Young people confronting the crisis: the role of cultural capital, reflexivity and sociological imagination

Although young people are disproportionately inflicted by the crisis, not all of them are equally affected by precarity and unemployment. In the paper we will demonstrate first how the intersectionality of gender, class and ethnicity helps us to understand why certain categories of young people are more affected than others and subsequently we will address the question what are the elements facilitating successful coping with precarity and crisis. On the basis of the analysis of 67 autobiographical narrative interviews with different categories of young people of Italian and foreign origin living in the south of Italy, who left the educational system during the crisis (after 2008), we will show how the one-dimensional approaches to the analysis of inequalities (taking separately the variables such as gender, age, origin, milieu, educational attainment, place of residence, etc.) do not articulate sufficiently the different opportunity structures young people can (or can not) enjoy. Intersectionality, with its capacity of capturing the differences along and across categories and allowing us to avoid essentializing differences, is of better use here. After demonstrating the importance of intersectionality of gender, class and ethnicity, we will bring our analysis further showing which are the elements helping young people in the construction of adult life in spite of the negative impact of macrostructural crisis. We will analyse the role of hard resources (such as economic, cultural and social capital) and then we will focus on less tangible but equally significant resources of reflexivity and sociological imagination. We will demonstrate that such ‘soft skills’, understood as the capacity of critical elaboration of one’s life situation in relation to broader social processes, contribute to self-orientation, projectuality and best use and conversion of possessed resources. They do not only help young people to find their place in the world but they also play a crucial role in developing innovative strategies of confronting the crisis and new life and work models. The results presented come from the ongoing research project PRIN, Sustainable Practices and Everyday Life in the Context of Crisis: Work, Consumption and Participation.