Navigational Capacities For Youth Success In Adversity: A Sociology Of Southern Youth

The global South has for too long relied on global North contexts and theories in the sociological study of youth and youth development.  These Northern approaches have centred on US-driven positive youth development focused on dynamic systems, risks and protective factors, and the UK-led socio-cultural approach addressing youth agency, resistance and cultural reproduction. This paper asks two key questions towards a comparative consideration of the sociology of youth: Who are Southern Youth, and in what ways are their lives the same as, or different to their Global North counterparts? and What new tools and language are required in order to make visible these similarities and differences and so bring Southern Youth out of the invisibility of current hegemonic youth studies? Substantially, it offers an alternative nascent framework, that of ‘navigational capacities’ to research and frame a sociology of Southern Youth. Navigational capacities are suggested as specific socio-emotional and material capabilties required for youth living in contexts of adversity to succeed. These capacities, rather than skills, are learnable and are available to young people in the pursuit of success, where success is postulated as the capacity to (1) exert individual agency; (2) obtain, create and invest capitals in their primary proximal contexts of engagement; (3) recognize and analyse the ways in which interconnecting distal contexts such as institutions, practices and policies exert influence to oppose and enable agency; (4) see the way in which power operates through identity markers to restrict participation, and perpetuate domination and poverty; and (5) practice collective agency for civic participation and life cycle transitions. In this regard, the notion of navigational capacities draws together the best emancipatory and context-sensitive elements of both the dynamics systems and socio-cultural approaches to youth studies, and has the potential to make visible (‘deinvisiblise’) the lives of Southern Youth.