Public Lecture: Yetis, Zombies & Voodoo Sociology: 25 years of Youth Research on Teesside, North East England - Bristol

External Event - 22nd Jan 2019

Tue 22 January 2019 17:15 – 18:30

Lecture Theatre 2D3, Social Science Complex, Priory Road, University of Bristol

This paper summarises in toto the thematic findings from 25+ years of our Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion. In doing so it charts how young people make transitions to adulthood in times of socio-economic change, under inauspicious social, economic, political and policy conditions and in a place (Teesside, North East England) that has high levels of multiple deprivation.

The analysis shows the ineptitude of ‘the voodoo sociology’ and weak versions of ‘social exclusion’ that infect much policy thinking; for example, that insists the answer lies in fixing the pathologies of ‘workless families’ where ‘no-one has had a job for three generations’, or ‘raising the aspirations’ of a ‘youth underclass’, or the fragmented, degraded work of the ‘gig economy’.

Instead, the paper insists on the necessity of a developed analysis of history and geography, the uneven development of late Capitalism and the active processes and decisions that result in the economic marginality of places and populations.

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