Conversations around young people and crisis tend to focus on their vulnerability to social crises, or their culpability for them. For example, young people experience hardships like escalating mental health problems, housing instability, and job precarity. At the same time, they’re deemed responsible for ‘anti-social’ problems and crises like street crime, substance use, and discipline issues in schools. But young people don’t all respond the same way to crisis, and often what’s left out of these conversations are their practices of hope and resistance. How do young people respond to crisis, and what can their response tell us about resilience and agency?
In this symposium for Social Science Week 2023, four of UNSW’s best early career academics will explore how young people narrate and practice hope, resistance and agency in differing conditions of crisis and marginalisation.
Panelists
Dr Sujith Kumar Prankumar, The Kirby Institute UNSW ‘Citizenship, belonging and flourishing’
Dr Ash Watson, Centre for Social Research in Health UNSW ‘Youth resistance in punk, rave and queer music zines’
Dr Naama Carlin, School of Social Sciences UNSW TBA
Dr Gabe Caluzzi, UNSW and La Trobe University ‘Hope for young people in residential drug and alcohol services’.
Brought to you by the UNSW School of Social Sciences.
