NEET Youth: Experiences, Needs, and Aspirations

Dear Colleagues,

Contemporary generations of youth are contending with considerable challenges in their day-to-day lives and transitions to/through adulthood. Rising living costs, the existential threat of climate change, and the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are compounding ingrained socio-structural problems that acutely impact youth across the globe, including economic downturns, weakened opportunity structures, declining state support, and widening inequalities. Concern is mounting about the living standards and prospects of youth, but young people categorized as NEET (not in employment, education, or training) are often among the most precarious, given their heightened risks of economic insecurity, health marginalization, and socioeconomic disadvantage (see McPherson, 2021). In this Special Issue of Youth, we aim to examine the diverse experiences and perspectives of NEET-experienced young people against the backdrop of this challenging socio-structural context.

‘NEET youth’ have routinely been uncritically characterized as a homogenous bloc. In reality, the NEET label applies to a highly diverse group of young people, reflected in very different backgrounds, experiences, challenges, needs, and aspirations (see Wrigley, 2024). There has also often been a tendency, particularly in policy, to examine ‘NEET youth’ only in relation to their (dis)engagements with education, employment, and training—a reductive, economist lens embodied in the NEET label itself. This Special Issue aims to provide a platform for researchers to share their research with NEET-experienced youth that examines the experiences, needs, challenges, and/or aspirations of this diverse and poorly understood group of young people. We are also interested in including research that transcends a singular focus on the economic transitions of NEET-experienced young people and explores other important and interconnected aspects of their lives and identities, including, for example, a focus on their relationships and access to support, their health and wellbeing, and their imagined futures. We are interested in NEET experiences from the global majority and emerging nations, where such voices are seldom heard in relation to academic research on this topic. We particularly welcome research that draws directly on the perspectives of NEET-experienced young people in exploring these issues.

References

McPherson, C. (2021). Between the rhetoric of employability and the reality of youth (under) employment: NEET policy rhetoric in the UK and Scotland. Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 4(2), 135–152.

Wrigley, L. (2024). “With the pandemic everything changes!”: examining welfare reform and conditionality prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic amongst NEET experienced young people. Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 7(1), 9-25.

Dr. Charlotte McPherson
Dr. Liam Wrigley
Guest Editors

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• NEET (not in employment, education, or training)
• youth
• transitions
• aspirations
• inequalities
• class
• support