Re-Engaging Youth Agency and Resilience in Youth Research

Much of the academic, public and policy discourses on youth development in South Africa tend to give primacy to constraints and risk factors that impact on young people’s wellbeing. The many statistics available on the lives of South African youth indeed indicate that large proportions of youth find themselves in dire situations, faced with severe structural constraints. Nonetheless, an overemphasis on the range of constraints in young people’s lives can lead to the creation of ‘moral panics’, which inadvertently leads to problematising youth from low socio-economic groups as at best victims and at worst deviant. Perceiving youth as mostly, or only, vulnerable may further reinforce a sense of passivity and obscure the understanding of young people as active agents with the power to transform and intervene in their life circumstances. Drawing on empirical data collected through a long history of qualitative research in various parts of the country, this paper illustrates extensively that young people can mitigate the often dire consequences of their risky and constrained environments by tapping into and strengthening their remarkable resilience. The article thus challenges existing literature that assumes young people growing up in poverty, to be only vulnerable or ‘dysfunctional’ and highlights in various ways the resilience and agency that young people continually display. It argues therefore that approaches to youth development should be comprehensive enough to simultaneously address ‘deficiencies’ that need to be rectified and support youth in their resilience and agency. It points to the need for a solid evidence-base that provides a comprehensive and correct understanding of both the structural constraints and individual agency and argues that a lack thereof could have important implications for the success rates of policy and practice aimed at supporting youth development.