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STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Thinking about
Belonging in
Youth Studies
Anita Harris
Hernan Cuervo
Johanna Wyn
Studies in Childhood and Youth
Series Editors
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
Nigel Patrick Thomas

University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK
Spyros Spyrou
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus
Penny Curtis
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary schol-
arship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material
phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in
recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and
methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the
diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and
which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and
youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writ-
ing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global chal-
lenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and
scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies,
Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education,
Health, Social Work and Social Policy.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14474
Anita Harris • Hernan Cuervo
Johanna Wyn
Thinking about
Belonging in Youth
Studies
Anita Harris Hernan Cuervo
Deakin University University of Melbourne
Burwood, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Johanna Wyn
University of Melbourne
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Studies in Childhood and Youth

ISBN 978-3-030-75118-0 ISBN 978-3-030-75119-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
The thinking about belonging in youth studies that we present in this

book draws on a range of research projects by the authors. These projects
would not have been possible without the willing participation of young
people, and for this, we express our deepest gratitude. Much of this
research has been funded by the Australian Research Council:
DP170100180, Understanding the Effects of Transnational Mobility on
Youth Transitions (2017–2023); DP110101249, The Civic Life of Young
Muslim Australians (2011–2015); FT100100163, Young People and
Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City (2011–2016); DP0557382,
Youth Civic Participation and Social Connection in Post-Industrial Society
(2005–2008); DP160101611, Learning to Make it Work (2016–2020);
LP150100291, Defining the Status of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse
Young People (2015–2018); DP1094132, Young People Negotiating Risk
and Opportunity (2010–2014); DP0557902, Pathways Then and Now
(2005–2009); DP0209462, Flexible Career Patterns (2002–2004);
A79803304, Vocational Integration of Post-Compulsory Education and
Training (1998–2000).
We are grateful to colleagues in the Youth Research Centre and the
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship & Globalisation for the collegiality
and intellectual environment that have supported our work on this book.
Our thanks also go to Laura Gobey who so ably assisted with the prepara-
tion of the manuscript. We would also like to thank our children and
grandchildren: Jules Harris-Ure and Louie Harris-Ure; Anna Cuervo; and
James Willis, Matilda Weyhe and Thomas Willis.
v
About the Book
This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth studies. The con-
cept of belonging has emerged as a recurring theme in the youth studies
literature, offering new alignments across previously divergent approaches.
But its pervasiveness in the field has led to the criticism that ‘belonging’ is
simultaneously ‘everything and nothing’, and requires deeper analysis to
be of enduring value. This book does this work.
The book is organised around the question ‘what does the concept of
belonging do?’. Taking a global perspective, it provides the reader with an
accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses this concept.
Chapters address its historical and theoretical underpinnings, and its prev-
alence in youth policy and research, with a focus on transitions, participa-
tion, citizenship, and mobility.
Readers will gain a much-needed perspective on why belonging has
emerged as a key concept to understand young lives today, and its benefits
and shortcomings.
Praise For Thinking About Belonging
In Youth Studies
“This book is a game changer for youth studies. Offering a new and long
overdue take on the turn to belonging in youth policy and research, it
interrogates ideas about young people and relationality and how these are
deployed particularly in settler-colonial nations. It opens up exciting new
spaces for understanding how young people consider and enact connect-
edness in difficult times. This is an important must-read analysis from a
team of leading youth studies scholars.”
—Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori Education,
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
“This is a fascinating, rigorous and wide-ranging exploration of the con-

cept of ‘belonging’ with respect to young people’s lives. It brings together
scholarship from across the globe to consider how ideas about belonging
impact on our understandings of transitions and participation, citizenship
and mobilities. It is an important and authoritative new text for youth
researchers, written by three key scholars in the field.”
—Rachel Brooks, Professor of Sociology,
University of Surrey, UK
“This groundbreaking book is a must read for anyone interested in Youth

Studies. Written by three world leading scholars it not only offers new
insights into the recent ‘turn’ towards belonging, drawing upon a histori-
cal and a global analysis, but also introduces new ways of conceptualising
young people’s lives today. One of its unique and pleasing features is its
engagement with indigenous ideas and alternative world views illustrating
the important contribution they can and do make to these debates.”
—Alan France, Professor of Sociology,
University of Auckland, New Zealand
“In this thoughtful and original book, acclaimed youth studies researchers
Johanna Wyn, Anita Harris and Hernan Cuervo turn a critical eye on the
idea of belonging. They demonstrate how belonging, as a concept, as
practice and as ways of being, can be used to illuminate the complexities
of young people’s lives. It is indispensable reading for anyone wanting to
understand how young people study, work and play in families, schools,
communities and nation-states in late modernity.”
—Judith Bessant, Professor, Schools of Global,
Urban & Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia
“Thinking about Belonging is an incisive interrogation of ‘belonging’ as an

idea and as a framing device. The book shows that, as productive as
‘belonging’ has been across youth studies–on transitions, policy and citi-
zenship–it is poorly theorised, used to ‘mean everything and nothing’. It
offers a genealogy of uses of belonging and a systematic unpacking of its
limitations and possibilities. The book illustrates insightfully that in a
mobile, global world, we need a relational and dynamic understanding of
the many faces of belonging.”
—Greg Noble, Professor, Institute for Culture and Society,
Western Sydney University, Australia
“This innovative book thoroughly and critically addresses a compelling

question circulating among youth researches today: do we really need the
concept of belonging to understand young people’s new life experiences?
And why? As the volume highlights, using empirical examples, for young
people the notion of belonging is intertwined with that of becoming. The
authors unveil the reasons for this, offering a critical and expert view on
the potential and limits of the concept.”
—Carmen Leccardi, Department of Sociology and Social Research,
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Contents
1 The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies 1
2 Historical Underpinnings 17
3 Conceptual Threads 45
4 Policy Frames 71
5 Transitions and Participation107
6 Citizenship131
7 Mobilities169
8 Researching Belonging in Youth Studies201
Index233
xi
About the Authors
Anita Harris is a Research Professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for

Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. She is a sociologist spe-
cialising in youth citizenship in changing times, with a focus on cultural
diversity, mobility and gender. Her books include Future Girl and Young
People and Everyday Multiculturalism.
Hernan Cuervo is Deputy Director of the Youth Research Centre and
an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education,
the University of Melbourne. His research interests focus on youth transi-
tions, social inequality, rurality and theory of justice in education. His
latest book is Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South.
Johanna Wyn is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Emeritus Professor in
the Youth Research Centre, the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of
the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Academy of Social
Sciences, UK.
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies
This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth research and in

youth social policy and seeks to provide a critical analysis of the work that
the concept of belonging does in youth studies. The idea for the book
began with our collective observation that belonging has become an
increasingly popular way to talk about young people’s lives in research and
policy. But why has belonging become popular, and what does it really
mean? What is its intellectual history in youth studies, youth research, and
youth sociology? How is it theorised today and how is this conceptual
framework elaborated and then applied? What are its analytical capabilities
and its methodological affordances? How has it been produced, used and
deployed in policy and research to enable and constrain ways of thinking
about and acting on young people? While the concept of belonging has
been widely accepted and utilised in recent youth research and youth pol-
icy, it has yet to be subjected to a critical analysis. Our project in this book
is to do this work, and in so doing, to advance understanding of the dif-
ferent ways in which belonging is utilised, to consider its foundations and
interrogate its conceptual apparatus, and to draw out its potential to tran-
scend some of the shortcomings of previous approaches in a considered
fashion. In short, we ask what does this concept do in and for youth
studies?
To answer this question, we explore the socio-historical context in which
belonging has been employed in youth sociology. We recognise that, while
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies
in Childhood and Youth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_1
2 A. HARRIS ET AL.
it is increasingly referred to in research and policy, its meaning remains elu-

sive. Belonging has a taken-for-granted quality, and even when it is the
object of inquiry it is often left undefined. As Wright (2015, p. 391) sug-
gests, ‘belonging itself is often considered self-explanatory’. And Noble
(2020, p. xvii) notes that ‘“belonging” is a word that is frequently used but
rarely with conceptual clarity… It is both theoretically and empirically
underdeveloped’. However, some theorists have given this concept close
analytical treatment and have undertaken important definitional work that
brings its key elements to light. Their insights guide the way we explore this
concept throughout the book, even while we are primarily interested in
what it does (often by operating as an ambiguous and elusive notion) rather
than in determining how it should be defined. Recognising that the multi-
ple registers of the concept of belonging is in some ways its strength, and
the ways in which its meanings are dependent on context, we resist the
temptation to reify belonging through set definitions.
Yuval-Davis (2006, 2011), one of the most prominent theorists of
belonging, argues that belonging is made up of the three elements of
social location, identification and emotional attachment, and ethics and
political values. For her, it is a series of processes and practices that mani-
fest through these elements, and thus is not a fixed condition or status.
Anthias (2006, p. 21) also usefully provides a definition of belonging not
so much as an abstract state but by outlining the practices or processes that
indicate what it means to belong. She argues that ‘to belong is to be
accepted as part of a community, to feel safe within it and to have a stake
in the future of such a community of membership. To belong is to share
values, networks and practices’. Habib and Ward (2020, p. 1) similarly
state that ‘At its core, belonging is about connection, membership, attach-
ment and a sense of security’. Wright (2015, p. 393) further considers that
‘belonging is not only created by people in places, or more-than-humans
in places, but actively co-constitutes people and things and processes and
places’; that is, these entities come together to co-create their meanings in
relational ways through belonging processes. For most theorists, belong-
ing operates at the levels of the personal and the political. For example,
Yuval-Davis (2011) differentiates between the sense of feeling ‘at home’
and the larger politics of belonging through which questions of citizen-
ship and the civic and political community are settled. Antonsich (2010,
p. 5) similarly notes that belonging refers to both the intimate sentiment
of place-attachment and a ‘discursive resource’ for the enforcement of
1 THE QUESTION OF BELONGING IN YOUTH STUDIES 3
social inclusion. While belonging is ‘multi-scalar’, the dimensions of the

subjective and the political are intertwined.
Belonging is thus about membership, rights and duties, forms of iden-
tification with groups or other people and with places, and the emotional
and social bonds that come of feelings of being part of a larger whole. It is
about both the subjective and affective experience of connection and the
social, structural processes of recognition, inclusion and exclusion. It is
sometimes approached as a status or a category, but increasingly theorised
as a process, a form of labour, an array of practices and capacities (Noble,
2020). Belonging also implies a form of ontological security, but there is
a sense in which this has become more precarious, more ‘at risk’ in late
modern times, especially for youth, as long traditions of life course pat-
terns and taken for granted processes of transition cease to be the norm,
and possibilities for identification and connection both multiply and
become more fragmented.
Belonging has emerged as a recurring theme in the youth studies litera-
ture, offering new alignments across previously divergent approaches,
such as political economy, youth cultures, transitions, generations and
social and political ecology. The question of the relationship between indi-
viduals and communities, nations, families, places and many other dimen-
sions of life such as gender, race and class, central to the social sciences, has
taken on renewed interest in the broad youth studies field. This shift is
reflected in the use of more complex research approaches that can more
effectively capture the different nuances of young people’s experiences at
a local level, while also accounting for the global and institutional pro-
cesses and structures that shape young people’s lives. They are often
underpinned by a concern with the question of how young people belong,
and seek to explore and analyse the complex relationships between people;
between people and institutions; places; and the flows of information and
ideas that shape the place of young people. As Noble (2020, p. xvii) has
argued, there is a sense of the heightened relevance and importance of
questions of youth belonging in current times:
In an increasingly globalised world, an array of forces has intensified the

anxious politics of belonging. Escalating flows of people, the technological
mediation of social relations, separation of work and home, the growth in
high density living, ecological crises which disconnect us from the environ-
ment and the spread of populist fears of the stranger: these are some of the
ways in which we have less and less to do with those with whom we share
4 A. HARRIS ET AL.
social space. These forces are often keenly felt by young people, not just
because they are interwoven with transitions in the life course but also
because young people are intimately connected to both the challenges and
opportunities of social, economic, technological and environmental change.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has only sharpened these concerns

and further centred the value of a critical framework of relationality. It has
brought to light the civic, social and economic bonds that tie societies
together as well as the structural faultlines that crises lay bare; the critical
role of digital communications and media for participation and relation-
ships; the importance of belonging to family, household, community,
neighbourhood, social and political networks and capacity for place-
making when human movement is constrained and the world must ‘shel-
ter in place’; the direct effects of government, policy and politics on who
is deemed to belong to a society and have their lives valued and rights
upheld; the interconnectedness of human and non-human life; our funda-
mental dependency on one another in a globalised world; and the open
question of what kinds of futures there will be for young people to
belong to.
Belonging has many registers, political, economic, social, cultural and
spatial; and the concept can act as a gauge for social change amidst com-
plex social times; including new learning and working expectations for
youth, increasing migratory processes, expanding forms of social activism
and movements for rights and sovereignty, and global flows of different
forms of capital. How young people are connected to their worlds has
taken on new significance in a context of global social changes that mean
young people are increasingly excluded from employment and housing yet
also increasingly required to participate in education and comply with
policies that dictate engagement in education, training or work. Interest in
belonging is also heightened by young people’s unprecedented mobility
within and across nations, and their engagement in information, media
and communications technologies that place them in the centre of new
cultural and communication flows and connections. In this context, issues
of how youth establish social, civic and place-based relationships and can
participate as active members of a globalised world have become increas-
ingly pressing.
A body of important scholarly work on belonging has been produced
in the field of youth studies, indicating the momentum and interest around
this topic for youth researchers globally. Much youth studies scholarship
draws from broader sociological work that addresses contemporary con-

cerns about belonging. For example, Savage et al. (2005), Yuval-Davis
(2011), May (2013), and Wright (2015) explicitly take stock of the con-
cept of belonging in relation to key concepts such as mobility, choice, citi-
zenship, and the self. Many of the youth studies works that are engaged
with these ideas have a related focus on social identity. For example, the
edited collections Identities, Youth and Belonging: International
Perspectives (Habib & Ward, 2019) and Youth, Place and Theories of
Belonging (Habib & Ward, 2020) bring together essays that draw on the
concept of belonging to explore the situation of young people in different
countries and use this concept specifically to interpret place- and space-
based youth identities. Swartz and Arnot’s collection (2013) focuses on
the role of schools in creating belonging by providing international exam-
ples in the construction of youth citizenship and identities, and Tilleczek
(2011) also explores the development of youth identities through the con-
cept of belonging (see also Huppatz et al., 2016; and Halse, 2019, for
another important edited collection on youth, education and belonging).
There is also a significant body of recent work that investigates young
people’s belonging with a focus on ethnic, religious and cultural identity,
national inclusion and migration (see for example Abu El-Haj, 2015;
Eliassi, 2013; Fangen et al., 2012; Miller-Idriss, 2009; Tanu, 2017;
Ziemer, 2011). Other work that has addressed youth and belonging with
an emphasis on the political nature of the concept, including citizenship
and belonging as ‘boundary work’ focuses specifically on Muslim youth in
the diaspora, identity, Islamophobia and racism. For example, Mansouri
and Percival Wood (2008), Muna (2018) and Mustafa (2015) all address
the issue of how young Muslims belong in contemporary Western societ-
ies. These works take a migration/ethnic studies perspective and explore
belonging through the prism of cultural identity resolution and social
identity construction and the challenges of national inclusion.
Other important publications have addressed the issue of belonging
through youth cultures or new thinking about youth transitions. For exam-
ple, Bennett and Robards’ edited book (2014) focuses on how digital tech-
nologies and media generate new social networks through culture, in
particular through music. More recently Robards and Lincoln (2020) have
analysed the meaning and use of social network sites for young people in
the UK and Australia, showing how their lives are mediated through these
platforms. Some chapters in Woodman and Bennett’s collection (2015)
address the tensions between youth transitions and cultures through a
6 A. HARRIS ET AL.
belonging perspective. Work by Wyn and Woodman has centred the idea of
youth as belonging to a social generation (Woodman & Wyn, 2015). More
recently, the question of how young people are positioned in society in
generational belonging terms has been taken up from the perspective of
political economy. For example, Bessant et al. (2017) provide a provocative
analysis of the situation for the current generation of young people, argu-
ing that it is time for a new ‘intergenerational contract’ to be built – one
that recognises that under post-neoliberalism, the relationship between
work and resources is being transformed. This approach directly confronts
the question of where and how young people belong in new times. Similarly,
Furlong et al. (2018) in Young people in the Labour Market: Past and Present
argue that long-term structural change to the labour market requires new,
more flexible policy responses, as the ‘new normal’ for young people
becomes liminal employment. These books engage with the question of
youth belonging from the perspective of economic security.
In some ways, our book is a response to this growing literature that
uses the concept of belonging to explore the situation and lives of young
people today. The framework of belonging appears to address many of the
current issues confronting both youth and youth studies in an intercon-
nected fashion, sometimes promising to cut across limiting empirical and
conceptual foci, and providing a core organising concept for engaging
with complex and interrelated aspects of young people’s lives today.
Indeed, in our own individual and collaborative work (Cuervo & Wyn,
2012, 2017; Cuervo et al., 2015; Harris, 2016; Raffaetà et al., 2016;
Wyn, 2013, 2015) we have found ourselves drawn to this idea, utilising it
as a way into empirical investigation as well as unpacking it as a metaphor.
The question ‘where and how do young people belong?’ certainly feels
like an intellectually expansive and politically compelling starting point for
youth studies today. ‘Belonging’ has helped to overcome some of the
more rigid and categorical approaches to youth (such as ‘transitions’ or
‘self-concept’) and opened onto productive ways of thinking about the
relational dimensions of youth experience in complex times, and young
people’s connections to place, people, material spaces and objects.
And yet we have been aware of some of its limitations. We have found
ourselves wondering about the easy take up of this term, and especially a
tendency for it to be used uncritically or rather normatively; for it to be
treated as a self-evident idea (and a good state to be in) rather than deeply
theorised. The more belonging pops up, the less it seems to be scrutinised.
Indeed, one of our avenues of inquiry is the possibly universalising
tendency of the belonging trope which may conceal and de-politicise

other pressing issues for youth. Its pervasiveness in the field has led to the
criticism that ‘belonging’ is simultaneously ‘everything and nothing’ and
requires deeper analysis to be of enduring value. This book does this work.
Accordingly, here we do not seek to add to the large body of empirical
work that already exists about youth and belonging, but rather address the
need for a critical conceptual and theoretical interrogation of the concept
of belonging as it is increasingly being used in both academic research and
policy. We focus on belonging as a conceptual tool, exploring its prove-
nance in the development of youth studies as well as the wide range of
theoretical traditions with which this concept is aligned. We remain inter-
ested in the questions of where and how young people might belong, but
this book explicitly does not follow the tradition of exploring experiences
of belonging on a site by site or country by country basis, or by categorical
youth identities. Rather, we take as the starting point the different concep-
tual affordances of the idea of belonging, and draw on examples from
many different contexts to provide analysis of what the concept of belong-
ing is doing for youth research and for youth policy in terms of framing
research and delivery of initiatives for young people.
We do so as Australian researchers, undertaking youth studies in the
specific context of a multicultural settler-colonial state described by
Connell (2007, p. 72) as ‘a small European community parked on the
edge of Asia’: a nation that is small (in population) but large (in land
mass), rich, peripheral and deindustrialised, home to the peoples of the
oldest living culture in the world, exceptionally culturally diverse but affili-
ated with the Empire and the West, geographically outside of but depen-
dent on metropolitan power and international capitalism, and riven by
racial anxieties (see also Harris & Idriss, 2021). From this perspective, we
are especially interested in the meanings of belonging frames in the con-
struction of youth research and policy in settler-colonial nation-making,
the mobilisation of these approaches in the study and management of
migrant and mobile youth, youth belonging in the regional context, and
reflection on the importation, application and generation of Northern
(and especially British) theory, concepts and approaches in youth belong-
ing research and policy. Therefore, some of our discussion necessarily cen-
tres the Australian example: this is critical in terms of our own positionality
but also promotes a youth studies approach that moves beyond the field’s
tendency towards dis-located tropes and often unnamed reference points
and encourages other youth studies scholars to reflect on their intellectual
8 A. HARRIS ET AL.
foundations and consider the politics of knowledge making about youth

in their contexts.
At the same time, we engage scholarship in and beyond Australia, the
UK, and more broadly from and beyond the ‘WENA’ hegemon of Western
Europe and North America that has claimed the centre of youth studies
(Cooper et al., 2019). Our scope is not intended to be comprehensive or
representative, but rather to show how the frame of belonging has shaped
broader trends in youth research and policy around some key issues and
agendas, with different local manifestations, as both a productive and
problematic response to globally-relevant and globally-felt circumstances
in which young people live and by which they are stratified. The aim there-
fore is not so much to show how young people in different places or cir-
cumstances belong, but to investigate the increasing popularity of a
belonging approach in youth research, to bring to light the work that the
concept of belonging does to construct an agenda for youth studies and
policy, to understand the history and politics of the concept, and to criti-
cally interrogate this framework (including the work it does to both pro-
ductively and problematically construct particular kinds of youth identities
and issues in the first place).
Organisation of the Chapters

Following this first chapter that has outlined our framework for thinking
about belonging in youth studies, we move to two chapters that explore
the intellectual origins and context for the turn to belonging in youth
research and policy. Chapter 2 offers an analysis of the historical back-
ground to this use, and Chap. 3 is a close consideration of the conceptual
strands that employ belonging in very different ways. Chapter 4 then
focuses on the adoption of a belonging register in youth policy. The fol-
lowing three chapters address key domains where a belonging approach
has been taken up in a substantive sense across scholarship and policy:
transitions regimes and participation; citizenship; and place and mobility.
The book concludes with a chapter offering a discussion of the implica-
tions of a belonging frame for researching youth, bringing together ques-
tions of epistemology and methodology. All chapters conclude by
answering the question ‘what do concepts of belonging do?’ in the areas
under consideration in those chapters.
Chapter 2, called Historical Underpinnings, traces a genealogical analy-
sis of youth studies within key three timeframes: post-World War 2
anxieties about youth; the challenges of post-industrial youth in the 1960s

and 1970s; and the question of youth transitions and cultures that domi-
nated youth sociology from the 1980s. This analysis shows the centrality
of emerging anxieties about the nature of young people’s belonging to
society that are consistently invoked in periods of social change. These
concerns are reflected in youth studies through the use of frameworks that
reflect wider concerns and preoccupations with nationhood, the future,
economies and social control. This chapter explores the historical under-
pinnings of interest in the ways in which young people belong, discussing
the development of ideas about belonging from the early work on youth
cultures of the Chicago School in the United States in the 1950s to the
Birmingham School in the 1970s, the interest in youth subcultures and in
youth transitions through education and work in the 1980s and 1990s,
and the focus on place and mobility introduced by social geographers,
rural youth sociologists and migration scholars in the 2000s. Whereas
early youth studies focused on the question of social order, focusing on
how marginalised and deviant young people made their lives meaningful,
contemporary youth studies has turned this on its head, to explore the
question of how new globalising processes are transforming the experi-
ence of youth.
Following from the historical perspective, Chap. 3, titled Conceptual
Threads, focuses on contemporary interest in the concept of belonging,
analysing a range of concepts of belonging that inform youth studies in
the present. Given its breadth and widespread use, both explicitly and
implicitly in youth studies, this chapter develops our argument that it is
timely to conduct a critical and rigorous analysis of what the concept of
belonging does, because there is the real risk that belonging simply
becomes a trope. It acknowledges that the metaphor of belonging is inte-
gral to a range of conceptual approaches and is understood and used in a
plethora of ways in youth studies. It is an agile conceptual formation that
can cover everything from young people’s personal capacities to create
social bonds to the political conditions of their membership in a nation.
Belonging is also at the centre of youth relationships with key institutions
(e.g. different education systems, work, family) that shape their everyday
experiences. The chapter opens with a consideration of the influence of
Yuval-Davis’ conceptualisations of the concept of belonging, given that
her work is widely referenced and, in many ways, pivotal to thinking about
belonging as a tool for analysis. The chapter then focuses on the way in
which the concept of belonging has been employed in youth studies to
10 A. HARRIS ET AL.
understand the everyday, making visible performances of belonging, and

the power of everyday encounters and the layering of encounters, both
human and more-than-human, to create belonging. This chapter also dis-
cusses the close relationship between belonging and identity in youth
studies, drawing on studies from many parts of the world. Finally, the
chapter draws on the interest in youth studies in approaches that reject the
ontology/epistemology and the human/non-human binaries. These
approaches, we argue, have opened up the contradictory, complex inter-
relationships of belonging in new ways. We draw particularly on Indigenous
scholarship to illustrate approaches to belonging that fuse the meaning of
being, belonging and place. This chapter concludes that despite the more
nuanced and complex understandings about belonging that are afforded
from new materialist conceptions of belonging, and the insights of
Indigenous scholars, its use tends towards the normative, supporting con-
ceptions of mainstream and risk.
We next turn to reflect on the ways in which both the historical legacy
of assumptions about belonging in youth studies and contemporary uses
of the concept of belonging are taken up in policies that impact on young
people’s lives, especially those associated with education, employment and
wellbeing. Chapter 4, called Policy Frames, also sets the scene for the con-
sideration of the affordances, limitations and challenges of the concept of
belonging for youth studies. This chapter examines how policy contrib-
utes to shape the ways in which young people construct their lives. It
explores how the treatment of belonging in youth policy is in many
instances not explicit but implicitly addressed through the policy frame-
works of social inclusion, exclusion and integration. It shows how the
metaphor of belonging taken up by these policy frameworks can compart-
mentalise youth into just a single sphere of life (i.e. youth-as-student or
youth-as-worker) and can individualise structural problems and solutions.
It examines how the framework of social inclusion constructs a conditional
belonging in society, underpinned by notions of personal responsibility
and entrepreneurialism that circumscribe young people’s membership
exclusively to participation in education, training and employment. A fail-
ure to engage in learning and earning is then framed through a social
exclusion approach that serves to individualise un-belonging by position-
ing youth at the margins as deficient and morally distinct from the rest of
society. Focusing on Indigenous youth policy research, predominantly in
Australia and New Zealand, it interrogates the way belonging has been
employed through a social integration framework that continues to
normalise the idea that Indigenous youth need to be ‘fixed’. Ultimately,

while examining how belonging has been taken up by policy as a norma-
tive, categorical and individualised concept, it explores how belonging can
still offer useful ways of expanding policy approaches by connecting young
people to other relevant spheres of life beyond education and work.
In Chap. 5, titled Transitions and Participation, we turn to the ubiqui-
tous concepts of transitions and participation. This chapter draws on youth
studies of Indigenous youth, gendered transitions and global transition
regimes to analyse the work of different conceptual framings of transition
and participation for understanding belonging. It shows how these linked
concepts are mobilised to stand for very different approaches to belong-
ing, depending on whether they are underpinned by categorical, norma-
tive and universalising assumptions of youth or on relational approaches.
Categorical approaches to transition invoke the stages and milestones that
mark trajectories from childhood to adulthood, with normative approaches
to youth participation as their partner, invoking the practices that are seen
to be appropriate for young people’s ‘expression’ or ‘voice’ through these
stages. Together, this pairing of concepts covers much of the youth
research landscape. The use of relational registers of transition reveals how
structural developments, particularly focusing on the weakening nexus
between education and work, reinscribe old divisions based on gender,
location and race. The chapter draws the work of Indigenous scholars; the
two-decades Australian Life Patterns longitudinal study as well as research
from the Asia-Pacific region and from Europe to highlight the way in
which relational approaches shift the focus to the multiplicity of individu-
al’s subjective identifications through to institutional processes, focusing
on the relationships between people, people and things, and researcher
and researched.
Chapter 6, Citizenship, considers the ways in which the framework of
belonging has been drawn on in new conceptualisations of youth civic and
political identity and participation. It looks at the move from legalistic and
technical to more maximal theorisations of citizenship that focus on the
belonging-inflected notions of participation and membership. It addresses
the interest in boundary-making and political and social inclusion in the
youth citizenship agenda in an age of migration, and tensions between a
focus on the nation on the one hand, and local, global and digital spaces
of young people’s civic and political lives on the other. In doing so it
explores the way belonging has been employed to theorise youth transna-
tional solidarities, multiple domains of political and civic agency, and
12 A. HARRIS ET AL.
emergent communities of membership and responsibility in conditions of

mass migration, extensive youth mobility and the ongoing politics of colo-
nisation (for example, belonging conceptualised variously through notions
of urban, cultural, digital, and/or Indigenous sovereign citizenships). It
evaluates the affordances that a belonging approach brings to youth citi-
zenship studies in terms of regard for relational and multi-scalar dimen-
sions of participation and recognition against ongoing attention to legal
and formal structures of inclusion and rights.
Chapter 7, called Mobilities, explores the complex and often contradic-
tory ways in which the concept of belonging is utilised to understand
young people’s mobilities and place making. It interrogates how a belong-
ing frame has been applied to youth mobilities in contemporary youth
studies through an analysis of the multiplicity of mobilities at different
spatial scales that are produced as a result of social and economic transfor-
mations and political conflicts and cultural developments. Against this
background, it questions individualised approaches to transnational transi-
tions that neglect the relevance of a relational approach, and problematises
the notion of spatial reflexivity with its tendency to reify mobility at the
expense of place making. The concept of belonging is employed to inter-
rogate the imperative of rural youth migration and how young people
from autochthonous, migrant and refugee backgrounds navigate different
cultures, including in digital spaces, while they forge new communities.
Flows and fixities in mega-metropolitan places in the Global South are
evaluated through a belonging frame to unearth the persistent production
of inequalities that impact on young people’s everyday (im)mobilities. It
interrogates the risk in youth studies to essentialise and individualise
belonging as a ‘good’ thing, and considers the implications when we nor-
malise it, moralise it, construct it as a normative expectation – just as with
the transitions approach – where those who do not achieve it are misrec-
ognised, deemed to be at-risk, stuck and unbelonging.
Chapter 8, Researching Belonging in Youth Studies discusses how a criti-
cal approach to youth belonging produces a number of conceptual and
methodological challenges and affordances for youth research. It explores
some of the key methodological, epistemological and conceptual aspects
of belonging research, evaluating claims that belonging as an approach can
helpfully attune research to relationality, can address tendencies to repro-
duce limiting issues, tropes and categories for youth research, and can
closely explore the structure/agency nexus in young people’s lives. It
weighs these perspectives against counter claims that it can individualise,
regulate, depoliticise and generalise youth experience, and lead to research

tools and approaches narrowly focused on youth agency, voice and iden-
tity in ways that are disconnected from social and political systems. It also
considers specific methods in belonging research to investigate the ways
the turn to belonging has animated debates about empirical techniques
and concludes with a reflection on the value of the question of belonging
as a driver for youth research.
Belonging has multiple registers and can elude simple definition. This
is common of complex, slippery, abstract concepts such as justice, or free-
dom. This is because their meanings are tightly associated with the socio-
historical context in which they are used and the subjective ideas, beliefs,
practice and uptake of individuals and social group within these contexts.
Particularly pertinent for our discussion is exploring how definitions of
abstract concepts can generate a norm (out of the idea of belonging for
youth), which eventually constructs a norm for how (and where) youth
should belong. Thus while we have opened this chapter with a consider-
ation of meanings of belonging as the concept is commonly used, this
book is not designed to tell readers the best way to define belonging, but
instead offers a series of explorations and reflections for youth researchers
to draw on to clarify and critically consider their position. Rather than
proposing a better or most accurate definition of belonging, we are more
concerned here with interrupting the persistent reification of this concept
and are interested instead in exploring how and why it has become popu-
lar, how it has been constituted and taken up in youth studies research and
youth policy, and with what effects. Our aim is not so much to promote a
single definition of belonging, but to investigate what different defini-
tions, ideas and uses of belonging allow youth research and policy to do,
in the changing socio-historical context of youth research.
Our overall aim in this book is to consider the historical and conceptual
foundations and applications of belonging in youth studies and trace its
development and use as an agenda, metaphor, conceptual framework,
research approach and policy orientation in transition, participation, citi-
zenship, place, mobility and related domains. Belonging has been a way to
regulate, include, exclude, stratify and manage youth, and yet also offers
considerable affordances; not least in overcoming categorical, segmented
and linear approaches in youth policy and research by opening onto rela-
tional thinking. At a time when belonging has become a core concern in
(and beyond) youth research and policy, we argue for its considered inter-
rogation. Rather than advocating for its take up or rejection, we explore
14 A. HARRIS ET AL.
what the concept of belonging does in and for youth studies. We suggest
that such an analysis of belonging must precede any work to mobilise a
critical framework of relationality, which may be its greatest potentiality.
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CHAPTER 2
Historical Underpinnings
Introduction
Although the term belonging has only recently come into regular usage in
youth studies, the question of young people’s relationships to and place in
cultural, political, economic, social and physical space is a central theme in
youth studies. Yet, despite being so central to the analysis of young peo-
ple’s lives, the concept of belonging has tended to be poorly defined.
Exploring the work that concepts of belonging do in youth studies invites
us to question how societies and institutions choose to manage their
changing relationships with youth. Its use in contemporary youth studies
compels us to provide greater conceptual clarity about how the concept of
belonging is deployed, how it shapes wider social recognition of young
people, and to understand in more depth what these conceptual approaches
mean and do for analysis. Tracing the genealogy of belonging in youth
studies sets the backdrop for this book.
Our interest in exploring the genealogy of youth studies through the
lens of belonging reflects a broader contemporary movement in the field
to seek ways to go beyond the divisions and binaries that have tended to
dominate youth research over the last 20 years or so (France, 2016), in
order to realise the potential for youth research to be a ‘powerful vehicle
from which we can explore big issues with implications for social science
as a whole’ (Furlong 2015, p. 18). The metaphor of belonging is of
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Harris et al., Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies, Studies
in Childhood and Youth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75119-7_2
18 A. HARRIS ET AL.
interest because it necessarily attends to the relational dynamics and pro-

cesses through which individuals and society are interpellated, across time,
space and historically. Its use is widespread because the metaphor of
belonging is not owned by any particular strand of youth studies. The
metaphor of belonging (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014) has synergies with diverse
conceptual frameworks from Marx, Weber and Durkheim, to Mannheim,
Beck, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Guattari and others, its relational register
spanning structuralist thinking, post-structuralism, political economy, set-
tler colonial theory and the new materialism. Belonging refers to young
people’s identifications and expressions (culturally and politically); their
structural location in families, in educational institutions and political life
and as citizens; their generational and geographic location and identifica-
tion and their positioning within local, national and global economic and
policy processes.
Young people (as do people in all age groups) constantly go through
changes associated with age (social, cultural, biosocial, physiological and
psychosocial) at the same time at which the social conditions through
which the meaning and experience of age are changing around them. This
is tricky for many reasons, including the fact that age-related change is
particularly focused on the category ‘youth’ as a receptacle for anxieties
about the future of society (and less so on the ‘adulthood’ into which they
are perceived to transition). This future is always being imagined in a pres-
ent that is itself changing. Thus, how young people belong in the present
and the future, and what current developments mean for the future are
sources of anxiety and concern that are reflected in the range of disciplines
that focus on youth. This chapter shows that questions about where and
how young people belong are inevitably shaped by both the contempora-
neous situation of young people and the conceptual resources that are
deployed at the time of writing, a process that also shapes how the history
of youth studies is told in the present (to paraphrase Furlong et al., 2011,
p. 359).
An historical reflection on youth studies reveals that interest in belong-
ing has tended to be heightened at times of perceived dramatic social
change, when societal anxieties surface about the future, socially, econom-
ically and culturally. An early example is Chesser’s Youth: A book for two
generations (1928), which speaks to social anxieties about the health, well-
being and prosperity of Britain in the aftermath of the First World War.
Chesser, a medical practitioner, situates her treatise on youth against the
backdrop of Britain’s recovery from the chaos of the war, a recovery that
2 HISTORICAL UNDERPINNINGS 19
she argued required new understandings of what it means to be a young

person in very new times. In the aftermath of the Second World War a slew
of books on the place of young people in society also appeared, including
Reed (1950), in the UK; Connell et al. (1957), in Australia; and Cohen
and Short (1958) and Friedenberg (1959), in the US. These books were
also responding to concerns about the emergence of a ‘new youth’, fol-
lowing the destruction and loss of the Second World War, and the imple-
mentation of mass secondary schooling. Mannheim’s (1952) work on
social generations was also developed in the aftermath of the Second
World War, in Germany.
Using the relatively arbitrary but distinctive time frames of post-World
War 2 anxieties about youth, the challenges of post-industrial youth and
the question of youth transitions and cultures that dominated youth soci-
ology from the 1980s on, this chapter expands on the above examples to
trace a genealogy of youth studies through the lens of belonging. We show
that the question of how young people belong is consistently invoked in
periods of social change, using a range of conceptual frameworks, reflect-
ing wider concerns and preoccupations with nationhood, the future,
economies and social control. Our analysis highlights the centrality of the
end of the industrial revolution, with the demise of industrial and manu-
facturing jobs, and the rise of neoliberalism on a global scale as the key
drivers of both cultural and transitions-focused research on youth. The
collapse of the youth labour market and the gradual increase in precarious
work positioned young people as bearers of the burden of economic and
political decisions that have increased inequality and precarity for all ages.
These conditions have underpinned analyses of different dimensions of
belonging through explorations of social generations, cultural expressions
of identification and opposition, institutional and policy regimes, and
young people’s management and navigation of these regimes.
From the 1980s to the present social changes include youth mobilities
in the form of migration and refugees, international education markets,
communication technologies, the emergence of universal post-secondary
education and its failure to deliver the promise of good work, and the
spread of precarious work and new forms and ways of working. These
developments have provoked a new wave of reflection in youth studies
about how to account for the situation of young people in ways that
acknowledge the significance of political, cultural and economic shifts
since the 1980s (Bessant et al., 2017; France, 2016; Furlong et al., 2017;
Woodman & Wyn, 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has unsettled many
20 A. HARRIS ET AL.
of these dynamics, creating new anxieties about and risks for young people
in ways that are yet to unfold. This chapter draws on these and many other
works to add to the endeavour of understanding of young people’s rela-
tionship with social change and social processes, through the lens of
belonging across time.
Many of the ‘threads’ identified in this chapter are developed further in
the chapters that follow, shifting from the more historical focus of this
chapter to an analysis of contemporary approaches and uses of the concept
of belonging. This includes an analysis of how belonging is explored and
debated through the frameworks of transitions and participation, policy,
citizenship, place-making and mobilities.
A Genealogy of Belonging in Youth Sociology

Although a distinctive youth sociology in Western countries only emerged
in the early 1950s, its legacy can be found much earlier, in the anxieties
about the future at times of widespread social change and dislocation. For
example, in the aftermath of the First World War, the massive loss of life,
destruction of infrastructure and heightened economic uncertainty
inflicted by the war was reflected in concerns about how the young were
now connected to their families, communities, institutions such as religion
and education, and the nation, and about what new realities for young
people might also mean for the future of society.
This is illustrated by Chesser’s book Youth: A book for two generations
(1928). It was written a decade after World War 1, which Chesser notes,
left an aftermath of chaos and:
a slackening of moral control and of psychological adjustment. The last war,

the ‘Greatest’ the world has ever known in area, numbers, brutalities, and
consequences, is responsible for many of the mistakes which everybody
must admit are being made by young people in the new quarter of the twen-
tieth century. (Chesser, 1928, p. 1)
She speaks to these and other emerging anxieties about social change
and generational conflict, to parents who have survived the war and strug-
gle to come to terms with a situation where ‘old beliefs, conventional
manners and morals, are being weighed in the balance and viewed from
new angles’ and to a new generation who ‘are unable perhaps to accept
the beliefs and ideals of the generations before them, but they are building
up for themselves a new sense of values, a new perspective’ (Chesser, 1928,

pp. 2–3). Interestingly, Chesser foreshadows the heightened concerns
about the impact of education on young people that accompanied the
emergence of mass secondary education in the 1950s. While she expresses
positive views on the value of education for both boys and girls, she says
that children ‘replace many of their home standards and values by those of
the school’; that ‘most children transfer some of the love formerly focussed
on the parents to teachers’; and warns that ‘we give school authorities too
much power. There is too little co-operation between parent and school-
master in Great Britain’ (Chesser, 1928, p. 24).
Written in the style of a handbook of advice for parents, Chesser, who
was a medical practitioner, was an advocate for the value of knowledge
about psychological as well as physiological processes. While she makes no
mention of the seminal work of G. Stanley Hall, it is likely that she was
aware of his work. Hall’s two-volume work Adolescence, its Psychology and
its relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and
Education (1904) laid out a theory of child development that has been
hugely influential in the field of youth studies. Latching on to the dynamic
nature of youth, Hall proposed that the period of youth was a mirror of
human evolution. Thus, the period of youth was seen by Hall as a distinc-
tive (and universal) phase in the evolution of the human organism, natu-
rally involving a period of conflict (or ‘storm and stress’) with parents and
authorities triggered during adolescence by the struggle between the
needs of the human organism and the needs of society. Hall’s notion of
adolescence as a period of storm and stress naturalises anxieties about
young people as becoming adults and becoming citizens, making social
change and social context irrelevant. Despite this, Hall’s work was influen-
tial in the emerging discipline of adolescent psychology and had a lasting
legacy in the field of youth studies (an example is the concept of a ‘emerg-
ing adulthood’, popularised by Arnett (2000)).
At the same time, in the US the work of a group of sociologists (which
came to be known as the Chicago School) was also exploring how young
people belonged in the emerging urban metropolis of Chicago. This
school produced a wide range of work, epitomised in the 1920s by
Thrasher (1927), whose work was widely influential. Whereas Chesser’s
work was inspired by Britain’s recovery from the First World War,
Thrasher’s work was against the backdrop of unprecedented urban devel-
opment in the US, of potential and possibility, a landscape that Dimitriadis
describes as the frontier of ‘an unprecedented economic and cultural
22 A. HARRIS ET AL.
revolution’ (2006, p. 338). Thrasher’s study of 1313 gangs in Chicago

was a pioneering sociological study of gangs, that sought to understand
the emergence of urban gangs in the light of the context in which boys
and young men were living, the nature of their urban landscapes and their
relationships with family, church and school. Drawing on extensive ethno-
graphic studies, Thrasher also focused on the imaginative investments by
the young men in activities that enabled them to actively construct their
lives. Thrasher’s studies of Chicago gangs in the 1920s explores the work
that young men do to belong, in a context of rapid social change, in which
the children of immigrant families often struggled to fit in with new divi-
sions of labour and new associations. As Dimitriadis (2006) points out,
the importance of Thrasher’s (1927) book is in the highlighting of:
the complex social and community surround of the young boys he studied.
He maintained that these young men were enmeshed in what he called the
“situation complex,” a web of influences that could not be understood in
isolation from, but only in relation to, each other. One could not under-
stand schools, for example, without understanding how they competed with
the media, families, church, and gangs for boys’ affections and imaginative
energies. Thrasher’s study was highly contextual and relational, foreground-
ing the agency of young people in constructing their selves and social rela-
tions. (Dimitriadis, 2006, p. 338)
Both of these studies share an underlying concern with youth, with

belonging and the building of nationhood during a period of significant
social change, and each, in different ways, addresses the question of what
happens when new institutions (such as education) step in, or when insti-
tutions in one sense ‘fail’ young people. In the following sections we trace
how these concerns resurface time and again.
Post-WW2 Anxieties About Youth

In the 1940s and 1950s a range of studies of youth published in the UK,
US, Canada and Australia sought to document and analyse the changing
relationship between young people and society, against the devastation
wrought by World War 2 and the emergence of new opportunities and
changes in the post-war era. These changes include universal secondary
education, a period of post-war prosperity for some as industry and manu-
facturing began to recover, increased migration, and the emergence of
new forms of older social divisions based on class, gender and race. For
example, in 1941–1942 Hollingshead (1949) undertook a community
study of the relationship between the social organisation of a small town
(Elmtown) in the Middle Western Corn Belt of the USA, and the lives of
735 school-aged young people. Framed as a sociological study of adoles-
cence, the book is an account of how ‘the social system’ of a town ‘orga-
nizes and controls the social behaviour of high-school-aged adolescents’
(Hollingshead, 1949, p. 10). This approach was explicitly in juxtaposition
to the domination of youth research by other disciplines, comment-
ing that:
Physiologists had done extensive work on physical maturation, psychologists

had developed a psychology of adolescence, educators had many studies of
the growing child, particularly from the view-point of the school; and soci-
ologists, with few exceptions, had ignored the subject. (Hollingshead,
1949, p. 4)
The question of belonging is central to Hollingshead’s book, drawing

the conclusion that youth are denied recognition. He argues that in
Elmtown in the early 1940s, adolescence is a period of life when a person
is not regarded as a child, but in which society ‘does not accord to him full
adult status, roles and functions’ (1948, p. 6). He describes how the class
structure and neighbourhood subcultures of Elmtown prescribe and con-
trol the possibilities and outcomes for young people, reflecting class
inequalities. Hollingshead draws on the study to reflect on the classed
nature of American society, and the emerging inequalities between families
that is being reproduced in Elmtown, concluding that this dynamic is ‘the
challenge American society faces in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury’ (Hollingshead, 1949, p. 453).
Hollingshead’s sentiment about the way in which the period of youth
was becoming emptied out of meaning and taken up with institutional
processes was echoed by US sociologist Friedenberg (1959), who argued
that adolescence is primarily a social process and that ‘traditional adoles-
cence’ was vanishing:
swallowed up at the childhood end by the increasing precocity of the young,

their turning of high school into an ersatz college or even suburb, their early
if somewhat flat maturity as lovers, consumers, committee-men and at the
adult end by the prolongation of the period of training for the increasing
numbers in graduate school. (1959, p. 9)
24 A. HARRIS ET AL.
In the UK, these changes were also fuelled by concern about the emer-
gence of unwelcome social changes in post-war Britain. For example, Reed
(1950) studied the attitudes and leisure habits of 80,000 Birmingham
youth aged 14–20. This study explicitly references the wartime dislocation
of family life and the emergence of universal state education, both of
which were seen to be a threat to traditional ideas about how young peo-
ple relate to society. Reed, who was a Methodist minister, was especially
concerned about the potential for state-based education to erode religious
beliefs and responsibilities amongst the new generation, foreshadowing
the sense of moral panic that was later identified (Cohen, 1955). Reed
argued that whilst it was:
quite erroneous to suppose that there are large numbers of unattached ado-
lescents roaming the streets or going to the cinema every evening or spend-
ing their leisure in vicious or antisocial ways … what one does feel about the
lives of many of these young people, … is that they are very barren and
restricted. (Reed, 1950, p. 131)
The imperative to understand the situation of young people in a time

of change was also central to Connell, Francis and Skilbeck’s Growing up
in an Australian City (1957). This study of young people in Sydney,
Australia in 1951 drew on the work of Hollingshead (1949) and Reed
(1950). The authors were interested in ‘the relationship between Australian
culture and the educational programme and theories to be found in this
country’ (1957, p. xiii); ‘the ways in which an Australian grows up to be
an Australian’ (1957, p. xiii), and the implications of these processes for
education, as well as for nationhood, against a backdrop of significant
social change. In the first place, the authors were acutely aware of
Australia’s colonial status, which involved taking a ‘path towards new tra-
ditions’ and a ‘repudiation of home influence’ (1957, p. xiii). This was
seen by the authors as a pivotal moment in history, because of the risk of
over-dependence on the home country (Britain) which might bring ‘stran-
gulation’ to initiative in the colony. The study of Sydney’s youth was initi-
ated in this context as a conscious effort to evaluate the development of
Australian urban culture as a guide to future action and to avoid the risk
of ‘either spiritual starvation or spiritual misdirection’ for Sydney’s
‘100,000 adolescents (who) have no secure guide as they strive to select
appropriate paths to adulthood’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 8).
In a tone that foreshadows the interest in insecurity and risk that has
dominated youth studies since the early 1980s the authors refer to the
1950s as ‘a quicksilver age’ in which ‘it is not possible to point, with secu-
rity, the direction in which the changes are trending except to say that they
are productive of further change’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 207). Focusing
on implications for education, Connell et al. argued that one of the most
‘urgent’ developmental tasks of young people was ‘learning to deal with
insecurity’ (1957, p. 207). This book makes a significant shift from earlier
studies of young people that saw school as a threat to stability, concluding
instead that schools have the answer. Connell et al. saw schools as provid-
ing youth with the skills of ‘cultural evaluation’ and judgement, which
would ‘enable him (sic) to add his mite to the clarification of an urban
culture’ that is ‘far from clear’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 210). Growing up
in an Australian City (Connell et al., 1957) carves out a distinctive
approach to the question of how young people belong. This study sees
youth as the bearers of a post-colonial future, and young people as making
active choices that will shape that future. Young people, in this study,
belong in the very centre of the colony’s development, guided by a critical
educational program that addresses their developmental needs and those
of the emerging nation.
Yet, there is also a profound statement of ‘unbelonging’ in this
approach, which invites further attention. Young Indigenous Australians
are, quite simply, an absence. Their absence is consistent with the prevail-
ing ideas of the time, which did not recognise Indigenous people as first
nations or citizens, nor account for the relationship between Indigenous
Australians and ‘country’ – the land, the waters and all living creatures that
centrally constitute the spirituality and sovereignty of Indigenous
Australians. Writing about Indigenous Australians from the 1920s onwards
was informed by the idea that Indigenous Australians were inherently
more primitive than White Australians (Elkin, 1929). The aim of academic
writing, drawing on the emerging disciplines of social anthropology and
the eugenics movement, was almost unanimous in positioning the future
for Australia’s Indigenous people as one of assimilation or annihilation. It
is hard to find any writing specifically about young Indigenous people in
the period from the 1920s to the 1960s – there is no recognition of their
past, and rather than being positioned as the hope for the future, they are
positioned as problematic to the future (a position that continues to frame
the way that Indigenous youth are seen, as we discuss in Chap. 4 (Policy
Frames). Australian cultural anthropologist Elkin (1937) argued that ‘if
Aborigines were to attain a fuller participation in the Australian nation’,
26 A. HARRIS ET AL.
they had to be assisted over ‘the difficult times of transition from the old
stone-age to that higher stage of culture to which we desire to lead them’
(Elkin, 1937, as cited in McGregor, 1993, p. 96). Thus, in stark contrast
to the writings of authors like Reed and Chesters, who saw the increasing
institutionalisation of young people in education as constituting a possible
threat to young people’s family and spiritual connections, the removal of
Australia’s Indigenous young people from families and their compulsory
participation in educational institutions from 1910 onwards, became
enshrined in policies that explicitly sought to break young Indigenous
people’s connection to their families, to country and to their spiritual
beliefs (Brown, 2018). As Moreton-Robinson (2003, p. 30) explains, the
situation of young Indigenous peoples:
must be theorised in a way which allows for incommensurable difference

between the situatedness of the Indigenous people in a colonizing settler
society such as Australia and those who have come here. Indigenous and
non-Indigenous peoples are situated in relation to (post)colonization in
radically different ways – ways that cannot be made into sameness.
Australian Indigenous people’s belonging rights inhere in custodian-

ship and prior occupation of land that was actively ‘unrecognised’ by the
assertion of terra nullius by the colonisers. This unrecognition is signalled
today in the description of the colonisers as invaders. As we have shown,
‘unrecognition’ was actively produced in the mid-twentieth century
through differentiated imaginaries of youth belonging to social institu-
tions, the nation and the future. Only non-Indigenous or ‘assimilated’
young people were constructed as having a role in Australia’s efforts to
make a cultural break with Britain and forge a new ‘post-colonial’ national
identity, with no reckoning with the dispossession wrought by colonisa-
tion. As we discuss in the following chapter where we explore concepts of
belonging in more detail, this uniquely Australian example serves to high-
light assumptions about which young people ‘belong’ and how they are
embedded within youth studies.
In other work at that time however, the risk posed by the age-based
identifications and affiliations of belonging that were fostered by universal
secondary education emerged as a central issue of concern. In the US for
example, drawing on the tradition of the Chicago school, Cohen’s (1955)
study of urban gangs, drawing on a functionalist conception of society,
focused on the threat to social stability by the failure of some groups of
working-class young men to absorb the ideals and practices of the new
American middle class. Cohen argued that these deviant young men were
a product of the disruption of traditional socialisation processes caused by
a range of changes, including the reduction of unskilled jobs and the rise
of mass secondary education (Cohen & Short, 1958). Like Connell et al.
(1957), Cohen’s work also focused on urban areas as the fulcrum of social
change, arguing that delinquent subcultures occurred in the cities where
an increasingly dispossessed working-class struggled to belong. These
ideas were developed further by Coleman (1961) who focused specifically
on the ways in which the new mass education sector of secondary school
in the US in the 1950s brought with it an era of age-based affiliations,
reflected in ‘teen’ fashion and new leisure styles, threatening traditional
ways. Coleman’s study highlighted the potential threat of this new situa-
tion where, he argued, young people were cut off from adult society
through their mass participation in education. Coleman’s focus on the
risks of education was developed further by Musgrove (1964) who
explored the situation for Australian youth, arguing that mass secondary
education was creating a ‘new class’ based on age.
The sense of unease about youth in this period was to some extent fos-
tered by the field of developmental psychology. This approach assumed
that age meant everything. Drawing on the ideas of G. Stanley Hall
(1904), the concept of stages of youthful development was popularised by
Piaget (1954) and then Erikson (1965). These authors proposed that the
biological processes of development dominated the period of youth
(termed ‘adolescence’ to give prominence to the biological process of
maturation) focussing on the risks of failure to complete all the develop-
mental tasks of successful maturation into adults. This developmental
focus reinforced the idea that youth was an inherently risky stage of life. It
proposed the existence of distinct and universal developmental stages that,
if not achieved, would compromise healthy, mature adulthood, and it saw
youth as being more pre-disposed than any other age group to taking
risks. Risk-taking, from this perspective, is essential because of an inherent
need to ‘try on’ different identities before ‘settling down’ but at the same
time, this period of experimentation has the potential to go wrong and
jeopardise healthy development. The focus on universal normative pro-
cesses of development and the non-normative (or deviant) behaviour that
fails to follow normative patterns, supported a view of youth as inherently
risky and in need of professional intervention. The traces of these ideas are
clear in much youth research of the 1950s and 1960s. For example,
28 A. HARRIS ET AL.
Connell et al. (1957) identified four developmental ‘tasks’ that educa-

tional programs should support young Australians to complete and
Cohen’s (1955) studies of deviant youth draw explicitly on the notion of
normative behaviours and patterns of life. The legacy of these approaches
to youth, impacting on the field of youth studies from the 1950s onwards
is analysed by Lesko (2001), who demonstrates how the idea of ‘natural
youth’ has shaped research and policy. We discuss how the legacy of these
normative and universal conceptions of youth can still be found in
approaches to youth transitions and participation, which we discuss in
Chap. 5 (Transitions and Participation).
Juxtaposed against this, a relational approach to understanding the dis-
tinctive intersections between young people’s biography and social condi-
tions was proposed by German sociologist Mannheim (1952). Using the
concept of social generation, his work brought a new dimension to the ques-
tion of belonging. He sought to understand the impact of economic and
social conditions on the sense of ontological security and outlook of young
people, giving prominence to young people’s subjective experiences as well
as the material conditions that shape their lives. Mannheim’s approach was
also focused on the impact of significant social conditions on young people,
arguing that widespread conditions and institutional events (such as post-war
recovery) which young people share would produce distinctive and enduring
attitudes and dispositions in young people, ones that would characterise their
generation. Mannheim saw social generation as being closely related to the
concept of cohort, distinguishing this from generation as an expression of
kinship. He argued that biological age is meaningless in itself; its meaning is
given by the mediation of age with social factors. His work on the concept of
social generation pioneered a new approach to the question of belonging,
focusing on how members of a social generation belong to their times, devel-
oping distinctive subjectivities (attitudes, dispositions, aspirations) through
their interpellation in the distinctive conditions of their situation.
These studies in the mid twentieth century all focus on the question of
where and how youth belong in times of social change, taking up different
approaches to this dynamic. Connell et al. (1957) for example, focus on
the question of emerging nationhood, crystallised by Sydney youth, whom
they saw as problem-solvers who, armed with critical skills and judgement,
would assert their adulthood in distinctive ways, and in so doing would
forge the next stage of Sydney’s development. This work saw white youth
as powerful change-makers – whose capacities to bring about change
would optimally be recognised in school curricula.
Hollingshead’s (1949) study of Elmtown is a reflection on American

nationhood, highlighting the impact of emerging class inequalities in the
US on young people’s life chances. Hollingshead is less optimistic about
young people as change-makers however, concluding instead that there was
broad social and institutional capitulation to the idea that arrangements
that benefit the upper classes also benefit the common person. He sees the
future of youth (and the nation) as needing to be rescued by challenging
‘those elements of the culture which foster and perpetuate the class system
over and against the ideals of official America, embodied in the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution’ (Hollingshead, 1949, p. 453).
While class is also a central issue in Cohen and Short’s (1958) studies of
American youth, they focused in on the antisocial and delinquent affilia-
tions of those who did not ‘belong’. Mannheim’s approach to belonging
shifts the focus from seeing ‘new’ youth as a threat to identifying how social
change inevitably creates new social subjectivities and social patterns, creat-
ing an understanding of how each generation ‘belongs’ to their time, and
in so doing, creates new social realities that reach into the future.
Post-Industrial Youth
The 1960s and 1970s are often regarded as the period which defined the
parallel tracks of youth studies: one focusing on youthful cultural identifi-
cations and social change (youth sub-cultures) and the other focusing on
transformations from education to work (transitions) (Woodman &
Bennett, 2015). However, a closer look at the work being undertaken in
the 1960s and 1970s shows that many youth researchers attempted to
hold the strands of transition and culture together in order to understand
how young people belonged in a context of societal transformations that
impacted most directly on young people.
The signs of a collapse in the youth labour market were emerging by
the early 1970s, resulting from the shift from industry-based economies to
post-industrial economies (often touted as ‘knowledge’ or ‘service’ econo-
mies). These changes had a significant impact on the life choices of young
men from working class families in particular, who would traditionally
have sought full-time work after completing a minimum of secondary
education, but whose options were becoming foreclosed. The 1960s and
1970s were also a period of change for women, whose participation in the
labour market increased significantly during this time. In the US for exam-
ple, the labour market participation for married women increased from
25% to 46% between 1950 and 1970, and this figure is repeated in most
30 A. HARRIS ET AL.
Western countries (Goldin, 2005). These trends began to increase pres-

sure on young people to stay at school beyond the minimum leaving age,
creating new challenges for both young people and educators. Youth
researchers were witnessing three related phenomena: increases in educa-
tional participation; the replacement of industrial and manufacturing jobs
with service sector jobs and the increase in part-time work for women; and
the expansion of leisure and cultural pursuits dedicated to young people.
In Australia, Connell et al. (1975) set out to understand the new ways
in which young people were situated in this changing social and economic
landscape, analysing in detail young people’s friendships, their engage-
ment in education, and their leisure interests. This study drew an equivo-
cal conclusion about how young people belonged. This in-depth study of
City Youth (based in Sydney), explores the creation of a ‘new’ youth
brought into being by the segregation of young people in educational
institutions in which young people had very little say, the curriculum of
which all but the most academic found to be lacking in relevance. They
argued that the situation of young people in Sydney was no different from
those in many countries in which ‘the emergent teenage subdivision,
almost a new leisure class of temporarily non-productive activity and con-
spicuous consumption, follows upon the level of affluence and the sus-
tained demand for highly specialized, diverse human skills typical of
industrializing societies’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 3). Foreshadowing the
critique of the ‘promise’ of educational participation, expressed by many
youth researchers in more recent times (Bessant et al., 2017; France,
2016; Woodman & Wyn, 2015), these authors argue that:
Compulsory school attendance, in effect, has become less an issue in the face
of the substantial incentive, ‘the promise’, for those continuing their educa-
tion. School ‘stayers’ who are ready to tolerate the demands of continued and
often competitive schooling, who can accept economic dependency, social
subordination and sexual sublimation are persuaded it will more than ‘pay
off’ in the future to do so. Postponed satisfactions and suspended rights and
status are temporary losses more than compensated for by personal success,
social standing, income, power and, some would venture, happiness prized in
the dominant success-oriented type of culture. (Connell et al., 1975, pp. 3–4)
The picture painted by this study is of young people out of place –

forced to belong in formal educational institutions that by and large fail to
recognise their capabilities and levels of maturity. Connell et al. (1975)
argue that educational institutions, supported by theories of adolescent
development, tend to withhold recognition of the social maturity of young

people. They see young people as a group as being bestowed a similar
status to migrants (although acknowledging they were sometimes mem-
bers of both groups) – ‘belonging to minority groups…both seeking
membership of the same club, and although they have the necessary quali-
fications, they are often inclined to run into difficulties over the initiation
rites’ (1975, p. 240).
As in the earlier work by Connell et al. (1957), the 1975 study concludes
with suggestions for relevant educational provision, responding to the
diversity that exists amongst the young population and the unmet ask of
tapping ‘the full richness of expressive work of which the teenagers are capa-
ble and the range of serious and worthwhile interests that would provide
many more pupils with personal satisfaction and fulfillment’ (Connell et al.,
1975, p. 301). They actively resist the tendency to exaggerate the nature of
‘teenage culture’ saying that despite the appearance of new leisure interests
and fashions ‘their identification with a teenage society is actually shallow
and transient. Individually they remain in reasonable control of their own
destinies and they are quite independently capable of shaping their own lives
irrespective of peer group associations’ (Connell et al., 1975, p. 14).
The influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at
the University of Birmingham in the UK also sought to understand the
complex new dynamics of education, labour markets and youth cultural
expressions that were reshaping how young people belonged. Much of the
focus of CCCS research was on the social dynamics that drove the fate of
working-class young men in a mass education system that was premised on
the idea of equal outcomes, but that favoured middle and upper-class stu-
dents. While their analyses highlighted the emergence of peer-based cul-
tures of resistance (to middle-class educational ideas) in schools, cultures
that reinforced existing power relations and inequalities (Hall & Jefferson,
1976; Willis, 1977), they explicitly moved away from a focus on young
people as ‘deviants’ towards understanding young people’s lives in societ-
ies characterised by deepening class inequalities. These researchers
explored how working-class young men sought to belong by appropriat-
ing cultural resources to resist institutional attempts to make them con-
form, and to celebrate their difference (Willis, 1977). In doing so, they
were exploring how some groups of young people were creating subcul-
tural communities as a form of protest against (or resistance to) capitalism,
urban development and slum clearance, school, the police and the court
system, forming fairly stable groups (such as the Teddy Boys, mods and
skinheads), which ‘solved the problem of belonging and identity’ that
32 A. HARRIS ET AL.
‘manifested a type of symbolic challenge to the class system’ (Woodman &

Bennett, 2015, p. 4).
Influenced by the CCCS tradition, Hebdige (1979) explored young
people’s cultural expressions through music, dance and drug use, posi-
tioning young people as consumers and producers and as the instigators of
new cultures. Hebdige (1979) argued that through cultural expression
and consumption, young people gained a sense of belonging against the
backdrop of the reduced relevance of traditional affiliations (especially
class-based ones), and educational systems that they found lacking in rel-
evance. His analyses of the new youth cultural influences of the 1970s,
such as punk music and skinhead culture as forms of symbolic resistance to
mainstream cultures represented a shift to appreciating the importance of
young people’s creative and cultural expression, and the ways in which
everyday cultural practices enable young people to feel they belong. This
work sought to understand young people’s subjective experiences and the
ways in which they actively negotiate and contribute to the complex social
transformations around them, including their relationship to formal edu-
cation and the labour market.
Over time the interest in youth subcultures became more focused on
the visible displays of subcultural affiliation. As Woodman and Bennett
(2015) argue, drawing on the more abstract forms of textual and semiotic
analysis, the CCCS’s analyses were open to criticism of being blind to
wider social divisions (such as gender) and to the multiple and often tran-
sient engagements with ‘tribes’ and ‘scenes’. McRobbie and Garber
(1977) showed that the focus on publicly visible youth subcultures ren-
dered young women’s subcultural experiences invisible (McRobbie &
Garber, 1977)). Their work inspired research into young women’s every-
day subcultural practices, shifting the focus from public, street cultures
that tended to be dominated by young men to ‘bedroom cultures’ and
private spaces within which young women’s gendered identities are nego-
tiated and performed. The role of subcultures in racialisation as well as
their productive meanings for non-white youth was also more deeply
investigated (Amos & Parmar, 1981; Gilroy, 1987; Jones, 1988).
Yet, in some respects, as Woodman and Bennett (2015) argue, the
response to criticism of a failure to respect young people’s voices and the
‘messiness’ of their lives, which inspired a more ethnographic approach to
youth subcultures, also contributed to widening the split between the
transitions and youth cultures strands of youth sociology. As we discuss
below, the worsening youth labour market also heightened anxieties about
how youth was being shaped by the changing relationship between educa-
tion and work, contributing to a renewed focus on this dynamic to the
exclusion of others.
Youth Transitions, Cultures and More

In the 1980s youth sociology was seen to diverge, with one strand focus-
ing on transitions through education and into work (and young adult-
hood) and another on cultural expression. The divergence was in part a
response to social and economic changes that wrought greater diversity
and precarity, reigniting concerns about how young people belong in the
present and the future. As Furlong (2015) explains, young people were at
the forefront of processes of deindustrialisation, of the expansion of edu-
cational participation into the post-compulsory years and a loosening of
traditional class relations. The effects of this, often summed up as ‘indi-
vidualization’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), were that the onus for
belonging was seen as the responsibility of young people themselves,
negotiating identities and navigating complex structural and institutional
processes over which they had no control, to achieve their goals. This
meant reflexively managing their biographical projects, negotiating the
changing statuses of youth and adulthood in a context not of their mak-
ing. Research on youth transitions and cultures has traditionally focused
on how different groups of young people in diverse settings negotiate and
respond to these circumstances. However, youth researchers have also
turned to the side of the equation that is referenced by the term ‘not of
their own making’, drawing on a tradition of political economy, to explore
governmentality, structural, political and cultural dimensions of young
people’s lives (Kelly, 2018).
There is a broad consensus that research on youth transitions was
strongly influenced by the crisis of crumbling youth labour markets in
Western countries, against a backdrop of government policies that would
promote universal participation in and completion of secondary education
and increase participation in post-compulsory education (Furlong &
Cartmel, 2007). Government policies assumed that there was close rela-
tionship between educational credentials and employment, and this posi-
tion was highly influential. As we discuss in Chap. 4 (Policy Frames), this
approach positioned young people as human capital and education as a
ramp for distributing employment, creating strong policy measures to
coerce them into belonging in school and work. Using metaphors such as
34 A. HARRIS ET AL.
‘pathways’ between education and work, and contrasting undesirable

(although often realistic) messy trajectories with desirable ‘smooth transi-
tions’, government policies in Western countries reinforced the idea that
the emerging youth crisis of unemployment and under-employment was
largely one of a mis-match between educational credentials and new labour
markets, a mis-match that was sheeted home to young people for making
the wrong choices and to educational institutions for offering the wrong
curriculum (Furlong et al., 2017).
Reflecting the shift in Western countries in the late 1970s from
Keynesian to monetarist policies that gave priority to economic goals
(Mizen, 2004), policy frameworks increasingly sought to identify a causal
chain linking young people’s characteristics, educational credentials, atti-
tudes and skills with employment outcomes. In this new policy context,
research funding was directed to a narrow conception of youth transitions,
away from cultural considerations, and many of the funded studies sought
to identify ‘patterns of inclusion and exclusion, identifying winners and
losers and showing how various bridges and barriers might impact on
pathways’ (Furlong, 2015, p. 18). While these were worthy topics, they
tended to view young people exclusively through an economic lens, giving
priority to their movement through education and into employment, pay-
ing less attention to the way in which engagement in education and work
are supported by a web of relationships with family, socio-economic sta-
tus, location and wellbeing, and that historical processes are also reflected
in the present. The focus on causal chains also turned the focus onto
young people’s deficits and failures, and away from the politics of position-
ing youth as bearers of precarity in neoliberal economies.
This narrow focus on the contemporary pathways and transitions of
young people represented a break with earlier youth studies (such as
Connell et al., 1957, 1975; Hollingshead, 1949; Thrasher, 1927) that
sought to understand young people’s lives in the context of their families,
class relations, the nature of their educational programs, their leisure and
peer relationships, and that sought young people’s views on their lives.
Once again, youth was positioned as a threat to national interests, unless
they conformed to prescribed patterns of transition. The identification of
the marginalised and excluded, those at risk and the worthy and unworthy
(of social security support) became a new frontier of measurement (France,
2008). The question of belonging, through the lens of transitions was also
narrowed, to categorise young people as economic units, who belonged in
education and work.
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reason for sending the O’Tooles out to spoil her lazy afternoon. Part
of the reason was probably because he had had to send them
somewhere, or he would have them still pleading with him to
reconsider his decision. Betty foresaw that Marie, being “sot,” would
not give up easily; while Mrs. O’Toole, wanting Marie to have what
she wanted, would be equally persistent. Betty decided that she
needed a breathing space.
“I don’t know what to say,” she told them. “To begin with, I haven’t
fully decided to go back to Harding this winter. If I do go, I shall be
very, very busy with my regular work. I don’t really see how I can do
more than I have already arranged for. But before I decide, I must
wait for President Wallace’s letter. It may be about you, or it may be
partly about Morton Hall—the dormitory that I shall have charge of if I
go back. May I have a little time to consider? I really couldn’t say
anything but no, if I had to decide to-day.”
Mrs. O’Toole sighed and looked reproachfully at Marie. “I told you
so,” she complained. “You’re always in too much of a hurry. We
might just as well have taken things easy and enjoyed the ride. We
came all the way in our car, Miss Wales.”
“But I like to ride fast,” announced her daughter calmly. “Do you,
Miss Wales? Because, if we’re going to wait around here for that
letter, I’ll take you for a ride. Do many Harding girls have their own
cars?”
Just then Tom Benson appeared on the piazza. Betty presented him,
and Marie promptly dazzled him with her smile and bore him off to a
distant corner of the piazza.
As soon as she was out of ear-shot, Mrs. O’Toole leaned forward in
her chair and addressed Betty earnestly. “Do it if you possibly can,”
she begged. “It’s a foolish notion she’s got that she wants to go to
college, but there ain’t anything bad about it. It ain’t as if she wanted
to go on the stage, or ride bareback in a circus, or marry some good-
for-nothing fellow that wants her for her money. So I’m awful anxious
for her to have her way. You see, Miss Wales, I know I stand in her
light some. I know I ain’t a lady, though I do dress perfect,” she
added proudly, “and look so young that people are always asking
Marie about her pretty older sister. But looks and money ain’t
everything, Miss Wales. And Marie is always so awful nice to me and
her Pa, that we aim to suit her as well as we can.”
“Did Mr. O’Toole come to America too?” asked Betty, for want of
anything better to say. She couldn’t help being touched by Mrs.
O’Toole’s plea, but she didn’t want Mrs. O’Toole to know it yet.
“Oh, he’s always in America,” explained Mrs. O’Toole, “out at the
mine, you know. But that’s no place for Marie, and her Pa knows it.
He wants her to have all the benefits fits of education and foreign
travel. We ought to be going, Miss Wales. Day after to-morrow, did
you say? All right. You’ve been awful kind, Miss Wales. Come,
Marie, we must be going.”
Marie came, slowly and reluctantly, with a backward smile for Tom
Benson, and a murmured, “To-morrow afternoon then, and we’re
staying in town at that big hotel with the queer German name.”
Betty watched them go as she might have watched the curtain
dropping on the last scene of a tragi-comical play. Tom Benson
broke into her revery with a laughing comment.
“Your friend Miss O’Toole is an accomplished little flirt, all right,” he
announced.
“She isn’t my friend,” Betty told him severely, “and it takes two to flirt,
Tom Benson. So, as a favor to me, you’re not to call on her in town.
You can come over here and see her day after to-morrow if you want
to. It looks to me as if I had been tumbled into the job of chaperoning
her through the first half of her freshman year at Harding, so I
propose to start her out right.”
“Why the first half of the freshman year only?” demanded Tom
curiously.
“Because,” explained Betty, “mid-years come then—at Harding.
Seems to me I have heard that they come about the same time at
Yale, but I suppose they don’t worry a distinguished scholar like
you.”
“The fair Marie doesn’t act particularly studious,” admitted Tom. “But
you can’t ever tell about these pretty college girls.” Tom smiled
meaningly at Betty, for whose brains he professed a vast admiration.
“Well, I wasn’t flunked out at freshman mid-years,” Betty told him,
“but if I didn’t think Miss Marie O’Toole would find half a year of
Harding all she wants, for one reason or another, I certainly shouldn’t
be contemplating acting as her special tutor.”
“Are you considering it?” demanded Tom in amazement.
Betty nodded calmly.
Tom whistled. “Then I bet you have your hands full.”
“Well, I certainly hate having them empty,” returned Betty, beginning
again on the stockings.
CHAPTER II
MONTANA MARIE O’TOOLE DAWNS UPON
HARDING COLLEGE
Betty Wales always insisted that the O’Tooles’ visit had nothing
whatever to do with her decision to go back to Harding.
“I see through you, Mademoiselle,” Will teased her. “You think you’ll
be getting ready to be married about next year, and you’re taking
your last chance to say a long farewell to your beloved Harding,—
also to save your three-decker, secretary-tutor-tea-shop salary for a
grand and elegant trousseau.”
“Will Wales——” began Betty fiercely, and then relapsed into
haughty silence (accompanied by the faintest blush) as the only
proper treatment of such unfounded accusations.
Nan was amused, and Dorothy relieved, of course, that her favorite
sister was to be within call again. At first Mr. Wales agreed, rather
soberly, that it would be foolish to neglect such good opportunities;
but before she left home Betty had made him laugh so heartily at a
few of her pet business theories, mostly adapted from Mary Brooks
Hinsdale’s Rules for the Perfect Tea-Shop, that he accepted her
decision as a huge joke—just another of Betty’s whims, having no
painful connection with the ebb of the family fortunes.
But Mother, with the illogical perversity that is proverbially feminine,
took the amazing position, for her, of Marie O’Toole’s ardent
defender and champion.
“If you’re not going back chiefly on that poor child’s account,” she
told her daughter Betty, “why, I’m ashamed of your unsympathetic
nature. I never was so sorry for any one”—she had been present on
the occasion of the O’Tooles’ second call. “She’s so sweet and
pretty,—and so ignorant of all the things that other sweet, pretty girls
learn from their mothers. She must know how strangely Mrs. O’Toole
strikes nice people, but she doesn’t act annoyed or embarrassed, or
try to keep her mother from making those dreadful remarks. Mrs.
O’Toole says that they have never been separated, and that she
doesn’t know how she can live next winter without Marie.”
“Betty thinks they can safely prepare for a grand family reunion after
mid-years,” laughed Will.
“And then,” explained Betty practically, “I can have time enough to do
justice to Morton Hall and”—very mysteriously—“to a lovely new plan
that I have for the Tally-ho. Of course, as long as I’m going back
anyhow, I won’t be mean enough not to ‘undertake’ Marie. But I hate
having a lot of entirely different things to be responsible for, and I
specially hate tutoring. I only hope this girl won’t cry all the time the
way Eugenia Ford used to. It was fearfully embarrassing.”
“Tom Benson advises you to make her join an anti-flirt society first
off,” Will put in solemnly. “He says it’s lucky Harding isn’t a co-
educational college, because in that case it would take about two
able-bodied chaperons to look after the gay Miss O’Toole.”
“Tell Tom Benson from me that I’m glad he’s at Yale instead of
Winstead,” Betty retorted loftily. “A girl who wants to go to Harding
badly enough to study all summer, take two sets of exams, and enter
with three conditions hanging over her, isn’t as silly as Tom Benson
seems to think.”
“Certainly not,” Mother defended her oddly-chosen favorite.
“President Wallace must have seen her possibilities, or he wouldn’t
have asked Betty to help her out. He evidently feels just as I do
about her. I am sure that she has a naturally fine mind, and that she
will respond very quickly to the cultivated atmosphere of the college.
I doubt if Betty will need to do more than give her the most casual
sort of instruction.”
Betty smiled to herself in the sheltering darkness of the piazza,
where the family was spending the evening. Her private opinion
coincided closely with Tom Benson’s, to the effect that even without
the complications of co-education, Marie would be “a handful.” But
President Wallace had hinted that he had a good reason which he
was “not yet at liberty to communicate” for asking Betty to try to get
Marie creditably through her freshman year; and, as Betty put it
briefly to herself, it would be mean, just because it meant hard work,
to refuse to do what the tragi-comical O’Tooles had set their hearts
on.
So that matter was settled. The Students’ Aid work had developed so
rapidly that Betty had petitioned for a senior assistant, and also, to
the vast amusement of the Association’s managers, for a smaller
salary for herself. Betty was bent on securing enough leisure to carry
out her “lovely new plan” for the Tally-ho. Jim Watson may have had
something to do with her feeling, or he may not; but, for one reason
or another, Betty had what Madeline Ayres called a “leading” that this
would be her last chance at Harding; and she wanted to “finish out”
the Tally-ho, partly because she wished Mr. Morton to feel fully
justified in his purchase and improvement of the property, but chiefly
just to satisfy her own queer little sense of the fitness of things. The
Tally-ho was capable of more than had ever yet been developed;
and Betty liked people and institutions to do their very most and best.
But the details of all this planning were kept a grand secret, even
from the Smallest Sister, who had been the “Co.” in the Betty Wales
business firm. Betty wanted to look over the situation at Harding first;
then she would be ready to confide her conclusions to Co., Babbie
and Madeline.
Betty Wales went back to Harding three days before the college
opened, in order to get a good start with her work. But almost before
she had stepped off the train she found herself up to her neck in a
deluge of Students’ Aid affairs, all marked “immediate,” at least in the
minds of the persons most concerned. It was a large factor in Betty’s
success that she could always get the other person’s point of view;
but there are occasions when this trait makes its possessor very
uncomfortable. Betty wanted every girl who had applied for the
Association’s help to get it, if she was worthy; she wanted every
lonely freshman to be met at her train, every boarding-house keeper
in search of waitresses, and every well-to-do student who hated to
do her own mending, to feel that nobody could supply their varied
wants so well as the Students’ Aid. The result was that one small
secretary was shamefully overworked, almost forgot that she was
supposed to be helping to run the most successful tea-room in
Harding, and had no time to spend in worry over the probable
bothers connected with tutoring Miss Marie O’Toole.
President Wallace was of course infinitely busier than Betty; all he
had found time to do about Marie was to tell Betty, with a twinkle,
that he had perfect confidence in her ability to manage “even the
extraordinary product of a mining camp, a convent in Utah, a Select
School for Wealthy American Girls in Paris, and the companionship
of Mrs. James O’Toole; and to transform said product into a
freshman that should be a real credit to Harding College.”
Whereupon Betty had gasped at the complicated things that were
expected of her, laughed because President Wallace was laughing
and seemed to expect that of her too, and then hurried off to find
Miss Ferris and ask her if Mary Jones, the senior who lived in an
attic at the other end of High Street, couldn’t somehow be persuaded
to pocket her pride and come to fill an unexpected vacancy in Morton
Hall.
She painstakingly met the train that Marie had written she would
take; though either Marie had missed that train or Betty missed
Marie. But with the capable assistance of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and
Helen Adams she found Rachel and Christy, and Georgia Ames and
Eugenia Ford found her. And the six of them, declaring that she
looked tired to death and almost, if not quite, starved, bore her off to
the Tally-ho for refreshment.
“Which is the biggest, most comfy chair you’ve got, Nora?”
demanded Mary. “Bring us tea and the best little cakes you have for
seven.”
“Better make it for fourteen, Nora,” amended Georgia. “I’m fairly
hungry.”
And while the seven ate for fourteen, they all talked at once of
“wonderful” vacations, “dandy” trips, “thrilling” summer adventures,
each story ending with a rapturous, “And now aren’t we having a
grand time here?”
“I must go and find that freshman,” Betty declared at last. She had
said the same thing before, but this time she meant it.
“No, you mustn’t,” Georgia told her firmly, tumbling little Eugenia into
her lap as a precaution against sudden flight. “You must tell me
where she boards, and I’ll go and dry her tears, help her to unpack,
explain about morning chapel and freshman class assembly, and tell
her to meet you in—let me see—oh, the note-room in the basement
of College Hall, at eleven o’clock sharp. She’s sure to be through by
that time, and if you’re busy then, why, she can just wait for you.”
Betty listened to Georgia’s program in obvious relief. “Oh, Georgia,
would you really do all that? You’re an angel! With so many other
things on my mind, having to hunt her up seems like the very last
straw. But Georgia—she’s—rather queer—not like other girls, I
mean. She’s lived abroad a lot and her mother is—peculiar.” Betty
tried to forewarn Georgia without prejudicing the company against
the absent Marie.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” Mary Brooks Hinsdale reassured her.
“Georgia will manage your freshman. Miss Ames, I hereby rechristen
you Georgia-to-the-Rescue, and elect you to take extra-special care
of our precious Betty Wales.”
Georgia blushed very red at being praised and “elected” to a mission
by the charming Mrs. Hinsdale. “I don’t care how queer Miss O’Toole
is,” she declared stoutly. “I guess I can make her understand a few
simple messages. I’ve wanted to see the inside of that elegant new
freshman hotel-affair where she’s staying. Go to bed early, and get
rested, Betty dear.”
When the college clock began to strike eleven the next morning
Betty reached for her rain-coat—the freshman downpour had duly
arrived—to run over to College Hall and keep her appointment with
Marie. But she had pulled on one sleeve, when Miss Ferris appeared
to say that she had interviewed Mary Jones, who lived at the other
end of High Street, and had persuaded her—it took fifteen minutes to
tell what. Just outside Betty’s door Miss Ferris encountered Georgia
Ames, red and panting. Georgia skilfully avoided a collision, slipped
inside Betty’s office before the door had fairly closed upon the
departing Miss Ferris, and dropped, breathless, into a chair.
“I thought maybe you’d forgotten your freshman,” she panted. “So I
came to remind you. Don’t know why I hurried so. Only—she is
entertaining the whole note-room, and it’s full of girls, and she is just
screamingly funny, Betty, though I shouldn’t say so to any one else.
But some of the other girls will pass on her choice remarks—the
grind book will be full of her. And I couldn’t help liking her last night,
so I thought I’d better come and remind you.” Georgia paused
awkwardly.
“You know she just happens to be my freshman,” Betty explained
smilingly. “I was asked to tutor her and look out for her a little. I liked
her too, the little I’ve seen of her.” Betty had slipped on her rain-coat
while they talked. “Come and help me find her, Georgia-dear-to-the-
Rescue.”
The note-room is a notable Harding institution, time-honored and
hedged about with inviolable customs. It gets its name from the four
letter-racks, one for each class, that cover the long wall opposite the
windows. The other walls are patched with Lost and Found and Want
signs, and with notices of class and society meetings. A long table
runs almost the length of the narrow room. On Mondays the janitor
piles upon it the week’s accumulation of dropped handkerchiefs, for
their owners to claim and carry off. On other days college celebrities
may sit on it, swinging their feet comfortably while they beam on their
admirers or wait to keep a “date” with one of their “little pals.” It is
unwritten law that no freshmen save only the president, vice-
president, and Students’ Council member may sit, or even lean, on
the note-room table.
The note-room is always crowded between classes, and on this first
disorganized, rainy morning it was a favorite rendezvous. As Betty
and Georgia wormed a slow passage through the crowd near the
door, they could see Miss Marie O’Toole, dressed, quite without
regard for the weather, in a furbelowed silk gown, a huge be-
flowered hat, and—of all things at Harding!—gloves, perched
comfortably on the sacred table, between Fluffy Dutton and a clever
little sophomore named Susanna Hart. Fluffy was all smiles and
attention; Susanna’s black eyes twinkled with suppressed glee.
Around the table surged a mob of girls, all amused but the freshmen,
who were deeply and seriously interested in what was going on.
“Yes, I think I shall like it here,” Marie was saying in her sweet,
piercing voice. “It’s so friendly and informal—not a bit like Miss
Mallon’s Select School ‘pour les Americaines’ in dear old Paree. I’ve
talked to lots of nice girls this morning. I can’t remember half their
names, but they nearly all promised to call on me. You will too, won’t
you?” She beamed impartially on Fluffy and Susanna.
“Maybe, if we have time. Got a crush yet?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.
“A what?” Marie’s face was blank.
Fluffy explained.
Marie giggled consciously. “You embarrass me, Miss Dutton. You go
off and stand in a corner of the hall for a minute, and I’ll tell the rest
of these girls whether I’ve got a crush or not,—and what her name
is.”
Fluffy slipped obediently off the table, and then pulled the amazed
Marie roughly after her. “Freshmen aren’t allowed on this table,” she
announced sternly. “You’d better go home and read the rules of this
college. There’s a rule about crushes, too. And about asking upper-
class girls to call.” Then tender-hearted Fluffy relented and held out
her hand. “I must go now,” she said. “But it won’t be against the rules
for me to call on you, and I will. Where do you live?”
Marie explained, her gaiety somewhat subdued. Just then she
caught sight of Betty and Georgia, who had at last succeeded in
getting somewhere near the sacred table.
“Oh, Miss Wales,” she cried eagerly. “Here I am, and I need your
help right away. Where can I find a set of the college rules—about
calls, and crushes, and sitting on tables like this one, and so on?”
“And passing exams in freshman math.,” murmured Fluffy wickedly,
hazarding a guess that Marie’s brain was not of the exact, scientific
variety. “How do you do, Betty? I’m coming to the Tally-ho for tea and
a talk to-night—Straight too. You’ll be there?”
Betty said yes, trying to look properly reproachful and not
succeeding at all. Meanwhile the crowd had drawn back, old girls
having whispered to the gaping freshmen that Miss Wales was a
“near-faculty.”
“Shall we come over to my office?” Betty suggested, nodding right
and left to girls she recognized. Marie covered her silken elegance
with a natty white polo coat, and thoughtfully insisted on carrying the
umbrella over Betty on the way back to her office.
“Just look at that, Miss Wales,” she began, as soon as they were
seated, handing Betty a printed list of the accepted freshman
candidates. “I’m in. I wouldn’t believe it till I saw it down in black and
white. And I’m the only O in a class of two hundred. Isn’t that funny,
Miss Wales?”
Betty looked sympathetically at the name of the only O in the
freshman class. There it was, down in black and white: Montana
Marie O’Toole.
“Oh, how f——” began Betty, who was fast being overwhelmed by
the accumulating absurdities of her protégée. “Why, I—I thought
Marie was your first name.”
Marie giggled. “I’m always called Marie—now. Ma would be awfully
mad if she saw that ridiculous old Montana cropping out again. But
they told us, when I took my first exams, to put down our full names.
I asked if ‘M. Marie’ wouldn’t do, and the teacher in charge of the
room just glared at me; so of course I wrote it all out in full about as
quick as I could. You see, Miss Wales, I was born in a mining camp,
and Pa named me after the claim where he’d struck it rich the very
day I came into the world. The Montana Mary it was called. When I
went to Salt Lake to school I dropped the Montana, and when I went
to Paris I changed Mary to Marie. Marie suits me better, don’t you
think so, Miss Wales?”
Marie got up to shed her heavy polo coat, and stood, a dazzlingly
pretty vision, smiling down at Betty with the half-pleading, half-
commanding curve of her lips that made her so winning in spite of
her crudities.
Betty smiled back at her. “You’ll be Montana Marie as long as you
stay here,” she told her freshman. “So you’d better make up your
mind to it. The girls always seize upon a queer name and use it. If
you’d written just Marie, you might have been nicknamed something
funny; so it would come to the same thing in the end. Now may I tell
you a few things, please?”
Betty repeated sister Nan’s suggestions to her when she was a
freshman about not making friends too hastily. Then she arranged
hours for special lessons, helped Marie with her schedule of classes,
answered her frank queries about the desirability of being friends
with Georgia Ames and Fluffy Dutton. Then she rushed off to settle
the complicated case of Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of
High Street, ate a hasty luncheon, held a lengthy conference with the
Morton Hall matron, who had not the least idea how to hurry through
her business, made a friendly call on “the Thorn,” a student who had
given some trouble the last year, and whose mother had died during
the summer. And finally Betty turned up, fresh and smiling, at the
Tally-ho in time to take Emily’s place at the desk, while that young
lady combined a marketing expedition with a drive behind Mary’s
new thoroughbred.
At five Fluffy and Straight appeared and ordered tea at a table drawn
sociably near to Betty’s desk.
“Please notice our senior dignity,” observed Straight. “We’re not
going to be so harum-scarum any longer.”
“I noticed Fluffy’s senior dignity this morning,” Betty told them with a
twinkle.
The two exchanged significant glances and then made a
simultaneous rush for Betty’s desk, which they leaned over sociably,
in the unmistakable attitude of those having confidential information
to discuss.
“Please tell us if her name is really Montana Marie,” began Straight
abruptly.
“And how you happen to have her under your wing,” added Fluffy.
“And then we promise to be very nice to her,” concluded Straight.
“Besides, Fluffy says that she likes her.”
“We’ll be very nice to her anyway, if you want us to, Betty,” Fluffy
explained sweetly. “But we’re just bursting to know about her and her
beautiful name.”
“Just can’t put our minds on anything else,” murmured Straight sadly.
“And I can’t afford to risk a mess of warnings this year after all the
trouble I had with logic when I was a junior.”
“In short,” concluded Fluffy impressively, “Montana Marie O’Toole is
the sensation of the hour at Harding College. Do you ask me to
prove it? Watch the Dutton twins forget their cakes and tea while
they talk about her.”
CHAPTER III
THE INITIATION OF MONTANA MARIE
Montana Marie O’Toole was, even as Fluffy Dutton had said, the
sensation of the hour at Harding College. Indeed, she bid fair to be
the chief sensation of the entire year of 19—. Her cheerful interest in
the curious rites and customs of college life continued undiminished,
in spite of elaborate snubs from upper-class girls and the crushing
scorn of her fellow freshmen, who attempted, all in vain, to keep
Marie (and so Marie’s class) out of the public eye. Nothing escaped
Montana Marie’s smiling scrutiny. Her questions were frank and to
the point. Her pithy comments were quoted from end to end of the
Harding campus, and beyond. But her giggle was contagious, her
sweetness really appealing, her appreciation of any small favors
touching in its breezy Western sincerity. Montana Marie had “done”
New York and the European capitals; she had been “finished” in
“dear old Paree”; but she had also been born and brought up in a
Montana mining camp, and she was not ashamed of that fact, nor of
her very plain, as well as very peculiar, parentage. So Harding
College agreed with Fluffy Dutton in liking Montana Marie. Its laugh
at her was always friendly, if merciless, and in time it came to be
even rather admiring. But that was not until long after the initiation of
Montana Marie.
Susanna Hart planned that joyous festivity. Since Madeline Ayres
had planned a similar one for Georgia and the Dutton twins and
some of their Belden House classmates, and Betty Wales had
explained and defended the Harding variety of initiation to an
amused faculty investigating committee, there had been no official
opposition to the hazing of freshmen at Harding. Hazing (Harding
brand) was recognized as just an ingenious, “stunty” way of
entertaining the newcomers, of finding out their best points, of
helping them to show the stuff they were made of, and to take their
proper places in the little college world,—in short, of getting
acquainted without loss of time, or any foolish fuss and feathers.
So being initiated had speedily come to be considered an honor
instead of a torment. All the most popular freshmen were initiated—
in very small and select parties calculated to give each individual her
due importance. And because of the extreme popularity—or
prominence—of Montana Marie O’Toole, Susanna Hart decided that
she should have an initiation all to herself. So she asked Marie to
dinner at the Belden on a rainy Saturday night when there was
nothing else going on. The initiation feature of the evening’s
entertainment was not mentioned to Montana Marie; it was to be
sprung upon her as a pleasant little after-dinner surprise. Susanna
and her sophomore and senior friends in the Belden spent the whole
afternoon arranging the “mise en scène” for the mystic ceremonies;
and they made so much noise tacking up curtains and building a
spring-board in Susanna’s big closet that Straight Dutton, who had a
bad headache and was trying to sleep it off, came up-stairs, with
rage in her heart, to find out what was happening.
Fluffy, who was acting as Susanna’s chief assistant, explained. “We
thought you were asleep, so we didn’t come to tell you,” she ended.
Straight sniffed indignantly. “I was likely to be asleep—underneath
this carpenter shop.”
“Stay and help us, and drown your sorrows in fudge and——”
“Noise,” finished Straight crisply. “No, thanks. I’m going to ask
Eugenia Ford to massage my forehead. She’s wonderful at it. Tell me
what everything is for, and then I’ll go back.”
Fluffy gleefully exhibited a glove full of wet sand which Montana
Marie was to be induced to shake in the dark, as she entered the
dusky Chamber of Horrors, otherwise Susanna’s single. There was a
part of a real skeleton to run into; there were clammy things and hot
things and wriggly things to touch; and finally there was the spring-
board to fall from, down upon a heap of pillows, surrounded by a
bewildering, fluttering hedge composed of Susanna’s generous
wardrobe, carefully spread out on all Susanna’s dress-hangers, and
those of some friends.
“She’ll never get out of that closet until we haul her out,” concluded
Fluffy joyously. “Isn’t it going to be an extra-special initiation,
Straight?”
Straight nodded in silence, reëxamined all the arrangements with
polite attention to details, and departed, wearing the pained
expression appropriate to one with a bad headache.
Five minutes later she was sitting cross-legged on Eugenia Ford’s
couch, her cheeks still pale, but her eyes dancing with mirth and
excitement.
“Of course I’m a loyal senior, and I ought by rights to be up-stairs
with Fluffy helping the sophs,” she outlined her position rapidly. “But
they’ve got enough help without me, and the racket did bother me
fearfully, and made me mad, and besides, the juniors’ Rescue party
that I’m going to organize will be a grand feature, so they really
ought to thank me for seeming to bother them. How many juniors are
there in the house, Eugenia? Well, Timmy Wentworth counts against
two of the sophs, because she’s so big, and that big corner double
room she and Sallie Wright have is the very best place in the house
for our extra-special show. Now where can we borrow masks and
black dominos? I have an idea that raw oysters dipped in hot
chocolate sauce would taste rather weird. They never have had
uncanny eats at the initiations I’ve been to, so that will be an original
stroke. You go tell the others and buy the oysters and borrow
chocolate and find the clothes and get the night watchman to lend
you a lot of rope. I’ll take a nice little nap here on your couch, away
from that sophomore racket, and at five we all round up in Timmy’s
room to arrange.”
Having thus relieved herself of all minor details, after a fashion
taught her by her good friend Madeline Ayres, Straight curled up
among Eugenia’s downy pillows, and slept sweetly and very soundly
until Eugenia and Timmy Wentworth shook her awake with the
information that there were not enough black dominos and it was
quarter past five.
The Belden House juniors appeared at dinner that night late and
rather disheveled. Straight, because she had a headache, did not
appear at all, and thereby missed seeing Montana Marie sweep
through the Belden House parlors between the triumphant Susanna
and Fluffy Dutton, the latter not too much worried about her twin’s
unprecedented indisposition to miss any of the humors of the
situation. For Susanna and her friends, being rather tired and
hurried, and wishing also to be suitably clothed for darkling
adventures in Susanna’s closet, had not dressed very formally for
dinner. Against their background of shirt-waists and walking skirts or
plain little muslins, Montana Marie sparkled radiantly in a clinging,
trailing yellow satin, cut low enough to show the lovely curves of her
throat and long enough to give just a glimpse of her high-heeled gold
slippers and to lend her a quite sumptuous dignity among her short-
skirted companions. A jeweled fillet held her piled-up hair in the
exaggerated mode of the moment—it was becoming to Montana
Marie. Diamonds sparkled at her throat and on her fingers. In short,
Montana Marie was perfectly dressed for twenty-two and a formal
dinner,—but not for a school-girl nor for any little after-dinner surprise
in the way of an extra-special initiation party.
“It would be tragic to have to jump off a spring-board in those
clothes,” Fluffy whispered sadly to a sophomore neighbor. “We’ll
have to manage somehow to dress her over for the part.”
“She’s about my size; she can take my white linen with the braided
trimming,” the sophomore agreed magnanimously. “It’s rather dirty,
I’m sorry to say, but that’s really an advantage for to-night.”
“I’ll tell Susanna,” promised Fluffy, “and she’ll have to arrange. Why
in the world didn’t she tell Miss Montana Marie O’Toole not to dress
up like a princess?”
But Susanna, though she employed all her far-famed diplomacy,
could not “arrange” any changes in her guest’s wonderful toilette.
When she proposed a little walk in the rain, and said it would be a
shame to risk spoiling that lovely dress, Montana Marie only smiled,
and picked up her train.
“I shan’t spoil it,” she said. “I never spoil my clothes. But I’d love a
walk in the rain—with you and Fluffy. Yes, or a fudge party up-stairs.
Just whatever you say.”
And no amount of hints and polite protests could make Montana
Marie change her mind.
So it was that, still smiling and still arrayed in clinging bejeweled
yellow satin, Montana Marie shook hands with a gloveful of wet
sand, at the door of Susanna’s Chamber of Horrors, stuck her arms
through a hole in the Curtain of Variety, and shrieked as she grasped
first a hot potato, then a large and lively lobster, and finally a paper
snake freshly dipped in thick white paint by Fluffy, so that it would be
sure to feel extra-crawly. Next, after she had assured her captors
that she was enjoying it all,—they inquired at intervals according to
the etiquette of hazing (Harding brand),—she was led up to the
skeleton, which promptly tumbled over upon her with a gruesome
rattle of dry bones. And finally came the spring-board and the
cushions, hemmed in by Susanna’s hanging dresses, from behind
which three little sophomores delivered horrible noises,
accompanying soft, uncanny pats and pushes, while Montana Marie,
still cheerful, though badly scared, minus one gold slipper, and quite
helplessly entangled in her long train, struggled manfully to regain
her feet and maintain her composure.
When they were tired of watching her try to get out, they turned on a
sudden blaze of lights, pulled down the dresses that had been hung
across the door, helped Montana Marie to arise, returned her slipper,
and arranged her train.
Montana Marie blinked at the lights, and smiled blandly at the
assembled company. “Nothing like this in dear old Paree,” she
announced, gasping but happy. “Now at Miss Mallon’s Select School
for American Girls——”
“Hush,” commanded Fluffy. “We aren’t interested in any silly little
boarding-school stories. This is a grown-up college. But as you seem
to want to talk, go ahead—make a speech.”
“GO AHEAD—MAKE A SPEECH”
“On the subject of the Fourth Dimension,” put in Susanna hastily.
“We are all very tired of dear old Paree.”
“But I never heard of——” began Montana Marie.
“Sh!” commanded Susanna sternly. “If you say you’ve never heard of
a thing like the Fourth Dimension, why, here at Harding that means
social ostracism. To use simpler language suitable for very verdant
little girls like you, not to have heard of the Fourth Dimension is a
mark of complete and utter greenness, perfect and unbearable
freshness, and even worse. If you haven’t heard of it, all right, but
don’t say so, unless you want to be finally and forever dropped like—
like a hot potato,”—Susanna glanced smilingly at the Curtain of
Variety,—“by the best Harding circles. If you haven’t heard of it, why,
bluff. Now don’t tell me you never heard of bluffing.”
“Well,” began Montana Marie, still smiling composedly, “you see I
never heard of a lot of things that you do here, because I was mostly
educated in a convent, I suppose. President Wallace understands
that. That’s why he let me in when——”
Marie was too much absorbed in her speech, and her audience were
too busy laughing at her confidential disclosures, to notice a slight
commotion near the door. A second later the room was full of
masked figures in black dominos. Two especially stalwart ones
guarded the door. The rest drew a cordon around the amazed
initiators and producing pieces of stout rope—procured, according to
Straight’s directions, from the night watchman, who was under the
impression that it was wanted by the Belden House matron for
strange purposes of her own—they silently bound their prisoners,
who were too astonished even to struggle, and started them in
procession out the door and up the hall.
Suddenly a black domino cried, “Stop—I mean—halt, prisoners!
We’ve forgotten something.”
For Montana Marie O’Toole still stood as she had been commanded
to do to make her speech, on the quivering middle of the spring-
board in the closet, viewing the performances of the black dominos
with mingled surprise and amusement, manifested, as usual with
her, by a smile, rather faint now, but still somehow infectious.
“We’ve forgotten the principal feature,” the voice went on. “Montana
Marie O’Toole, get down. You’re no longer a persecuted little
freshman. You’ve been nobly rescued by your junior protectors. Now

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Thinking about Belonging in Youth

Studies (Studies in Childhood and

Childhood, Youth Identity, and Violence in Formerly

Queer Youth Histories 1st ed. 2021 Edition Daniel

Chemical Youth: Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the

Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across

Youth Active Citizenship in Europe: Ethnographies of

Youth and Unconventional Political Engagement 1st ed.

Youth Employment in Bangladesh: Creating

Youth Justice and Migration: Discursive Harms 1st ed.

Nigel Patrick Thomas

More information about this series at

Studies in Childhood and Youth

The thinking about belonging in youth studies that we present in this

“This is a fascinating, rigorous and wide-ranging exploration of the con-

“This groundbreaking book is a must read for anyone interested in Youth

“Thinking about Belonging is an incisive interrogation of ‘belonging’ as an

“This innovative book thoroughly and critically addresses a compelling

1 The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies 1

5 Transitions and Participation107

8 Researching Belonging in Youth Studies201

Anita Harris is a Research Professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for

The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies

This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth research and in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

it is increasingly referred to in research and policy, its meaning remains elu-

social inclusion. While belonging is ‘multi-scalar’, the dimensions of the

In an increasingly globalised world, an array of forces has intensified the

The COVID-19 global pandemic has only sharpened these concerns

draws from broader sociological work that addresses contemporary con-

tendency of the belonging trope which may conceal and de-politicise

foundations and consider the politics of knowledge making about youth

Organisation of the Chapters

anxieties about youth; the challenges of post-industrial youth in the 1960s

understand the everyday, making visible performances of belonging, and

normalise the idea that Indigenous youth need to be ‘fixed’. Ultimately,

emergent communities of membership and responsibility in conditions of

regulate, depoliticise and generalise youth experience, and lead to research

Wyn, J. (2013). Young adulthood in Australia and New Zealand: Pathways to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

interest because it necessarily attends to the relational dynamics and pro-

she argued required new understandings of what it means to be a young

A Genealogy of Belonging in Youth Sociology

a slackening of moral control and of psychological adjustment. The last war,

up for themselves a new sense of values, a new perspective’ (Chesser, 1928,

revolution’ (2006, p. 338). Thrasher’s study of 1313 gangs in Chicago

Both of these studies share an underlying concern with youth, with

Post-WW2 Anxieties About Youth

Physiologists had done extensive work on physical maturation, psychologists

The question of belonging is central to Hollingshead’s book, drawing

swallowed up at the childhood end by the increasing precocity of the young,

The imperative to understand the situation of young people in a time

must be theorised in a way which allows for incommensurable difference

Australian Indigenous people’s belonging rights inhere in custodian-

Connell et al. (1957) identified four developmental ‘tasks’ that educa-

Hollingshead’s (1949) study of Elmtown is a reflection on American

Western countries (Goldin, 2005). These trends began to increase pres-

The picture painted by this study is of young people out of place –

development, tend to withhold recognition of the social maturity of young

‘manifested a type of symbolic challenge to the class system’ (Woodman &

Youth Transitions, Cultures and More

‘pathways’ between education and work, and contrasting undesirable

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1 The Question of Belonging in Youth Studies 1

5 Transitions and Participation107

8 Researching Belonging in Youth Studies201