ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the pathways towards adulthood for young people living in a metropolitan area of Southern Italy. It is a context of very high unemployment, especially in case of young people, with irregular work and insufficient institutional support. The chapter sketches out the conditions of young people living in the context of Southern Italy, and outlines class and gender issues. The structural weakness of the Southern context has a clear impact on the life conditions of young people. Deep structural changes are in education and in the labour market result in a situation where young people are faced with the need for reflexivity and constant negotiation of the possibilities and impossibilities of the social world. Drawing on the analysis of young people’s life histories, the chapter discusses some case studies that illustrate the ways in which reflexivity operates in lower- and higher-class contexts and how it gets transformed into agency.
