ABSTRACT
This chapter set out why young people’s social relationships matter, and how and why they are powerful. In addition, it clarifies how young people’s agencies are theorised in the book, through the original concept of young people’s contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies. Rather than focus on them as individual coherent wholes, young people are identified as dynamic, porous and connected bodies/subjectivities/agencies. The importance of young people’s own social relationships is situated within the concepts of embodied social and emotional capital. Four key interconnected interventions emerge which develop the central idea of young people as embodied and becoming contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies, drawing upon insights from Bourdieu (habitus), Judith Butler (performativity, subjection and recognition) and Foucault (subjection, normalisation). The first idea is the embodied nature of young people’s agencies. The second is the contextual and dynamic nature of young people who become differently in different social, spatial, historical, political, economic and cultural contexts. The third is understanding young people as nodes of the intergenerational reproduction of enduring differences. Fourth, the powerful nature of young people and specifically their socialities is outlined, and their power to reproduce but also to challenge and change enduring broader-scale inequalities via their everyday performances is discussed.
