ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the question of the historical present by asking how the times we live in–that young people are being young in and ‘becoming’ in–can be characterised. It examines ambiguities, the limitations and possibilities, of the discursive field of Youth Studies. The book explores stories of young people on the ‘margins’, for whom being ‘entrepreneurial’ requires significant struggle. It suggests that since the late 1970s youth studies, education studies, and sociologies of work have done a great deal of work in thinking about the entanglements of young people, education and training various forms of employment and the ways in which these entanglements shape young people’s ‘transitions’, their life courses. The book outlines the process of ‘bodying forth’ in partial connection with others, with places. It seeks to develop more ecological understandings of resilience, of those ecologies that might foster young people’s resilience.
