Care experienced young people: Agency and empowerment

Abstract

Empowerment discourses have become fashionable in current policy and practice relating to young people, including those with care experience. Empowerment, however, is a slippery and contested concept, associated with neo-liberal discourses. An ecological understanding of agency offers more theoretically nuanced understandings of empowerment, taking account of the complex, temporal and relational factors, upon which empowerment is contingent. This paper utilises data generated through an 'empowerment group' for care-experienced young people; it illustrates how an ecological understanding of agency, as a heuristic, might further understanding of the lives of care-experienced young people.

Understanding youth empowerment: a youth participatory action research approach

“…The data the youth collected and their own sensemaking on youth empowerment also contributes to the conceptual debates about empowerment as a complex social phenomenon. Prior studies have problematized the lack of consistency in the way empowerment has been defined and cited a vagueness of the phenomenon and a lack of conceptual refinement (Cattaneo and Chapman, 2010; Priestley, 2020). Though I saw significant consistency across our youth participants, I have come to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon through this study and the usefulness of having a closer look at youth perspectives from generation alpha, which I believe adds even more nuance to the debates.…”

“…This insight is consistent with other research that indicates that fostering youth engagement can have positive effects on youth empowerment (Owen and Irion-Groth, 2020). Imagination combined with agency can generate different perceived trajectories (Priestley, 2020). It gives you some insight into yourself and other people ∼ Youth Researcher.…”