Stamou, Eleni; (2013) Exploring youth identities and educational pathways : habitus, technologies of time, identifications. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London.

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Abstract

This study entails the exploration and interpretation of youth identities and educational pathways. Youth, regarded as a diversified and unequally experienced phase of life, has been extended in terms of time as well as being attached to a more autonomous and less transitional status. Located within the broader context of redefinitions of youth and the changing content of youth experience, my concern focuses upon what has been constructed in the field of youth research as 'mainstream youth' or 'ordinary kids'. My research was set out and conducted in Greece during the mid- to late 2000s, prior to the outbreak of the financial crisis. The general aim of my inquiry is to experiment with an analytical technique that allows the capture, exploration and making sense of the diversity of youth. First and foremost, this study constitutes an exercise in theory and method that is founded upon Bourdieu's epistemological contributions. While drawing on Bourdieu's reflexive sociology I shift between three different analytical standpoints and consider each as a distinctive lens through which I explore different forms of youth experience. Second, the study employs exploratory research, the aim of which is to unpack and look into the experiences of 'ordinary' young Greeks in the era of modernisation. The data comprise youth narratives of the self that have been elicited via semi-structured and in-depth interviews with young Greeks in the final year of post-compulsory secondary education. By deploying Bourdieu's habitus and setting it against Beck's and Giddens' theorisations of reflexivity I interrogate young people's imagined futures along with the material and symbolic accumulations involved in their social positioning. By working with the concept of social time and drawing on Foucault's technologies of the self I unravel the temporal elements of youth self-formation processes and read temporalities alongside forms of self-care. Through the deployment of Hall's identification I explore the multiplicity of youth identifications as well as the ways in which they are stitched together to form situated temporary articulations. Overall, shifting between these three different standpoints allows me to shed light on different aspects of youth narratives and develop a multifaceted understanding of youth identities and educational pathways.

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