School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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Item'West side' stories: visible difference, gender, class and young people( 2012)The impetus for this thesis emerged from my job as a youth worker and my dissatisfaction with the dominant ways in which young people are discussed and managed as ‘at risk’ and ‘disengaged’. I argue that, far from being disengaged, young people in Melbourne’s western suburbs are engaged in reading the power structures that influence their lives and have developed a range of strategies to operate within and against these classed, ‘raced’ and gendered structures. Throughout this thesis I contend that young people have agency (that is, the ability to act), and argue for young people to be recognised as astute social actors, from whom we can learn much about the way power operates and the strategies people use to live with social inequality. ‘West side’ stories explores how young people experiencing social disadvantage are ‘managed’ in public policy and how they are represented in academia. The qualitative research presented in this thesis problematises the dominant representations, by illustrating the ways in which visible difference, gender and class intersect and how these social divisions shape the lives of young people living in the west – a culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged region of Melbourne. It is argued here that whiteness is marked in the western suburbs and that Anglo-Saxon Australians are also visibly different because of their class location.