Agency of young people in peripheral areas - educational practices between regionality and family

Basic data for this project

Description

The research project focuses on young people in structurally weak regions and asks how they can act under the conditions of this peripheralisation. The conditions under which young people stay in social spaces that tend to encourage them to leave and how they experience themselves as powerful to act in the interplay of regionality and family will be investigated. In this way, the project addresses a research gap between a purely socio-structural definition of structurally weak areas (based on economic indicators) and the people on the ground (young people and their families as 'central actors'). Consequently, the project aims to shed light on the social construction of regions as peripheral concerning peripheralised actors (young people in these areas) and to reconstruct strategies for negotiating and dealing with this peripheral situation. Young adults are viewed here as relationally embedded in the family, region and possibilities of education, i.e. vocational schools. Young adults can stay if they experience themselves having the power to act and thus advance as local actors. In the sense of collective agency theories, this can also only be established relationally with the actors and conditions in a processual way (Raitelhuber 2018). A transnational perspective is innovative here to view educational practices against the backdrop of transnational competitive spaces on the one hand and, on the other, to view the results not in specific countries but in terms of young adults. Through this, a contribution is to be made to the still-young region-related youth research (Ludwig 2022), as the studies on sparsely populated, structurally weak regions tend to be limited to purely quantitative descriptive or qualitative content-analytical evaluation methods.