Conclusion

Abstract

This book has demonstrated that contemporary academic and popular debates over ‘youth issues’ reproduce a limited range of discourses. The case studies have shown how these discourses rely on essentialist and totalising assumptions about youth the operations of which actually serve to undermine the explanatory possibilities such assumptions articulate in the work of making sense of youth. I have argued that young people exceed the limits of what dominant discourses mark as possible when young people act in accordance with these discourses. In this way, ‘youth problems’ can be tied to the very manner of conceptualisation of youth. Thus, to the extent that youth discourses create effects that limit or close down possible solutions to a range of youth issues, attending to the discursive construction of youth is necessary.