Critical Childhood and Youth Studies

This chapter takes a generative stance to the challenge of ‘wicked problems’ in the context of childhood and youth studies. As articulated in Rittel and Webber’s classic article from 1973, wicked problems are those problems which resist ready definition, let alone solution. In the globalized context, childhood and youth studies are replete with such problems, problems that offer no easy solutions, only ideas about how to proceed that are better or worse. At the same time, childhood and youth studies draw on an established hinterland, one evoked by existing methods and arguments. In this chapter we draw on our 2014 collection − A Critical Youth Studies for the twenty-first Century − to illustrate an argument that contemporary times demand new theoretical and practical hinterlands that better acknowledge and respond to complexity. The focus of the chapter – youth transition – offers one example of such a potential hinterland.