D., 80 Hochschild, A. R., 23, 111–113 Holy, L., 35 Humbert, C., 79 Hume-Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network (HWLLEN), 15, 16, 19, 20, 39, 40, 135 Husen, T., 52

G Galton, M., 70, 71, 73 Garner, A., 128 Geertz, C., 69, 130 Giddens, A., 23, 114–116 Gilbert, N., 77 Gilbert, S., 141 Glenn, J., 79 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), 14, 79, 134 Gordon, J., 47, 48 Goring, J., 144 Grattan Institute, 47 Gregory, T., 79 Grogan, P., 12, 129 Gunderson, L., 79

I Identity becoming somebody, 27–32, 83; intense interactional economy, 27 entrepreneurial, 29, 44, 48–50 institutionalised cultural identities, 41–42 sense of self, 22, 28

H Habitus, 11 Hall, S., 80 Halse, C., 69, 83, 84 Hamilton, M., 38 Haraway, D., 29, 55, 56, 141, 142

J Jacquez, F., 130 Jefferson, T., 80 Joseph, J., 79 K Kamp, A., 44 Kelly, J. F., 47, 49 Kelly, P., 15, 35, 44, 46, 49, 50, 55, 81–85, 93, 100, 109, 120–122, 138, 142, 144 Koziol, M., 143

154 

INDEX

L Laidlaw, B., 77 Lancet, 130 Langer, E. J., 86 Lash, S., 45, 46, 48 Law, J., 126, 138–140 Lentzos, F., 85, 92 Lindroth, M., 79 Lingard, B., 55 Lubeck, S., 51 M Macdonald, F., 141 Maranguka Just Reinvest Project, 2, 6, 131 Maranguka (caring for others), 1–6, 131, 145 Mares, P., 47 McKeown, A., 79 Melbourne, 15–18, 20, 22, 23, 30, 31, 47, 65, 77, 90–93, 101, 127, 132 liveable city, 47, 91 Michelsen, N., 79 Middle years disengagement, 6, 38, 123, 126, 131 engagement, 6, 7, 13–23, 31, 54, 57, 58, 65, 70, 79–81, 83, 84, 93, 101, 109, 126, 127, 132, 134, 138–140, 142, 143 student engagement; affective factors, 7; behavioural factors, 7; classroom factors, 8, 10, 31, 33; cognitive factors, 7, 9; generic school factors, 8, 9; personal factors, 8, 9; relational factors, 8 Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI), 17, 19, 38–40, 79, 107 Mol, A., 138–140

Montero, K., 100, 109 Moral economies, 14, 93 Moral geographies, 46 Muir, K., 36, 37 N Nairz-Wirth, E., 11 Nayak, A., 31, 32 Nicholson, L., 7–10, 72 Noonan, M., 144 O O’Malley, P., 92, 93 Owen, J., 14 Owens, A., 6 P Paruthi, S., 107, 108 Patton, G., 130 Phillips, S. K., 108 Phillips Smith, E., 10, 11 Pike, J., 46, 82, 83, 93, 120, 121 Place class, ethnicity and relative disadvantage, 32–33 stigma of place, 30–32 wild and tame zones, 29, 45 young people’s aspirations, opportunities and mobilities, 30, 33–34 Place-based approaches, 130 Proctor, H., 35 Pusey, M., 35 Putwain, D., 7–10, 72 R Reconciliation Australia, 41 Redmond, G., 12, 38, 129

 INDEX 

Renzulli, L., 6 Resilience age, well-being and resilience, 88–89 Connor-Davison Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), 86 education/employment status, wellbeing and resilience, 89 gender, well-being and resilience, 88 household composition, well-being and resilience, 89 household income, well-being and resilience, 89 socio-ecological models of resilience, 93 social support, wellbeing and resilience, 90 Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis Theory, 87, 93 Subjective Well-being (SWB), 87–89, 129 traumatic events, 85 Resilient Cities, 46, 90 Rizvi, F., 55 Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), 90, 91 Rose, N., 85, 92, 121–123 Russell, J., 51n4 S Schonert-Reichl, K., 79 Scott, Ridley, 31 Seddon, T., 54 Seligman, M., 86 Sexton, M., 86 Shaw, A., 130 Shonkoff, J., 128 Sinevarra-Niskanen, H., 79 Smyth & McInerney 2013, 6, 7, 10 Social capital, 11 Socio-ecological models ecological framework/approach, 78

155

Socio-economic Indexes for Areas Index (SEIFA) of Disadvantage, 16 Standing, G., 132–134 politics of paradise, 134 precariat class, 14, 132, 133 Stein, M., 86 Stuchlik, M., 35 Sukarieh, M., 84 Swadener, B. B., 51 Swanson, H., 141, 142 T Tait, G., 51 Tannock, S., 84 Tanton, R., 54 Thunberg, G., 145 School strikes 4 climate (SS4C), 145 Time disciplinary time, 109, 116–123 embodied time; families and children’s sleep, 106–107; mental health and sleep patterns, 108–109; school performance and sleeping at school, 107–108; time, families and ‘at risk’ kids, 105–106 institutional time; changing school start times, 103; inflexible school timetables, 102; negotiating school timetables, 104–105; quality of school time, 103–104; timetables, 102 metaphorical time, 100, 109–123 networked time, 23 quality time, 23, 100, 101, 104, 109–113, 123 sleep time, 23, 103, 105, 107, 129 Toumbourou, J., 77 Tsing, A., 142

156 

INDEX

U United Nations Incheon Declaration, 6 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 135 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 6, 134–136 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 130, 134 Urry, J., 45, 46, 48 V VicHealth, 86–90 Vutha, A., 141 W Walker, J., 80 Wandji, D., 79 Waters, C., 41 Weissberg, R., 79 Wexler, P., 27, 83 Whittlesea Youth Commitment Committee (WYC), 13–23, 29, 135, 136 Wilczek, F., 141

Willis, P., 80 Windle, G., 86 Winton, T., 81 Withers, G., 51n4 Woods, A., 71 Wyn, J., 38 Y Yarra City CTC, 77 Young people culturally and linguistically diverse, 12 disability, 11 health and well-being, 3, 35, 83, 107 life course perspective, 127 marginalisation, 11, 101, 127 mental health, 42–43, 105, 108 political economy of youth, 84, 85 refugee/migrant communities, 14 at risk, 10, 18, 20, 22, 51, 53 transitions, 6, 16, 28, 36, 50, 51, 53, 127, 129 Your Business Network, 48–55 Youth services accessible, 128 collaborative, 13 integrated, 13 Yuval-Davis, N., 83