Abstract
There are several reasons why this book about young people in rural Tasmania deserves our attention. It is rare that youth workers write books about the young people with whom they have worked. Generally they tend to be too involved with the work itself to find the time to reflect on what they have seen, much less offer theoretical insights that encompass both macro and micro sociological analysis over years of contact. There are of course exceptions, such as Mark Krueger, but the writing about youth work tends towards the prescriptive rather than the descriptive. In this respect, Young People Making a Life makes a unique contribution to both the fields of sociology and youth work.
Wierenga tells the story of 32 young people she encountered in rural Tasmania, first as a youth worker and then over years as a graduate level researcher. Her insights span both perspectives, offering sociological analyses as well as an imbedded reflection on youth work practice. From a sociological perspective, she offers a nuanced and complex portrait of the shifting terrain of rural southern Tasmania under the increasing incursions of global capitalism. Her descriptions of the local historical modes of production thrown into crisis by shifting global markets is both compelling and disturbing. In this telling, there is a snapshot of the dynamic corrosive impact of capitalist market values on long-standing social and cultural patterns of life in rural communities.
Her concern, however, is premised in her encounter with the young people in the region. It is worth noting that Wierenga was a youth worker, who walked away from the work in frustration in order to obtain the distance to try to think about it differently. Although she was only a youth worker for a short time, the experience definitively colours the text throughout. Indeed, she spends her graduate career returning to the young people she encountered, attempting to find ways to both describe and theorize the hardships, struggles and successes of these youth.
The task that Wierenga sets for herself is complex and extensive both personally and in terms of the scope of the research itself. Indeed, to be done thoroughly, the book would really need to be much longer. That said, within the scope of what was attempted here, there are both frustrations and rewards. Wierenga makes an honest effort to set a framework that will allow a coherent reading of the tensions and flows of constructing one’s life as a young person in rural Tasmania.
She offers us two overarching lenses through which to read the lives of these young people over time. The first is premised on an analysis of their sense of their social position and projection for the future. Here she proposes that young people might be analyzed using four vectors based on locale and sense of identity. The locale vectors are comprised of global and local, while the identity vectors are premised on clarity or lack of clarity vis-à-vis one’s sense of oneself. She combines these variables to form groups of young people she defines as exploring (clear and global), wandering (global and unclear), settling (local and clear), and retreating (local and unclear). The methodology employed here would imply certain rational and objective analysis based on interview data and her analysis of economic factors. However, her frustrations as a youth worker with certain aspirations for the young people involved leak through. Indeed, she very clearly wishes conventionally-successful trajectories for these youth.
This may sound like a reasonable position to take, perhaps even one grounded in a certain kind of pragmatism. However, in hoping for clear goals, manageable expectations, practical, realizable dreams, and agentic applications of self, Wierenga either sidesteps or ignores post/subcultural theory and postmodernity, both as a historical aspect of the very capitalism at the heart of her analysis and as a theoretical framework for resistance and alternate modes of knowledge. In and of itself, this might not be so problematic as the youth work literature is predominantly modernist. Many of the texts on youth are either traditionally Marxist or laden with concepts borrowed from developmental psychology. However, Wierenga draws both her methodology and one of her main modes of analysis from arguably postmodern sources. Her methodology is grounded theory that is rooted in both post-positivist and constructivist theory. In the field of youth studies, the methodology has been increasingly characterized as postmodern. In addition, one of the primary themes throughout the book is the notion that the stories young people tell of themselves have a powerful influence of their capacity to access and deploy resources in making their lives. To make this case she draws on the work of Michael White who was heavily influenced by postmodern theory, most notably by Foucault. The omission of the postmodern is a significant gap in Wierenga’s theoretical coherence.
The other significant gap in this otherwise quite compelling text is any account of the young people’s lives outside an economic definition of making a life. Perhaps a better title for the book might have been ‘making a livelihood’. In fact, there is little or no accounting of the social lives of these young people. We learn very little about their peer relations, leisure habits, musical tastes, fashion interests or subcultural affiliations. When these variables do enter the picture, they tend to be cited as problematic. Similarly, while gender and class are accounted for, sexuality and race are only peripherally touched upon. Overall, however, for those interested in the lives of rural youth and the struggles they face under the conditions of global capitalism, this is an important contribution to the literature. Its longitudinal and nuanced accounting of the economic hardships and challenges of young people under late-stage capitalism is provocative and well worth considering. Wierenga’s style is accessible and, outside of some theoretical muddiness, the text is a coherent accounting of young people making a life.