Security-Autonomy-Mobility Roadmaps: Passports to Security

• In Event: 311 - Regular Session. Impact of Hard Times

Abstract

In this research we show how differently positioned youths chart their imagined futures, given their varied positions within a community afflicted by generalized economic insecurity and uncertainty. Our data comes from youths growing up in a relatively prosperous community that is now a place in which many families sit down to dinner in dramatically different circumstances than before the 2008 meltdown. While not all families have endured the same kind or degree of economic insecurity, nonetheless they dwell in a community strongly affected by the Great Recession. Drawing on in-depth interview data, we compare and contrast the four security-autonomy-mobility roadmaps sketched by youths with different experiences of economic insecurity. We map the contours of these security-autonomy-mobility roadmaps and trace these roadmaps to the distinctive life circumstances of each of the groups. Exploring how economic security and insecurity resonate through the lives of these youths and how they perceive and respond to the economic circumstances of the adults and peers around them, we investigate the kinds of experiences, preoccupations, and strategies that inform these roadmaps. Our analysis examines the implications of youths’ firsthand and secondhand experiences of long-term and short-term security and insecurity. For each roadmap we show the kinds of experience and information each group gathers in making strategic plans. The focus of the analysis is the complex interrelationship between the youths’ varied economic circumstances, their class background, and the roadmaps they fashion to give some shape to their futures.

Author

• Jeremy Markham Schulz, University of California-Berkeley