Understanding Youth: Beyond Myths and Moral Panics

This panel aims to develop reflexive perspectives on youth and youth research. It will discuss the challenges of understanding youth since the dominant discourses around youth are most of the time referring to myths or moral panics around youth. In the first part of the panel, Demet Lüküslü is discussing youth as an ambivalent category either seen as the future of the society or as a threat. The case of youth in Turkey will be discussed as an ambivalent and heterogeneous category. In the second part of the panel Annegret Warth is pointing out pitfalls of eurocentric youth research. She will share learnings on non-essentialist approaches she aquired during her research on Youth in Istanbul as a youth researcher from Germany.

Demet Lüküslü, Yeditepe University Sociology Department: Ambivalences of Youth: “Youth as the future” or “Youth as a threat”?

Annegret Warth, Education Management at City of Stuttgart: Dealing with Ambivalences of Youth as a Youth Resarcher: Eurocentrism and non-essentialist research approaches

Demet Lüküslü is Professor of Sociology at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey where she is also working as the chair of the department. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France in 2005. She is the author of Türkiye’de “Gençlik Miti”: 1980 Sonrası Türkiye Gençliği (The “myth of youth” in Turkey: The post-1980 youth in Turkey) (İletişim Yayınları, 2009) and of Türkiye’nin 68’i: Bir Kuşağın Sosyolojik Analizi (Turkey’s 68: The Sociological Analysis of a Generation). She is also the co-editor of the edited volume in Turkish as Gençlik Halleri: 2000’li Yıllar Türkiyesi’nde Genç Olmak (The States of Youth: To be young in Turkey of the year 2000s) (Efil Yayınları, 2013). Her areas of research include youth studies, social movements, sociology of everyday life, sociology of education, cultural studies and internet studies.

Annegret Warth has a strong background in academia, civil society and administration. She works at the interface between youth, education and diplomacy by merging local, national and international perspectives on formal and non-formal education. Annegret has studied Educational Science at Tübingen University, Marburg University and Bosporus University in Istanbul. She holds a PHD in International Youth Research from Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.

At Stuttgart Municipality, she coordinates a network which aims to mainstream Education for Sustainable Development by encouraging intersectoral cooperation between education, civil society and administration. In her academic work, Annegret has developed a non-essentialist approach to overcome Eurocentric research on youth in the Global South. She is an associate researcher at Goethe University of Frankfrut an is a member of the Global Diplomacy Lab. As a 2018/19 Mercator-IPC Fellow, she has explored potentials of local youth policy and youth participation in Turkey. She has formerly worked as a research and teaching fellow at Goethe-University in Frankfurt and as a youth worker at the Youth Studies Unit of Istanbul Bilgi University.

Deniz Arzuk 

“The End of Childhood?
Moral Panics over Childhood in Turkey and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s and 1990s, the news coverage about children in the mass media was marked by a series of moral panics about children. In many of these panics, the disappearance of childhood-as-we-know-it had been a recurring theme, but with different explanations about which aspects of childhood was lost, and why. Based on a comparative reading of news texts published in mainstream newspapers in Turkey and Britain, this talk will introduce some central themes and trends, as well as similarities and differences between these two contexts. The aim is to discuss how these texts framed the “end of childhood” and to raise questions about how representations of childhood define who is a child. This talk is an output of the European Commission funded MSCA project CHIBRIT “Is There No Such Thing As Childhood? New Childhoods in Britain and Turkey between 1976 and 1997” which investigates the changing ideas about children and childhood that emerged in response to the shared global processes of this period of rapid social change.

Yvonne Petrina
Kinder-Akademie Fulda

Hands-On and Interdisciplinary Experience: Out-Of-School Learning at Kinder-Akademie Fulda

Kinder-Akademie Fulda is Germany’s oldest children’s museum. It was established in 1991 and run privately until it was taken over by the town of Fulda in 2020. The museum’s approaches towards learning are interdisciplinary, which allows its visitors a new, holistic experience. Many methods applied by the museum are unique and have been proven successful. They have often been copied by other German and European museums and children’s academies. It is, thus, well worth to look at Fulda when it comes to out-of-school learning, even in an international context.