This article discusses young people's attitudes towards the future in terms of two distinct risks: on the one hand, their perceptions of achieving their ambitions, on the other, their perceptions of the future of the world, particularly in terms of environmental issues. The data are discussed as a disjuncture between these issues where the positive perceptions of the likelihood of achieving ambitions are rarely linked to their pessimistic visions of societal collapse. This is discussed through the lens of social theories about risk, reflexivity, ambivalence and governmentality. It is argued that the ‘experts’ in young people's lives – namely parents, teachers, politicians and media – discursively create a hierarchy of risk that legitimises individual choices about managing one's own life trajectory while delegitimising action towards large scale social issues. Despite considerable awareness of coming environmental problems and frustration over inaction, young people tend to prioritise the management of individual issues that works towards the maintenance of a governmentalised subjectivity. When faced with the ambivalences inherent in a risk society, the reflexive quest for order is governmentalised.

Using research examples, this article expands the theoretical premise that the `new' reflexivity constitutes an element of cultural capital for contemporary youth. Employing the sociological ideas of cultural capital, habitus, reflexivity and risk, the authors propose that Beck's notion of `risk' provides a useful way of understanding what drives the development of this reflexivity in the habitus of groups of young people, especially negotiation of risk. However, the emergence of this new reflexivity in youth habitus does not diminish the importance of socioeconomic class as some proponents of reflexive modernization claim. Quite the contrary. The capacity for reflexive negotiation of future risks, both real and perceived, has become another form of what Bourdieu calls embodied cultural capital — which remains inequitably distributed along class lines.

‘Youth’ as a social category is used and abused in all manner of ways across an array of fields, platforms, discourses and spaces, Youth Studies notwithstanding. When we talk about ‘young people’ sometimes we seem to be referring to different phenomena, depending upon our political interests, theoretical perspectives and research methods. This article interrogates how the concept of ‘youth’ is figuratively put to work. By suggesting different figures of youth, and inviting suggestions for more, I propose that tracing how they are situated in different ontological spaces can develop a clearer conception of our research object(s) and help reduce confusion and the possibility that we are talking past each other. The incomplete picture I want to paint of figures of youth, in quite broad-brush strokes, all inter-relate in something of a feedback loop, a material-semiotic assemblage that forms powerful affects for the ways that ‘youth’ is brought into being, how youth are researched, governed, co-opted and exploited.

Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures have to negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. This article presents research with young people in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk-influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to continue to be creative. Their ideas of being successful are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they continue to have the opportunity to invest themselves in their interests even if that means living in relative poverty. Using the oft-ignored Bourdieusian concepts of illusio, struggle and strategy, this article provides a case study of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future.

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.

Cotê has called for a focus on a political economy analysis, where young people should be thought of as ‘youth-as-class’. Cotê positions youth as having false consciousness, arguing that youth studies is too focussed on subjectivities and a potential apologist for neo-liberalism. While we acknowledge the central importance of economic considerations, this paper critically engages Cotê’s claims while developing an approach to political economy that recognises the importance of inequalities between young people. We engage with a number of Cotê’s claims arguing that his position underestimates the diversity of work in this area and the importance subjectivities to any analysis of political economy. We also identify a number of conceptual problems with ‘youth-as-class’ and the ‘false consciousness’ heuristic. We develop an alternative approach outlining a more integrative understanding of the relationship between the political and the economy highlighting the importance of subjectivity. We draw on ideas of political ecology; reflexivity and consciousness; and concepts from Bourdieu. Our approach recognises that young people's lives can be shaped by economic forces and by classed symbolic and moral forces. Young people are not passive dupes, but are in a constant reflexive struggle to respond to circumstances not always of their own making.