Researching race in Australian youth studies

Abstract

This paper seeks to historicise the formation of youth studies in Australia with a specific focus on how the absence of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and other race critical and postcolonial scholars has produced particular research cultures, trajectories and traditions that have thus far made it difficult to incorporate race and ethnicity as central to an Australian youth studies agenda, both theoretically and methodologically. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples of how racialisation plays out in Australia, it will be argued youth studies, as a field, needs to respond to how race as a complex, global, structural phenomenon comes to bear on the development of young people’s identity making, life choices and lived experiences a necessary scholarly development.