La Trobe University Agnes Heller Lecture 2024 - Professor Anita Harris

‘Youth belonging: Rethinking transitions, integration & placemaking in a mobile world’

Deakin Distinguished Professor Anita Harris

Belonging has become an increasingly popular focus for youth research and policy, although sometimes its meaning remains elusive because it has a taken-for-granted quality. The growing interest in belonging invites a critical analysis of the work that the concept can do for youth studies. This paper explores belonging as a way to understand the challenges and opportunities for young people to find a place and make a life in a mobile, globalised world where pathways to settled adulthood seem ever more fragmented. It considers some of the key affordances of a belonging approach, focusing particularly on rethinking issues of transition, integration and place making. It argues that a framework of belonging enables youth researchers to ask different questions and move beyond outdated expectations of young people’s progression towards adulthood, integration into citizenship and connection to place in changing times.

Please note the lecture will commence at 9:30am , followed by a complimentary morning tea.

This is a free event, but registration is required.

Unfortunately this event cannot be livestreamed.

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Host or Publisher La Trobe University Sociology Program