ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the various ways young people understand themselves and their world. The young people's belief in self-making and choice is part of their own complex understanding of their lives. The political economy of generations offers a non-reductive relational account of young people's practices and relations in the world. Young people can draw on the stories and memories of older generations to add to their own cultural capital and inform their own habitus. Bourdieu's notion of generations suggests that what is represented as generational conflict is often simply about people from different age groups who had different experiences and who derived different benefits over time. Using the education system as his primary example of how 'benefits' are divided, he argued that intergeneration conflict 'is not between the young and the old but between two states of the education system, two states of the differential rarity of qualifications'.
