Introduction

Abstract

This chapter locates the study of youth life writing at the intersection of social sciences and the humanities. It argues that any attempt to account for the life writing practices of young people must draw on the insights and methodologies of youth studies and sociology and literary and cultural studies. This blending of methods and approaches is required if young people’s use of life writing as a discourse and a practice is to be recognised as an important act of self-representation and agency by subjects often marginalised from the fields of social and political power that is shaped by pre-existing cultural practices shaped by genre. We offer three examples of how attention to the social, political and cultural positioning of young people that has been closely studied in youth studies can be placed into a productive dialectic with attention to the textuality of young people’s autobiographical acts.