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Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Youth Arts: Creative Production and Skills for Work

In this blog we preview our new book, "Youth Arts: Creative Production and Skills for Work" that emerges from the work we have been doing over the last four years on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Linkage project the official title of which is, "Creative industries pathways to youth employment in the COVID-19 recession", but which elsewhere we call the "Vital Arts"project. The "Vital Arts" project has been concerned with identifying, and finding innovative ways to credential, a number of what we have called 21st century skills that young people develop, not necessarily explicitly, through their various forms of participation in the creative practices of youth-based arts organisations and their programs.
14 September 2026
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Fire, Food, Futures: Learning Ecologies Beyond Harmonisation

This is the final post in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies and what young people already know about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. The series began with the silences running through ‘tertiary harmonisation’; then moved to fire, VET, and disaster-preparedness learning the credential system cannot quite see; then to food and farming, and learning the system sees and reaches for, but struggles to value. This post gathers those threads and asks: what follows?
2 September 2026
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Food, Farming and Community-Led Learning

This is the third in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies and what young people already know about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. This post turns to food, farming and models and approaches to community-led learning.
1 September 2026
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Young people, VET, and Bushfire Disaster

This is the second in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies and what young people already know about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. The first post introduced some of the silences running through 'tertiary harmonisation'. This post goes looking for one of them: bushfire disaster, and how vocational education and young people are currently governed in our response to it.
17 August 2026
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Beyond the Credential: Tertiary Harmonisation and Learning Ecologies in a Time of Compounding Crisis

This is the first in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies, the reform of Australian education, and what some young people already know and do about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. Across the series I move from the policy architecture of ‘tertiary harmonisation’ and through some of the places - fire and disaster, food and farming - where meaningful learning is already happening, and what it might mean for education.
12 August 2026

On the Problem of Foundation Skills and the Future of Work

This blog presents a version of an Adult Learning Australia Webinar that my colleague (Dr Garry Argent) and I presented on Thursday, June 4, 2026.
24 July 2026
Young People and Digital Disruption

Blog 5. Living with the knowledge: What to do when the problem may exceed the solution

This final post does not offer a reassuring list of actions. It tries to think honestly about what it means to live and work in the knowledge that the risks are real, the institutions are inadequate, and the margin for error may be very small.
29 June 2026
Young People and Digital Disruption

Blog 4. Engineering harm: Biotechnology, dual-use science, and the production function for catastrophe

Nature constrains how deadly a pathogen can be. Human engineering does not have to. This post examines the second-largest contributor to extinction risk — and the particular difficulty that the tools of harm and the tools of healing are, increasingly, the same tools.
26 June 2026
Young People and Digital Disruption

Blog 3. The machine: AI risk, written from inside an AI

A 2025 survey of nearly 3,000 AI researchers found that roughly half assign more than a 10% probability to AI causing human extinction or permanent disempowerment. This post examines what that means — and what it means that the text is being written by an AI.
24 June 2026
Young People and Digital Disruption

Blog 2. The architecture of looking away: Why silence around extinction is overdetermined

The silence that met Leigh's lecture was not a media failure or a political oversight. It is the rational output of an entire civilisation of systems — cognitive, emotional, social, economic, political, cultural, religious — that were not designed to confront this class of problem, and that have strong interests in not doing so.
22 June 2026
Young People and Digital Disruption

Blog 1. 1 in 6: Sitting with a number that resists being sat with

An Australian government minister, a PhD economist, stood up in Hobart in May 2026 and said there is roughly a 1-in-6 chance humanity does not survive this century. This post does not immediately convert that fact into a policy agenda. It asks you to hold it first.
19 June 2026
Uncategorized

Serving Your Country: Young Women in the Military

The Australian Defence Forces seek to increase the numbers of women in the military. A number of challenges have emerged as they pursue a goal of 25% full-time women servicemembers in the ADF by 2030.
1 June 2026
Education and the SDGs

New Publication: Vocational Education and Training (VET) Delivered to School Students and Australia’s Neoliberal Education Apparatus

We (Garry Argent, James Goring & Peter Kelly) have a new open access article published — and we want to share it with the practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in our network who are thinking critically about vocational education, place-based approaches, and what reform actually means for young people.
2 April 2026
Young People and the Climate Crisis

The Pandemic and the Challenges for Young People of Living Well in the Anthropocene

Our recent article, explores how the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crises, and global capitalism have impacted young Australians’ well-being, highlighting the challenges and opportunities they face. Through the stories of Daisy and Elijah, we argue for more inclusive and place-based understandings of young people’s well-being that move beyond individualistic and human-centred frameworks, inviting new ways of telling (geo)stories in the Anthropocene.
6 January 2026
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #10 Intersections and affinities. Connecting with the innovative, creative and radical in youth work philosophy and practice.

These blogs began by noting that the collective and cooperative effort required to respond to the crisis of the Anthropocene involves a reimagining of ourselves in the world. I have argued that youth work can - has an obligation to – contribute to this reimagining, and that this may involve creatively drawing on alternate philosophical and cultural traditions to kindle - nurture, enrich - different ways of seeing / being in the world; with our ‘earth others’. In the final blog in this series I take up and extend Kerry Young’s conception of youth work as an ‘art’ to explore how this idea connects with, and might be extended through an understanding and embrace of the essentially aesthetic character of Chinese philosophical traditions.
24 December 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #9 Dedicating oneself to doing what is best.

In this blog I continue my reflections on the enrichment of approaches to youth work philosophy, ethics and practice made possible by paying attention to themes and insights of Chinese philosophy. These include: a consideration of the significance of ‘situated ethics’ and exercising good judgment in the thinking and doing of youth work; the emphasis on ‘way-seeking’, not ‘truth-seeking’; an understanding of the self as interconnected and interdependent; a broadening of the concepts included in the notion of the Good; opening up new perspectives on cultivation of the self for the purpose of ‘dedicating oneself to doing what is best’ (Zhu 1969, cited in Ames 2017).
18 December 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #8 Cultivating excellent habits of the heart-and-mind. (Doing) philosophy with young people.

In the second blog in this series I noted that some youth work authors value and promote the opportunities youth work offers (and the obligations it carries) to explore with young people questions of the Good, living well, how one lives a good life. Ord (2014), citing Kerry Young (2006), argues that ‘youth work’s job is to assist young people to negotiate the morally textured landscape’ and ‘enable young people to make judgments and take action’. This blog explores some of the key underpinnings and themes of Chinese Philosophy that offer fruitful foundations, touchstones and ideas for exploring questions that conventionally sit within the ‘doing’ of moral philosophy with young people.
11 December 2025

Young people and the ‘biocultural politics’ of young people’s voice in the Anthropocene

James Goring, Peter Kelly and Seth Brown, have just published an Open Access article - Young people and the 'biocultural politics' of voice in the Anthropocene - in the journal Children's Geographies.
10 December 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #7 Wandering at Ease in the World

This blog, building on previous blogs, considers a number of ideas from Chinese philosophy that might provide some answers to questions such as how may we live well, and live true to ourselves? In particular it explores the writings of Zhuangzi and what it means to be, and to experience happiness. I will demonstrate how Zhuangzi’s description and analysis from more than 2300 years ago of people’s futile striving for happiness in frenzied activity and grasping after stuff rings very modern.
4 December 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #6 A gardener in the garden of the Dao

For the past half century or more there has been a growing recognition among environmental philosophers, theorists, and activists that we need to move beyond ‘old modes of thought’, such as anthropocentricism and ‘man-nature dualism’, to inhabit a new worldview that is capable of effectively responding to the crisis of the Anthropocene. In this blog I engage with scholarship that has Identifies a corrupted relationship to nature that is grounded and enmeshed in the belief in human dominion over nature - a relationship established within the early history of western thought. In this context, and in thinking about how to 'do' you work, a growing number of authors have explored the significance of the Daoist worldview in relation to nature, to promote the potential of Chinese philosophy to contribute to the ‘reevaluation of values’ necessary for the development of solutions to the planetary crisis.
27 November 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #5 Philosophy, young people and making a home in the world

Young people find themselves corralled into individualised lives, in precarious employment, with mortgaged futures, engendering anxiety, despondency, loss of hope. Acknowledging these burdens, and while not retreating from the need to engage with the world and its labours, the question becomes: how to achieve this without a fracturing of the self? How to find peace, rest, authentic connection, spiritual connectedness, and meaning to live authentic lives? In this blog I examine how Chinese, particularly Daoist, philosophy allows for people to be at once in the world, to treasure its abundance and complexity, and to be at the same time unentangled, un-troubled by the ‘dust’ - the noise and fuss (Minford 2019) - of the world.
21 November 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #4 Breaking into song: Modalities and imaginaries of Chinese philosophical traditions.

In this blog, in acknowledging the difficulties and ethical dilemmas created by working within a philosophical tradition that is rarely interpreted, understood, or worked with on its own terms (Ames 2017), I explore the ways that the philosophical imaginaries and modes of Chinese philosophical traditions may nevertheless augment the repository of resources and ‘thinking tools’ of youth work. If we accept youth worker and author Kerry Young’s (2006) proposition that youth work is to a significant degree about ‘doing moral philosophy’ with young people, the question becomes: what are the foundations and tools required for such philosophising?
13 November 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #3: A frog in the well surveys the ocean of Chinese philosophy

In this blog I provide a brief background to the development of classical Chinese philosophy, and outline some key ideas that I will draw on in later discussions. Introducing key ideas from Daoist and Confucian traditions I suggest that "Essentially, all the philosophers of ancient China addressed themselves to the same problem: how is man to live in a world dominated by chaos, suffering, and absurdity? (Watson 2013)
6 November 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #2: A philosophy for/of youth work

Philosophy, as a resource for thinking through questions of youth work, has been recognised by a number of youth work writers drawing, for example, on philosophical concepts, particularly in moral philosophy, to explore questions relating to the central purpose of youth work. In this blog I explore how Aristotelian traditions in particular have opened up productive avenues for thinking about the purpose, and the doing of youth work. While there has been an occasional reference to other traditions, for example Buddhist, Confucius/Confucianism, the Chinese philosopher Mencius, (and recognising that there is a rich tradition of youth work with/in indigenous and other culturally relevant traditions), the ‘philosophical turn’ in youth work literature has been fundamentally grounded in the concepts, methods and language of the Western philosophical tradition.
30 October 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

‘The net of heaven is vast, vast…’ Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene. #1: Introduction

 In the following series of blogs I draw on and develop ideas I presented in a chapter for the collection Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene (2022). Acknowledging and building on a growing interest in the contribution of philosophy to youth work, I explore the potential of Chinese philosophical traditions as a resource for thinking about, and through, questions of youth work and various forms of work with young people in the Anthropocene.
24 October 2025
Uncategorized

On Charlie Kirk, #3. Young People and the Culture Wars on US Campuses

In this note on Charlie Kirk I continue curating a variety of resources to capture some of the ways in which Charlie Kirk performed as ‘Charlie Kirk’, and the techniques and strategies he used in this performance. I am also interested in surveying some of the commentary on why Charlie Kirk was so popular with so many young people – largely in the US in terms of his on-campus performances, but also globally in terms of his reach and impact on various platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and X.
22 September 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Net Zero Futures, 2035 Emissions Targets, and Climate Wars

On September 18, 2025 the Australia’s Government released its policy framework to achieve its 2035 emissions target and path to net zero by 2050 – as it is required to do as signatory to the Paris 2015 Climate Agreement. Predictably, the Liberal and National Party Coalition in opposition, and the Murdoch owned News Corp media outlets (newspapers and Sky News), were outraged by doomsday scenarios for Australia’s economy. The policy framework was based in, and developed from, Australia’s Climate Change Authority's 2035 Emissions Target report. As a matter of record, and as a means to more widely circulate the evidence, sources and methodologies that produced the 2035 Emissions Targets, we present a comprehensive summary of that report.
19 September 2025
Uncategorized

On Charlie Kirk, #2. ‘As you sow, so shall you reap?’

We do not want to become fixated on Charlie Kirk and the aftermath of his killing. But as Resistor Vic observes in a video we repost here, now is not the time for silence. What we see writ large in this saga of hate, division and violence are the consequences of the processes of ‘enhittification’ that we have been writing about in recent months, and which we will continue to not be silent on.
17 September 2025
Uncategorized

On Charlie Kirk, #1

Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping. Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media (Chris Stein and Dani Anguiano, The Guardian, Friday 12 Sep 2025). Jesse Wells is an American singer-songwriter: "for all of the bile...the bold talk...the venom...the hate and the lies...no one should be killed...no blood should be spilled...Charlie shouldn't have died".
12 September 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

The Problem of Young People and Uncertain Futures?

James Goring and Peter Kelly have just had their new book – Young People and the Problem of Uncertain Futures – published by Routledge in the series Youth, Young Adulthood and Society.
8 September 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Youth Research and the Absurdities of the Neoliberal University

In early 2019 I published a blog on The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Youth Thematic Group blog that was titled On the Absurdity of…(Youth Studies). I returned to this blog, and the sentiments that shaped it, in a recent presentation as part of Deakin University, School of Education, Research Methodologies in Education: Conversations with Professors series. My aim in the work I refer to is not to somehow banish or move beyond this absurdity. Rather, my interests lie in exploring ways in which it is possible to re-imagine, even re-enchant a sociological imagination for the Anthropocene within these labour process and work practices that continue to shape institutionalised, intellectual knowledge production.
26 August 2025
Young People and Digital Disruption

In Conversation with ChatGPT about Ulrich Beck’s The Risk Society, and the ‘Value Proposition of the Human’ in the Age of Machine Intelligences.

Sitting in a cafe on a beautiful autumnal Saturday afternoon. Go to pay. The young guy asks "So, what have you got on for the rest of the day?" I say "I've been chatting to ChatGPT about the AI apocalypse, so I'll finish that off..." The look on his face!!
2 June 2025
Young People and Digital Disruption

Can Education Survive the Age of Machine Intelligences?

In this blog I want to introduce and review a recent essay from The New Yorker on the future of the humanities titled 'Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?'. D. Graham Burnett is concerned with the ways in which machine intelligences are forcing ‘us’ to rethink the ‘value proposition’ that ‘humans’ bring to any relationship, setting or practice - including the settings and practices of all educational systems and institutions that have little to do with authoritarian paranoias about freedoms of thought and speech.
27 May 2025
Young People and Digital Disruption

Reflexively Reading ‘Adolescence’ as Allegory

In what follows, we develop a critical, but affective, reading of the Netflix series ‘Adolescence’, and consider what it might reveal - literally and allegorically - about the increasingly powerful influence of the 'enshittification' of platform economies in shaping young men and women’s engagement with each other, with the other, with education, with the world in all its diversity and difference, opportunities and possibilities, inequalities and inequities.
23 May 2025
Young People and Digital Disruption

‘Adolescence’: What Others are Saying

In this blog we want to provide an overview of some of the significant commentary, analysis, and arguments that the series 'Adolescence' has provoked. Given the limited space we will provide an admittedly selective survey of these commentaries, and we also provide links to a number of the resources that we cannot discuss in this blog.
8 April 2025
Young People and Digital Disruption

‘Adolescence’: A Blue River of Truth?

In this series of blogs we explore the ways in which the concept of ‘enshittification’ can be used to foreground concerns with the increasingly powerful influence of platform economies in shaping young men and women’s engagement with the world in all opportunities and possibilities, inequalities and inequities. We will do this via a critical reading of the Netflix series 'Adolescence' to add to existing community, political and scholarly work on such things as the ‘manosphere’, ‘toxic masculinity’, young people’s identities, the crises of capitalism, and the politics of identity.
2 April 2025

Enshittification and the World Wide Dead

This video-based case study attempts to delineate some of the ways that “enshittification” impacts, distorts, and shapes the formation of youth identity.
23 March 2025
Uncategorized

A Deeper Dive into Enshittification

In a previous blog we introduced Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’ to capture some of our concerns with the ways that social, cultural, economic and political processes appear to be increasingly characterised by various forms of racism, misogyny, proto-fascist, ‘strong man’ politics, and denials of the climate crisis and mass extinctions associated with crises in the dominant model of neoliberal global capitalism. In this blog we want to take a deeper dive into what this metaphor offers for thinking about a range of things beyond Doctorow’s original coining of the term.
21 March 2025
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

New Book. On the Problem of Foundation Skills and the Futures of Work

Our new book - 'On the Problem of Foundation Skills and the Futures of Work' - provides an analysis of how global capitalism, digital disruption, and new worlds of work have reshaped ideas about language, literacy and numeracy (foundation) skills in a neoliberal foundation skills apparatus in Australia since the 1980s.
19 March 2025
Young People and the Climate Crisis

On Trump, Authoritarianism, Plutocracy, and the Enshittification* of the Promise for Regenerative and Just Futures for Young People

This blog – which we plan to be the first in an ongoing series of commentary, suggestions, curation of resources, strategies and responses – is a means for us, and our colleagues who we invite to participate, to not ‘turn away’ from that which confronts us at this time, as Trump and his cohort of ‘plutocrats’, and ‘tech-bros’, and far-right fellow travellers in the US and elsewhere are seeking to impose themselves on our lives.
27 February 2025
Education and the SDGs

New Book: The Cultural Politics of Education, Inclusion and Pluralism in Postcolonial Pakistan

Drawing on my personal and professional experiences growing up and working in Pakistan, this book offers a compelling analysis of education’s promise to achieve inclusive, pluralistic and sustainable societies. These globally shared challenges are examined through a detailed analysis of the cultural politics of education in postcolonial Pakistan, that reveal the ways that the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, neocolonialism, globalisation and forms of extremism continue to present significant challenges for postcolonial Pakistan.
16 January 2025
Education and the SDGs

New Book: Educational Leadership and Education for Sustainable Development in Postcolonial Pakistan

This book draws on my extensive personal, professional and research experience to analyses the key challenges and opportunities educational leaders face in realising the promise of quality education for all. Situated in a close analysis of Aga Khan Schools in Chitral District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, the book explores the colonial legacies and lingering neocolonial influences on postcolonial Pakistan’s development and education.
6 January 2025
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Informal Workers and a Political Economy of Lifelong Learning: Provocations from the Margins of Global Capitalism

Our new book analyses the political economies of lifelong learning in regional and global contexts; provides innovative models, concepts, analysis and theoretical contributions to academic and policy debates; and brings together research and evidence from the fields of education, sociology and political economy.
4 December 2024
Education and the SDGs

New Book: The Problem of Girls’ Education in Postcolonial Pakistan

This book draws on my extensive policy and research experience about the issues and challenges concerning girls’ education in the postcolonial context of Pakistan. Building on this policy and research experience I focus on gender, education, development and rurality in Balochistan province in Pakistan.
1 November 2024
Geelong

The Biocultural Politics of Young People’s Voice in the Anthropocene

At the 16th European Sociological Association (ESA) conference in Porto (Portugal), James presented a paper which considers how different, speculative modes of storytelling, can provide productive and critical ways to rethink some of the key frameworks that underpin ideas about young people’s ‘voice’.
18 September 2024
Geelong

Crisis + Change + Growing Up in Geelong

The mini-documentary captures the stories of a number of young people in Geelong and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermaths on young people's lives. In watching the video you should look out for the ways in which Carmen, Brandon, Hannah, Mackenzie, Madeline, Jack, James, Emilie, Marisa, Elliot, Josh and Edie, reflect on a number of issues and how some of them experience significant change during this time.
16 August 2024
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Mechanisms that Capture and Incorporate Student Voice into Vocational Education and Training Design

We – Seth Brown, Scott Phillips, and James Goring, – have just published a report titled, Mechanisms that capture and incorporate student voice into vocational education and training design: Strategies, tools and approaches - Evidence from Australia and the Wider World The report is available here.
14 August 2024

Rethinking young people’s aspirations in times of crisis: stories of futures from a de-industrialising city

We have just published an open access article in the British Journal of Sociology of Education titled, "Rethinking young people’s aspirations in times of crisis: stories of futures from a de-industrialising city". The article is available for free download.
15 May 2024

Reflections on Doing Video Based Interviews With Young People

In this video/blog we reflect on some of the technological and ethical challenges and opportunities that come from using video-capture technologies in research with young people. We also consider some of the reasons why young people might feel more comfortable consuming digital video content rather than producing content. Finally, we highlight the powerful possibilities for engaging young people in these ways – not only in terms of research, but also where stakeholders want to promote young people’s participation and voice.
14 March 2024
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Reengaging Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) young people in the senior years of schooling: the promise of ‘wild pedagogies’: Part 4

Part Four of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Grace McKerras explores the proposition that ‘wild pedagogies’, as an element of a wider framework of regenerative education, have the potential to reengage CALD young people in the senior years of schooling.
4 December 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Reengaging Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) young people in the senior years of schooling: the promise of ‘wild pedagogies’: Part 3

Part Three of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Grace McKerras explores the proposition that ‘wild pedagogies’, as an element of a wider framework of regenerative education, have the potential to reengage CALD young people in the senior years of schooling.
1 December 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Reengaging Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) young people in the senior years of schooling: the promise of ‘wild pedagogies’: Part 2

Part Two of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Grace McKerras explores the proposition that ‘wild pedagogies’, as an element of a wider framework of regenerative education, have the potential to reengage CALD young people in the senior years of schooling.
29 November 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Reengaging Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) young people in the senior years of schooling: the promise of ‘wild pedagogies’

Part One of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Grace McKerras explores the proposition that ‘wild pedagogies’, as an element of a wider framework of regenerative education, have the potential to reengage CALD young people in the senior years of schooling.
27 November 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Young people’s health and well-being in a state of perma-crisis: Exploring the promise of regenerative education: Part 4

Part Four of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Alison Read explores how a regenerative education approach can support young people's health and wellbeing in a time of permacrisis.
23 November 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Young people’s health and well-being in a state of perma-crisis: Exploring the promise of regenerative education: Part 3

Part Three of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Alison Read explores how a regenerative education approach can support young people's health and wellbeing in a time of permacrisis.
21 November 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Young people’s health and well-being in a state of perma-crisis: Exploring the promise of regenerative education: Part 2

Part Two of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Alison Read explores how a regenerative education approach can support young people's health and wellbeing in a time of permacrisis.
17 November 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Young people’s health and well-being in a state of perma-crisis: Exploring the promise of regenerative education

Part One of a four-part blog series in which YPSFL Research Associate Alison Read explores how a regenerative education approach can support young people's health and wellbeing in a time of permacrisis.
15 November 2023
Uncategorized

Israel, Hamas and Young People as Terrorist Targets

Hamas' terrorist attacks in Israel, and the Israeli response, are leading to the deaths of thousands of children and young people. But our hope should be that more moderate voices can emerge during these volatile times. There are moderate Israelis that are appalled at the violence and oppression that is perpetrated by the Israeli state just as there are moderate Palestinians that are appalled at Hamas’ actions and seek to recognise Israel and dream of a two-state solution. These voices must be heard and embraced amidst a 24-hour news cycle that adores the most extreme events and the most volatile opinions.
6 November 2023

Hope…in Others

In this blog, I want to introduce an essay, The Hope of Public Philosophy, by Yarran Hominh. What is of interest in this essay, is Hominh’s suggestion that we move from thinking of hope as a futures oriented, object or outcome focused disposition. And to imagine hope as something that we invest in others, and in the possibilities of our relationships with others. My sense is that this is something that we routinely do, but which we don’t think of explicitly in these terms. Nor do we often consider what it might mean to think of hope in these terms, and how thinking of hope in these ways might guide collective responses to the ‘hopelessness of our times’.
28 October 2023

Against Optimism

This blog is about trying to think about what the vast amount of evidence - that continues to pile up as the first quarter of the 21st century winds down - of humankind’s history of seemingly endless capacity for irrationality, greed, violence, hatred, intolerance, prejudice, and bigotry, and continued inaction in the midst of the crises of climate, mass extinction and capitalism, means for the very idea of human progress and the suggestion that it bends towards justice.
16 October 2023
Geelong

Geelong’s Little Malop Street Mall: public space and patterns of disadvantage in a post-industrial city: Part 2

In this two-part blog series, we tell a story about Geelong's Little Malop Street Mall, an area of public space in the heart of Geelong's CBD. We explore what this story reveals about the status of public space in the 21st century, and the dynamics of social and economic inequality in the post-industrial city of Geelong.
5 October 2023

Generation Dread: Young People’s Mourning for Futures Lost

In this blog, we discuss a recent article by Mikkel Krause Frantzen who explores a range of emotional responses that he identifies as being possible, even widespread, in the context of individual and collective mourning for the things – species, climate conditions, eco-systems, biomes – that we are losing, or are at risk of losing, as the Holocene collapses.
1 October 2023
Geelong

Geelong’s Little Malop Street Mall: public space and patterns of disadvantage in a post-industrial city

The first in a series of two blog posts in which we tell a story about Geelong's Little Malop Street Mall, an area of public space in the heart of Geelong's CBD. We explore what this story reveals about the status of public space in the 21st century, and the dynamics of social and economic inequality in the post-industrial city of Geelong.
28 September 2023

Dithering as the Holocene Collapses: The Legacy We Are Leaving Young People and Future Generations

As the Holocene collapses, and the Anthropocene appears increasingly to be baked into the next thousands of years with catastrophic consequences for earth systems and planetary life, we continue with business-as-usual and place young people's futures in peril.
15 September 2023
Geelong

Young People and the Challenge of ‘Living Well’ in the Anthropocene

In previous posts on this blog, we introduced the stories of Daisy and Elijah, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. In the third and final blog post in this series, we develop a discussion around some of the important themes that emerge from Daisy and Elijah's stories.
19 July 2023
Geelong

Elijah’s story

The second in a series of three blogs in which we explore the stories of Daisy and Elijah, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. We consider what these stories provoke us to think about, in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges for young people of 'living well' in the Anthropocene.
12 July 2023
Geelong

Daisy’s story

The first in a series of three blogs in which we explore the stories of Daisy and Elijah, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. We consider what these stories provoke us to think about in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges for young people of 'living well' in the Anthropocene.
5 July 2023
Geelong

Deindustrialisation, youth unemployment, and the (broken) promises of education in the 21st century

In previous posts on this blog, we introduced the stories of Madeline and Marisa, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. In the third and final blog post in this series, we develop a discussion around some of the important themes that emerge from Madeline and Marisa’s stories.
12 April 2023
Geelong

Marisa’s story

The second in a series of three blogs in which we feature the stories of Madeline and Marisa, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. We consider what these stories provoke us to think about, and how the stories can make a productive contribution about young people’s hopes and aspirations in post-pandemic Geelong.
29 March 2023
Geelong

Madeline’s Story

The first in a series of three blogs in which we feature the stories of Madeline and Marisa, two of the young people participating in our research in Geelong. We consider what these stories provoke us to think about, and how the stories can make a productive contribution about young people’s hopes and aspirations in post-pandemic Geelong.
22 March 2023
Geelong

James’ Story

James is a young man from the Geelong region who spoke with us during 2021 and 2022, about his hopes and aspirations about the future – for the planet, his community, and himself.
8 March 2023

Young People and the Moral Obligation to be Enterprising and Aspirational in Times of Crisis

We (James Goring, Peter Kelly, Diego Carbajo and Seth Brown) have just published a new paper in the highly ranked, international journal Futures. The article is titled Young People’s Presents and Futures, and the Moral Obligation to be Enterprising and Aspirational in Times of Crisis.
6 February 2023

‘Being young’, ‘living well’, in/beyond the pandemic

We (Peter Kelly, Seth Brown and James Goring) have just had a chapter published in a new international collection - Wellbeing: Global Policies and Perspectives, Insights from Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond - edited by Annelies Kamp, Cheryl Brown, Trish McMenamin, and Veronica O’Toole. The chapter is titled ‘Being young’, ‘living well’, in/beyond the pandemic: Exploring the entanglements between COVID-19, the Anthropocene and young people’s wellbeing.
3 February 2023
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Intergenerational Justice, the Climate Crisis and Young People’s Futures

In the context of the climate crisis, current ideas about intergenerational justice are focussed on contemporary populations of young people, and as yet un-born generations, and the futures that our past and present actions will visit on these generations.
8 September 2022
Geelong

Young People’s Voices and Participation and the Beginnings of ‘Co-Design’

In their recent book – Youth rising?: The politics of youth in the global economy – Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock (2014, p. 143) reflect on the problematic character of young people’s voices and participation in movements against such things as the climate crisis, war, and racism, and their encounters with the institutionalised promise of ‘youth participation’.
10 March 2022
Geelong

Young People’s Mental Health and Well-being in the Pandemic

Throughout the different waves and stages and responses to the pandemic there has been much commentary about the impacts of the crisis on the health and well-being of young people, including from agencies such as the National Youth Commission, YACVic and Mission Australia.
9 March 2022
Geelong

Aspiration and Young People’s Sense of their Futures in the Time of COVID

8 March 2022
Geelong

Introduction: Young People’s Aspirations, Health and Well-being and Voices in Geelong During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In a series of blogs we will provide an outline of three of the key themes that have emerged during the first year (2021) of a three (3) year project that we are conducting in Geelong, Victoria’s (AUSTRALIA) second largest city.
8 March 2022
Inner North of Melbourne

COVID-19 and young people’s ‘Future Presents’: lockdown stories from the Anthropocene

31 January 2022
Young People and the Climate Crisis

School Strikes for Climate: Young People, Dissent and Collective Identities in/for the Anthropocene

23 January 2022
Inner North of Melbourne

Ash’s Story

21 October 2021
Geelong

COVID, Lockdowns and Young People’s Mental Health and Well-being: A Perspective From Geelong

6 October 2021
Young People and the Climate Crisis

Blah, Blah, Blah: Young People, the Climate Crisis, Hope and the ‘Dithering’ of Adults

5 October 2021
Young People and Digital Disruption

Young People as Biocultural Creatures: Re-imagining Sociologies of Young People’s Well-being

5 October 2021
Inner North of Melbourne

Bella’s Story

4 October 2021
Inner North of Melbourne

Connor’s Story

4 October 2021
Inner North of Melbourne

Carmen’s Story

4 October 2021
Inner North of Melbourne

Rosie’s Story

4 October 2021
Young People and Technical and Vocational Education and Training

Contemporary Issues in Applied Learning and Vocational Education and Training (VET)

In this blog I condense a number of key ideas that we have been exploring about young people, education and futures in the Age of Machine Intelligences.