Shaping the Selves of “At Risk” Youth in Debt and Poverty in the Context of Economic Vulnerability

Abstract

AbstractDrawing on two interrelated areas of youth work, outreach youth work as a place of coordination of work, social benefits and social services, and youth workshops as a place for work training for young people “at risk”, our aim in this article is to analyse how young people in poor financial circumstances are governed through policies and practices in these institutions in Finland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with young people and professionals working with young people, we ask how the subjectivities of young people “at risk” (and particularly those in debt and poverty) are shaped in the context of economic vulnerability. This shaping is not only from top-down dimensional formation of a subject, but also from the multidimensional flow of power/knowledge via subjects that sometimes possess opportunities of acting otherwise, as delineated in the end of our analysis. In the context of ubiquitous neoliberal governmentality, we delineated a landscape of survival strategies for economically vulnerable young people in these power/knowledge relations.