The life-course transitions of young women in a Maltese context (original) (raw)
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European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 2019
This paper discusses the ways in which women aged 50, in two different cultural contexts (United Kingdom and Italy) narrate and portray turning points in their life course. Particular emphasis is put on the relationships between identity, learning and agency that emerge through work, family and life experiences. The reference paradigm is adopted from Narrative Learning Theory and the approach is qualitative and comparative in analysing the participant’s voice. For the UK sample, the data sources are 16 semi-structured interviews, including drawings representing the life course, selected from the study deposited in the UK Archives Data under the “Social Participation and Identity” project; for the Italian sample, the data sources are 28 semistructured interviews and drawings, based on the same selected items of the UK interviews and provided by women living in the North-East of Italy. This study will show how women’s representations of their life course and of turning points in their...
This article outlines a qualitative narrative inquiry study conducted within Australia that focussed on a group of female commencing university students, all of whom were the first in their family to pursue higher education. During one year of academic study, seventeen women participated in periodic interviews as each moved through the year. By choosing to ‘travel’ with the students, the study reveals a very different perspective on the student experience, one that is often missing in policy documents and university discourse, which can place these students within a deficit discourse. Instead, by approaching this topic from a strengths perspective, the intent is to highlight how this group persist and engage throughout the year. The semi-structured interviews built upon each other and explored themes related to how the participants managed their university studies in relation to other competing demands in their lives as well as how the students reflected upon the transition to university life and the repercussions that this decision provoked. The participants’ reflections reveal an initial disjuncture with the university environment but as the year proceeds, the narratives highlight changes in personal perceptions, from that of exclusion to inclusion.
2019
The paper discusses the ways in which women aged 50, in two different cultural contexts (Italy and UK) narrate and portray life relationships and events that have influenced their learning and self-development. The reference paradigm is adopted from Narrative Learning Theory and the approach is qualitative and comparative in analysing the participants' voice. This inquiry has shown how women's representations of their life course reveal different propensities to reflect on and learn from their own lives. The research supports the case for approaches that are facilitative of biographical learning to become integral to adult education practices and to the development of adult education practitioners working in areas such as mid-life career change and work-re-entry
Who Wants to be a Woman? Young Women's Reflections on Transitions to Adulthood
Feminist Review, 2004
The focus of this article is on how Finnish young women construct their transitions to adulthood and how they imagine their futures as women. Tensions in this process are analysed: many young women want to accelerate their shifts towards independent adult status. At the same time, some of them attempt to postpone the point of being locked into the lives of adult women. They look forward to acquiring the legal status of an adult citizen and to moving to homes of their own. But they want to stay young, which means time for relationships, studying, work and travel, and definitely not children at an early age. Being an adult woman does not seem to be a very tempting position for some young women; being a girl is considered by them to open more possibilities. Those young women who are keener to embrace female adulthood are also discussed, focusing on ways in which they envisage their futures, and what contradictions they experience. These tensions are explored drawing from the research project 'Tracing Transitions F Follow-Up Study of Post-16 Students'. In the study, 40 young women and 23 young men aged around 18 years were interviewed individually, in paris or in groups of three. The project is grounded on ethnographic research in which the same young people were followed when they started secondary school at the age of 13 years.
“Doing Transitions”: A New Research Perspective
Life Course Research and Social Policies
Life courses and the transitions that mark them are highly complex phenomena of social reproduction. Past research has been driven by institutional actors and policymakers concerned with mitigating problems such as social disadvantage and risks of exclusion. It has tried to reduce complexity to make it easier to observe and measure the effects of transitions on individual life trajectories. This chapter joins several other recent attempts to better address the complexities of life course by introducing a new framework – Doing Transitions – for understanding life course transitions, which also provides a foundation for the chapters of this book. This framework is inspired by a praxeological perspective, which takes as its starting point the proposition that transitions do not simply exist but are constantly constituted through social practices and the interrelation of social discourses, institutional regulation, and individual processes of learning, education, and coping. After descr...
Agency, Learning and Identity in Women’s Life Trajectories
Savoirs, 2016
Drawn from the longitudinal panel research of the National Child Development Study (NCDS), a sample of 110 women aged fifty years old from England, Scotland and Wales were interviewed as part of the Social Participation and Identity sub-project. They were invited to tell their life stories, to give a self-definition of identity and to describe the turning points in their lives. They were also invited to choose a visual representation of their life trajectories, either selecting from 8 given figures with the possibility of drawing their own version. We analyse the resulting life course diagrams which were drawn, focusing on self representations in which agency and learning are reflected in the associated personal narratives on turning points. Emphasis is given to the links between agency and learning and identity development within the perspective of the life trajectories. qui symbolisaient le mieux leur vie, avec la possibilité d'esquisser par eux-mêmes la trajectoire de vie. On va explorer les diagrammes du parcours de vie tracés par 31femmes, sans l'aide des huit modèles offerts. Le choix de réaliser sa propre trajectoire est donc étudié comme une forme d'expression de soi, voir d'autodéfinition de l'identité personnelle qui sollicite des formes d'agentivité et de responsabilité. En particulier, on focalise l'attention sur 16 autoreprésentations de l'identité dans lesquelles l'agentivité et la capacité d'apprendre sont différemment affirmées dans les histoires de vie racontées dans les entretiens.
Biography and gender in youth transitions
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2006
In this chapter, the author argues for the essential role of "doing gender" in the transition of young people from education to the labor market. Two relevant concepts are introduced: biographicity and gender competence. They are illustrated with a female and a male case.
The transitions to adulthood of young people with multiple disadvantages
New Youth, 2006
This chapter examines the implications of these issues for young people’s expectations and self-perceptions, with reference to a group of multiply disadvantaged young people in the UK. It draws upon qualitative research with disadvantaged young people at a stage in their lives (post-compulsory education) when they were expecting to have to made significant transitions from school to work, into their own housing, and in terms of personal relationships and family formation (Lakey et al., 2001). Semi-structured biographical interviews were employed, using a detailed topic guide. While this provided a comparable context for the research, tracking young people’s progress through key transitions (Thomson et al., 2004), the format of the interviews varied, with interviewers employing probes and prompts to ensure that the research process reflected and explored the diverse and individual circumstances of young people’s lives.
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2021
The article presents some of the first results obtained during a qualitative longitudinal research on being young in Italy, begun in 2019, promoted by the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milano- Bicocca. The paper aims at contributing to the study of the life trajectories of young men and women as they deal with a transition to adulthood that appears suspended, especially in relation to the economic, social and cultural fractures determined by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. By focusing on life experiences and life courses in Italy, the paper analyses how transition is strongly affected by the geographical, cultural, social and economic contexts in which the biographies of the young people interviewed are immersed. Furthemore, the article explores the subjective meanings they ascribe to those contexts. Firstly, the results show that a common feature of the biographies of the young people we encountered is a perception of uncertainty. More specifically, the paper underlines the ambivalent role that geographical context plays in the narrations and biographies of young people. Especially, when it is characterized by scarcity of resources, and therefore, by the impossibility of recognition and realization of personal aspirations. Lastly, the research shows that the sanitary emergency, with the subsequent containment policies, represents a sudden event that amplifies pre-existing conditions, characteristics, and differences, but at the same time, it triggers novel transformations, at a collective as well as individual level.