Youth, Risk, Routine

Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson is a senior researcher at VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research, Denmark.Signe Ravn is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

This is an important, thoughtful, and original new research monograph about young people and risk. It deserves a wide audience amongst researchers, lecturers, and students; not only is it useful and accessible, it is ambitious and innovative. The authors have combined their own, separate research studies to provide a compelling, expansive, and coherent new approach to understanding young people’s risk-taking practices. Young people are often said to be at risk, or to pose risks to others. Risk is an influential concept in youth research, theory, and policy but it is also complicated, contested, and multi-faceted and used in quite different ways. Bengtsson and Ravn lead us away from individualised, positivistic, normative, choice-heavy, moral-panic infused understandings of risk to a theory that prioritises young people’s shared understandings and their routinized, embodied, socially-contextualised everyday practices. Practices of risk in respect of alcohol and drug use, speeding in motor vehicles, offending, youth culture, violence, partying, and so on are explored through detailed, qualitative vignettes and case studies from the authors’ own research. Bengtsson and Ravn quite rightly locate these insights into the everyday risk practices of young people within a wider analysis of changing patterns of youth transition to adulthood and, in turn, how these relate to changes in the welfare state, society, and economy. Rob MacDonald, Visiting Professor, Danish Centre for Youth Research, University of Aalborg; Adjunct Research Professor, Department of Sociology, Monash UniversityThis is an excellent book that not only takes our understanding of ‘risk’ to new levels but also shows why it should remain central to how we analyses the lives of young people today. A must read for those working in the field of youth sociology’. Alan France, Professor, University of AucklandThis is an insightful book about risk-taking practices amongst young people in Denmark. Bengtsson and Ravn take a fresh look at theories of risk while also drawing on youth sociology to analyse their own empirical data on young people’s risk-taking practices. I will strongly recommend this book for both practitioners and researchers dealing with young people today.Katrine Fangen, Professor, University of Oslo

• Chapter 1. Introduction: why study youth and risk? Chapter 2. Setting the scene: growing up in DenmarkChapter 3. Looking back: ‘risk’ in the sociology of youth Chapter 4. Looking ahead: towards a new framework for analysing youth risk-taking as practiceChapter 5. Being young: risk-taking practices and youth culture Chapter 6. Coordinating practices: risk-taking and everyday lifeChapter 7. Embodying risk-taking: risk, embodiment, and gender Chapter 8. Contextualising risk: risk-taking, youth transitions, and processes of social marginalisationChapter 9. Conclusion: routines of risk in young lives Appendix: The two empirical studies