ABSTRACT
A theory of social representations is needed to help understand how most people claim to know certain groups, when that ‘knowledge’ too often does not align with how those being researched and talked about experience their own lives and understand themselves. This misrecognition or misalignment is particularly important when there are major differences in the resources, abilities or power between those being representation and others who play an influential role in saying how they are represented. As Christine Griffin, Serge Moscovici and Pierre Bourdieu argue, children and young people are the ‘object’ of ‘representations’ of various scientific studies, which re-produce a diversity of fears, fantasies, hopes and misunderstandings. These representations take many forms, including the long-standing and popular tradition of scientific studies claiming to show the alleged innate or natural deficiencies of people with an adolescent or teen brain.
