Links – Related Research Projects

On this page you will find links to a number of other research projects attending to issues related to the CelebYouth research – including research on aspiration; gender, class and youth transitions; and young people’s everyday consumption of celebrity culture

SmartGirls.tv

This project is the doctoral work of Michele Paule. Like CelebYouth, Michele’s work has combined talking to young people face-to-face and online with analysing the media that they’re into. Her starting point was the labelling of young people as ‘gifted and talented’ and her desire to understand how such ‘smart girls’ negotiate this label.

Taste and the TV Chef

This is a project by Gilly Smith at the University of Brighton that pulls together her20 years of professional experience in food journalism and TV production of food programmes. The project is only in its earliest stages but will be exploring the influence of TV chefs on the meta-value of food, deconstructing the power of TV, celebrity and capturing voices from industry on the production of the most influential shows.

Young adults, drinking cultures and social networking:

This 3-year project has been funded by the NZ Royal Society Marsden Fund and is led by Antonia Lyons at Massey University, New Zealand and the research team includes Prof. Chris Griffin (University of Bath) whose work has examined young people’s consumption practices, identities and youth cultures. Its aim is to explore how new technologies such as social networking (for example, Facebook) are being used by young people in their drinking cultures in Aotearoa/NZ.For a lot of young adults in Aotearoa, drinking is about having fun and being with friends. Social networking is too. The primary goals of the project are to explore drinking cultures across Pakeha, Maori and Pasifika young people, specifically looking at:

• drinking practices, and the roles that new social networking technologies play in these processes.
• how young adults negotiate their identities through specific drinking practices, drinking cultures, and the public display of drinking experiences.

The project engages with celebrity culture by exploring how young people’s online drinking practices intersect with modalities of ‘everyday’  celebrity enabled by new technologies and attending to how young people negotiate images of drunk celebrities which circulate across (social) media in relation to their own practices and identities.

The Sheppey project: Living and Working on Sheppey:

Living and Working on Sheppey explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey, Kent, in the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st. It concentrates on the period since the closure of the dockyard at Sheerness in 1960. The Living and Working on Sheppey project was funded by the South East Coastal Communities Programme from 2009 to 2011. The project team includes researchers from Kent and Southampton Universities. Part of the project examines local young people’s sense of place and imagined futures. The research involved collecting essays from local young people about the kinds of futures they imagine for themselves, including their aspirations for work, families, and travel.

The ASPIRES project: Science Aspirations and Career Choice: Age 10-14

The ASPIRES project is a 5 year longitudinal ESRC project, led by Professor Louise Archer (with J. Osborne, J DeWitt & J. Dillon) which examines children’s science aspirations and career choice (age 10-14) . The project responds to research which suggests a failure to engage young people, particularly girls, with pursuing scientific careers.It seeks to develop a better understanding of why this is happening through qualitative and quantitative research with pupils, parents and teachers. The project engages with the following research questions:

1. How are student educational and occupational aspirations formed over time?
2. How are these aspirations influenced by their peers, parents and their experience of school science?
3. How are these aspirations shaped by their gender, class and ethnic identities?
4. How and why are student educational and occupational aspirations affected by an intervention which specifically addresses career aspirations in science, mathematics and engineering?

UK Youth Research: The making of the ‘precariat': unemployment, insecurity and work-poor young adults in harsh economic conditions.

UK Youth Research is a collective of UK based academics and researchers who are collaborating on projects on youth, unemployment, transitions and labour market research. The group benefits from expertise in labour market studies, education studies and  has extensive experience of conducting successful research projects in these areas. The making of the ‘precariat’: unemployment, insecurity and work-poor young adults in harsh economic conditions, is the title of UK Youth Research’s current ESRC funded project that uses data from Understanding Society and two 1980s datasets.

This is a one year project funded by the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative: Phase 1. This research will explore unemployment, insecurity and work-poor young adults in harsh economic conditions in the UK using quantitative data from  three datasets; Understanding Society c2010, with two ‘historical’ datasets from the 1980s. The central research question is: In what ways have the experiences of unemployed, insecure and vulnerable 18-25 year-olds changed between two key periods of economic instability in the UK? This will be done by mapping the nature and extent of unemployment and precarious or fragmented forms of work in the 1980s and c2010; developing an understanding of the ways in which positive and negative outcomes occur and are influenced by policy interventions occurring in both time periods. The data will look at the 18-25 age group in the UK labour market  in two periods characterised by high youth unemployment and economic recessions. The study will enable us to develop an enhanced understanding of vulnerable, work-poor, young adults in order to provide new underpinnings for effective youth employment policies.

The project team include Dr Henrietta O’Connor, Sarah Hadfield, Dr John Goodwin and Professor Andy Furlong.

As well as an active blog, the team can also be found on twitter:

@UKyouthresearch 

 @hso1 

@DrJGoodwin 

@Sarah_H5