ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights an increasingly generalised and institutionalised sense of anxiety and mistrust in relation to the capacities of today's young people to make the transition to adulthood. It argues that Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary, sovereign and governmental forms of power provides a generative framework for analysing what it refers to as the institutionalised mistrust, surveillance and regulation of contemporary populations of young people. The chapter also argues that that a major problem for young people today is that they increasingly cause adults anxiety. It suggests that youth is an 'artefact of expertise', constructed at the intersection of a wide range of knowledges about youth and so-called youth issues: an intersection marked by expert representations of crime, education, family, the media, popular culture, (un)employment, transitions, the life course, risk. The promise is that dangerousness and mistrust will give way to heightened senses of security enabled by hi-tech surveillance technologies.
