(SCY1a) Sociology of Childhood and Youth I: Precarity, hope and making change

Much research in child and youth studies focuses on challenges in young lives, including vulnerability, inequality, discrimination, marginalization, worry, and hardship. While seeking to recognize and appreciate these challenges, researchers in the sociology of childhood and youth frequently recognize that such challenges do not wholly define the lives of children and youth who are living with precarity: there is also hope, joy, innovation, creativity, participation, and activism. The papers in this session all examine hope in the face of precarity, and the possibilities for thinking about and making change. Tags: Égalité et Inégalité, Enfants Et Jeunes

Organizers: Rebecca Raby, Brock University, Hunter Knight, Brock University; Chair: Mehdia Hassan, University of Toronto

Presentations

Greg Yerashotis, Trent University

Urban youth and outdoor learning: Including environmental justice perspectives into sport-for-development programming

This article examines the learning experiences of urbanized immigrant youth who took part in an outdoor education component of a Sport-for-Development (SfD) program. Operated through an intersectoral partnership between the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto from 2017-2019, youth spent multiple weekends at the Hart House Farm, a University of Toronto-owned education facility located on the Niagara Escarpment. Drawing from participant-observation, focus group interviews and photo voice, we analyze if, how, and why participation affected youth at personal, social, and political levels. The findings of the study speak to calls from within SfD for a renewed environmental politics, namely by showcasing how augmenting traditional SfD programs with aspects of outdoor education can lead to more ‘transformative’ forms of social learning and development. In more detail, the findings of the study were threefold. First, we found that providing urban youth with access to the outdoors facilitated a new appreciation of the natural world. Previously, many of the young people in the study had an aversion to spending time in ‘the outdoors.’ These negative preconceptions about outdoor leisure highlight how barriers to environmental access emerge not only from restrictive structural forces—i.e., exclusion through class or race—but also from culturally enabling memes that lead youth to consciously avoid seeking available opportunities. Providing youth with opportunities to break through these intersecting barriers was therefore a critical first step to any potential benefits they may garner from access to the outdoors. By bridging structural and cultural barriers to the Canadian outdoors, it enabled youth to form new appreciations for how to live with and alongside the natural world. Second, we found that the trip supported youth’s sense of wellness. We found that the trip afforded and provided youth the time they needed to gain some perspective on their life stressors and the space to undergo forms of self-reflection/introspection. This often occurred through ‘holistic’ natural experiences, which allowed them to find transcendental forms of meaning that are known to support emotional wellness and facilitate personal growth. Third, the study highlights how the trip fostered what we refer to as a form of ‘ecological thought’ in youth. By this, we mean that in forming a deeper connections with the natural world and with each other, their experience at Hart House Farm expanded their political worldviews around matters of environmental justice and sustainability. The context in which it occurred clearly demonstrates how non-formal learning environments are well-suited to promote feelings of social responsibility in young people, which formal educational environments often fail to impart on them (Breunig and Rylander 2016). In this case, we found support for preliminary investigations into how programming in the outdoors can foster an awareness of issues around environmental justice (e.g., Maria-Jose Ramirex et al. 2020). These findings speak simultaneously to two calls from within the SfD field. Namely, the results address the need to establish deeper connections between SfD and issues of environmental justice (Darnell 2019; Giulianotti et al. 2019; Millington and Darnell 2020), and to generate more ‘socially transformative visions’ for sport-based youth programming (Coakley 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk 2011). Augmenting a traditional sport-for-development program with non-formal outdoor education and recreation generated unique program effects that are unlikely to occur in traditional sport spaces (Coakley 2011), or even in classroom environments (Breunig and Rylander 2016). The initiative described here not only supported youth’s wellness and provided a platform for personal growth, but also extended beyond the individual level to include socio-political development. Integrating non-formal outdoor education into sport- plus -development program models (Coalter 2013) may therefore be an important resource for SfD to make meaningful contributions to the environmental movement. Indeed, while other studies have highlighted the potential role of SfD programs in teaching social responsibility on communal levels (Kope and Arellano 2017; Wright 2016), we extend this finding to include the actual acquisition of socio-environmental justice perspectives. These findings also align with core themes of this year’s conference, namely regarding the relationship between diversity and racialization with sustainable futures. Indeed, given the diverse backgrounds of the youth involved in this study, we must also appreciate these findings in light of the growing criticisms of the environmental movement and outdoor education as being comprised of predominantly ‘white,’ middle-class individuals (Curnow 2017; Gauthier, Joseph and Fusco 2021; Gibson-wood and Wakefield 2013). Our study has shown that when programs provide access to, and opportunities for diverse youth to connect with the natural world, concerns over environmental justice may positively respond to the limiting categories of race, culture, and class. Providing equitable access to natural environments should therefore be regarded as a social right of citizenship that all young people should be afforded in Canada— not only for the benefit of those youth, but also for society at large.

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Non-presenting author: Simon Darnell, University of Toronto

Greg Yerashotis, Trent University

Kickin it in the Hood: Soccer and Social Inclusion in Global Toronto

This presentation will lay out the findings of my doctoral research that I completed while enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies. Using immersive ethnographic methods, my dissertation chronicled my involvement in sport-based youth development initiatives from 2014-2020. Here I took on the role of a community soccer coach to better investigate if, how and why sport programming was affecting the integration experiences of marginalized youth living in urban Toronto’s marquee immigrant reception site—the neighbourhood of St. James Town. Sitting at the literal and symbolic heart of Canada’s ‘global city,’ St. James Town is colloquially known as the world in a block due to its vast range of ethno-cultural diversity and extreme population density. It stands as the last remaining immigrant settlement site in a rapidly gentrifying urban core, with newly constructed ‘mega-towers’ of higher rental income units now dwarfing this once proud constellation of high-rise buildings. Using this avowedly intersectional community context as a background, the author tells the story of how local immigrant youth used sport in nuanced ways to construct unique senses of inclusion and forms of belonging in a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized world. The central questions the project seeks to answer are: Did sport participation affect the everyday integration experiences of these youth? If so, how, and why? And how were these experiences unique for different genders? Upon the answering of these questions, a theory of social inclusion through sport is put forth based on programming’s ability to engage and develop local youth, while also facilitating group bonding and eclectic forms of belonging in their lives. There are three pillars of this theory that will be explored in greater detail within this presentation. First, sport’s engagement capacity in the lives of marginalized immigrants. In the foreground of this argument are adolescent boys’ experiences of ‘sport-based urban belonging,’ that resulted from their ongoing involvement in ethno-culturally diverse recreational programs. Participants described in interviews how the program served as a space for ‘trans-cultural’ learning, which they believed aided in their acculturation because they saw these multi-cultural social relations as representative of the dynamics of the ‘global’ city of Toronto more generally. However, despite the global and domestic aspects of this process of ‘making home,’ the manner in which it was tied to the hyper-diversity of their locality meant that this kind of belonging was essentially urban . Second, in addition to the book’s focus on teenage boys, a standout feature of the research underpinning this proposal is its comparative analysis on gendered sporting relations in the community context. Here, the deep level of immersion achieved by the researcher into local neighbourhood life revealed intersectional barriers to sporting access faced by young women locally. Following the implementation of a girls-only soccer program by the author, however, local girls reported experiencing uniquely empowering affects from participation, which were found on both individual and collective levels. Third, following a detailed analysis of the separate sporting experiences of boys and girls, the author documents how soccer eventually bridged gendered divides, and facilitated a neighbourhood-based, cross-gendered, and multi-generational soccer community, termed the ‘Wellesley-Jarvis Soccer Tribe.’ Therefore, not only did access to, engagement with, and ongoing participation in this inter-sectoral program partnership positively influence youth on individual levels; but out of the collaboration grew a semi-autonomous network of soccer players whose bonds transcended the physical activity spaces where they were originally cultivated. There are clear linkages between conference themes and the focus of this research. Primarily, the expansion of the conference’s understanding of sustainability beyond just environmentalism, and to incorporate the idea of shared and global sustainable futures. This leaves space for research that highlights meaningful strategies to battle against structural forces of marginalization, and in this case, present strategies to better facilitate the inclusion of racialized groups in ‘global cities’ and multicultural societies like Toronto, Canada. I have recently submitted this research in the form of a book proposal in Palgrave Macmillan’s Sport and Global Culture series, and look forward to using this conference as a platform to further refine my findings for an academic audience.

Dawn Zinga, Brock University; Natalie Tacuri, McGill University

Balance and conversation: How competitive dancers and their parents navigate parental Involvement

Many competitive dancers are required to spend significant amounts of time practicing in the studio, typically training and rehearsing between 8-20 hours each week. Participating in competitive dance yields substantial costs and personal demands on both dancers and their parents, including competition fees, studio tuition, and time commitments. As is the case for many competitive athletic pursuits, there are additional costs and time commitments associated with traveling to competitions, all of which make it necessary for parents of competitive dancers to be dedicated and highly involved. Our research focuses on how dancers and their families manage these commitments and navigate parental involvement. Additionally, as the environment of the competitive dance world is highly gendered and is, unlike many other athletic contexts, heavily dominated by girls and young women, we are also interested in how gender shapes the ways in which mothers and fathers are involved. According to Schupp (2017), dance competition culture can send clear messages about how gender should be performed. We argue that what is often overlooked in research is that those messages are not restricted to the stage. They also permeate how dancers are supported and view their parents’ involvement. Sandlos (2015) argues that there is an implicit understanding that mothers will be highly involved and devote themselves to supporting their children’s competitive dance experiences. In this analysis, we use Butler’s concept of gender performativity to help inform us about the expectations that competitive dancers have of their mothers’ and fathers’ involvement as well as how they characterize the involvement of other dance parents in studio and competition contexts. We conducted an exploratory study examining the experiences of young competitive dancers across three types of studios: Competitive (e.g. acro, ballet, contemporary, hip hop, jazz, lyrical, modern, musical theatre, tap), Highland, and Irish. There were 41 dancers who participated in the study - Competitive (13 participants, 12-17 years), Highland (15 participants, 12-19 years), Irish (13 participants, 12-19 years). Through semi-structured interviews, we identified the convergences and divergences existing between dancers’ competitive experiences in these three dance contexts. In this paper, we discuss dancers’ identification of strong convergences across contexts in terms of how dancers and their parents negotiated parental involvement and four themes resulting from our qualitative analysis: Parental Support and Involvement; Parental Knowledge of Dance; Expectations; Decision-making and Autonomy. These categories emerged from the dancers’ reflections on how they have navigated their own parents’ involvement as well as their observations of other families. While dancers indicated some convergences around what they believed to be too much or too little involvement, they predominantly agreed that parental involvement was a type of balancing act that needs adjustment for family situations and the individual preferences of dancers and their parents. Essentially, dancers and their parents must work to find the level and types of parental involvement that are right for them. Parental involvement was not seen as static but as something that must be continually adjusted to context, including parental capacity/preference and dancer need/preference. Dancers reported typical gendered stereotypes around the ways in which mothers and fathers tend to support their children’s dancing, with far more involvement being expected of mothers. Discussions about fathers’ involvement revealed that they tend to participate differently than mothers and, while many dancers viewed father involvement in a stereotypical way, several wanted a different level of involvement from fathers. Our discussion centres around how gender performativity can be applied as a theoretical framework to understand these gendered dynamics and consider how parental involvement in competitive dance might shift as attitudes about gendered parenting roles continue to evolve in the future.

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Non-presenting authors: Lisa Sandlos, York University; Danielle S. Molnar, Brock University

Dan Woodman, University of Melbourne

The Political Economy of Youth in the Context of the 'Asset' Economy: The growing role of the 'bank of mum and dad'

This presentation engages in debates about the political economy of youth, drawing on longitudinal data from Australia. In youth studies, political economy approaches (such as Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Côté 2014; and Sukarieh and Tannock 2015) focus on the way the status of youth is used to disadvantage young people, both in education and employment, to the advantage or older generations, or to neoliberal capital accumulation in general. This presentation maps these debates as they emerged during the 20th century and their contemporary iterations before turning to the neglected effects of the changes mapped on integrational relationships. These relationships are changing as time in education extends, transitions to work become more complex and in a context in which older generations in many countries have benefited from asset price increases, particularly in housing. Parents are increasingly supporting their young adult children in the context of an extension of precarity further along the life course for contemporary cohorts. This is changing intergenerational relationships such that young adults are more likely than their parents to receive in-kind transfers (such as rent-free accommodation in the family home) and direct financial transfers from their parents. Drawing on mixed method (qualitative interview and quantitative survey) longitudinal data from Australia, the presentation looks at the role of these transfers in emerging patterns of mobility and in the re-creation of inequalities across generations. Many intergenerational supports from parents to children once associated with teenage years now characterise youth and young adulthood and parents in Australia are increasingly financially supporting their children well into young adulthood. It is established these financial transfers are being used to support young adults’ housing transitions, particularly home ownership, but the effects of the ‘bank of mum and dad’ are potentially far wider, impacting on the education, career, and relationship outcomes of young adults. The presentation shows that in Australia these transfers are in many cases being used to manage financial insecurity and a cost-of-living crisis faced by young people but in other cases, parents are helping their children to pursue extended education and manage a period of insecure and poorly paid employment on the way to more secure and well-paid careers in areas such as medicine, academia, and journalism. I use this analysis to further develop an approach to the political economy of youth informed by the sociology of generations, one that is better attuned to changing dynamics in intergenerational relationships (Woodman 2022). I return to the foundational work of Karl Mannheim (1952) on generations to develop his insights on the role of intergenerational relationships between a generation of students and an older generation of teachers educating within the context of rapid social change, extending these ideas to intergenerational relationship within the family, particularly between parents and their young adult children. Through this I argue that a political economy of youth, if it is to best provide insights into contemporary inequality and barriers to social justice, needs to attend to the way that social change reshaped the life course of contemporary young people’s parents, and how this has facilitated changing intergenerational demands within the family.