Friday Nov 14th at 9–12am (Hybrid session)
Chair: Jasmina Jerant, Tampere University
This working group explores how young people imagine and pursue a “good life” across diverse contexts, including cash benefits, higher education in terms of both student aspirations and the practices that support learning, rural livelihoods, agricultural entrepreneurship, and child welfare. The papers highlight the interplay between aspirations, structural constraints, and social well-being, offering insights into how youth navigate opportunities and challenges worldwide and how these insights can inform more inclusive youth policies and practices.
Friday Nov 14th at 9–12am
Abstracts
Autonomous cash benefits and social well-being of underage youth
Jasmina Jerant, Tampere University
“With youth marginalisation and material insecurity on the rise across Europe, there is an urgent need for policy tools that recognise under-age adolescents as direct recipients of income support, not just dependents. Yet most cash transfers still go to households. This conference paper introduces and develops a novel youth-directed concept and policy frame—autonomous cash benefits (ACBs)— which emerged from my earlier qualitative study.
That study, based on in-depth interviews with 15–17-year-olds living in poverty, revealed that small monthly cash benefits received through a charity lessened poverty-related social exclusion. The cash enabled young people to maintain valuable peer relationships and “fit in” socially. As the money was paid directly to them and they could use it however they wanted, the autonomy it afforded was significant. This autonomy manifested itself in a novel, dual form—no parental nor state control. I therefore labelled these transfers autonomous cash benefits.
This conference paper develops the ACB concept further and looks at existing cash policies to see if, and how, they reflect similar autonomy. The study’s distinctiveness lies in shifting focus from common criteria like conditionality and universality to the autonomous aspect of cash transfers. The paper presents various features that qualify a cash benefit as “autonomous” and discusses why personal control without parental or state oversight is particularly important for underage youth, and what broader lessons can be derived from it.
Finally, because adolescents are particularly vulnerable to low social well-being—and because these effects can perpetuate social and economic disadvantage across the life course—the paper also asks how the autonomous dimension of cash policies relates to social well-being of youth (relationships with peers, parents, school, community).”
“The future doesn’t look very bright”: Finishing University, Hazy Aspirations, and a ‘Good Life’ Slipping Out of Reach
Bimbo Omopo, University of St Andrews
Young people at Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, have great hopes for life after graduation. These hopes, or aspirations, formed the motivation for investments in formal, higher education. These investments are what I have termed the “tortuous and the not-so-tortuous sacrifices” for a university education and the good life. The good life, quite multifaceted, includes having an ostentatious life, breaking the yokes of family poverty, investing in the propagation of their religiosity, and so on. To achieve these, it therefore means they cannot afford to give up or to drop out. However, closer to graduation, they suddenly realize that they have been sold the lie of a successful future through education (Martin et al. 2016). This casts a doubt on their hopes, with the realization of a “good life slipping out of reach”. Based on an eleven-month-long ethnography of a university campus space, hinged on Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism theory, I attempt an answer to the following questions. What are the investments made by young people for a higher education? What aspirations do they have for a university degree? What makes the future bleak, seemingly unadventurous, or perceived as a time-wasting venture despite the initial optimism? This work contributes to works on youth studies, time, ethnography of campus spaces, and the anthropology of youth in Africa and elsewhere.
Toolkit for Tutors
Nifemi Adewoye
Bimbo Omopo, University of St Andrews
As part of the University of St Andrews’ Summer Teams Enterprise Programme, I collaborated with four other students to develop a comprehensive toolkit for academic tutors. This project involved conducting interviews and maintaining correspondence with PhD tutors and senior academics to gather qualitative insights into effective tutoring practices and common challenges. By engaging a diverse range of teaching staff, we were able to design a well-rounded blueprint to support future tutors. To strengthen the validity of our findings, we also distributed a student questionnaire incorporating both qualitative and quantitative questions. This allowed us to compare student perspectives with those of tutors, ensuring the final recommendations were informed by the experiences of both groups. The primary objective of our research was to improve the efficacy of the tutorial system—helping tutors adjust more quickly and confidently to their roles, while also enhancing student learning outcomes. Notably, our research highlighted the strong correlation between tutorial engagement and academic performance, prompting us to place particular emphasis on strategies to increase student participation and involvement.Drawing on all our findings, we produced both a visual poster and a detailed guidebook designed to support current and future tutors in delivering effective, engaging, and student-centred tutorials.
Moral dispositions and relational approaches in child welfare emergency institutions
Amalie Byremo Sund, the University of Agder
In this article, we explore how employees in four child welfare emergency institutions engage in relational work and the importance of employees’ moral dispositions in their relational approaches. Based on Bernardo Zacka’s (2017) theory of moral dispositions, we construct three categories that attempt to shed light on the different approaches to relationships of employees in emergency institutions. The study is based on 10 qualitative interviews with employees in various child welfare emergency institutions in Norway. The results show a tension between closeness and distance in the relationships between staff and young people. Given the temporality of an institutional stay, this issue may be pertinent to employees in all types of child welfare institutions. Staff face the challenge of finding the right balance between developing a close and positive relationship with the young people in the institution and ensuring that the relationship does not become too close, as it can be stressful when the young person moves, and the relationship must be broken off. We argue that staff use different strategies to manage this tension. Some choose a distant approach, others adopt a caregiver role, while others act as educators who set clear boundaries.