Researcher Highlights
The kids are alright

Steven Threadgold is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology, in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Newcastle.

VIDEOHow did you get into youth sociology?

Worried that the youth of today are lazy, irresponsible and narcissistic? You can relax, says Associate Professor Steven Threadgold, a youth sociologist with a focus on class, inequality, and culture.

Spoiled by overly busy parents and allergic to saving money or hard work, young people are apparently more interested in scoffing overpriced brunches in bespoke eateries than future planning.

At least that’s what the media tells us.

Unlike many who espouse vehement opinions on young people, Steve is interested in challenging these moral panics with research about their actual lives.

He does so by working directly with young people to learn how class affects their opportunities, attitudes and cultural activities.

VIDEO Figures of Youth

Since completing his PhD in 2009, Steve has attracted global attention for his work in youth sociology.

He is Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre digital editor of the Journal of Youth Studies, and on the editorial boards of The Sociological Review, DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society and Journal of Applied Youth Studies.

VIDEOWhy is youth sociology important?

Young people and fintech

Steve’s current research investigates how young people’s financial practices are shaped by their use of new financial technologies (fintech).

Young people form the primary target consumer base of an array of fintech products including buy-now-pay-later services (BNPL), cryptocurrencies, NFTs, blockchain and mortgages, share trading and gambling apps.

“In the current economic context young people must individually try to plan their lives by stitching together the means to make a living while service the debts they need to accrue on the way”, he says.

“They are doing so not just by relying on traditional sources of income related to family, education and employment, but by using and strategising with these new fintech products”.

With his colleagues in the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, he is looking at the everyday financial practices of young people.

He says, “Young people are negotiating a growing array of digitalised financial options while strategising for their future, resulting in the emergence of investment and gambling orientations towards their own future."

They are also working on how fintech companies and platforms use gamification features, and AI and algorithms to sort, profile and target young people.

These ‘background’ machinations of fintech companies’ data gathering, sorting and classifying techniques are not readily accessible or available to the general population.

“But what we do know is that these technologies replicate real world sexist, racist, geographical and class inequalities. The ramifications of this may be that inequality is increasingly automated and dehumanised, as per the Robodebt fiasco, and people will be included or excluded in ways that we will not even know about until it is too late," he says.

Youth, class and everyday struggles

His research monograph Youth, Class, And Everyday Struggles draws on ideas of affective economies, reflexivity and the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

In 2020, it won The Australian Sociological Association’s Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book.

VIDEOWhy do you use Bourdieu in your research?

Despite media and even some youth researchers' efforts to describe young people as passive dupes, Steve’s work argues young people are actually in a constant reflexive struggle to respond to circumstances not always of their own making.

“My approach recognises that young people's lives can be shaped by economic forces and by classed symbolic and moral boundaries,” Steve says.

In the book, Steve uses the work of Bourdieu to critically examine specific transitions and cultural phenomena in two case studies.

One case study dissects the proclivity of the media and comedy to invoke the labels ‘hipster’ and ‘bogan’ to implicitly delineate class, without ever mentioning class.

VIDEOHipsters and Bogans as Figures of Class

The other draws on Steve’s study of young DIY punks and creatives across Australia.

Quite often opting out of the ‘normal’ trajectory of leaving school, doing more study and embarking on a ‘career’, these young people choose a life of voluntary poverty for the sake of artistic passions and ethical concerns, all the while navigating the insecurity this situation creates.

His book Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities developed this research to help conceptually understand how our emotions in everyday moments contribute to the construction and remaking of social class and aspects of inequalities.

Young people and the hospitality industry

VIDEOAffective Labour and Young People Working in Bars

With Dr David Farrugia and Associate Professor Julia Coffey, Steve worked on an ARC-funded project on young people, precarity, and affective labour.

Through a study of 'front of house' service labour in Melbourne and Newcastle, the team illuminated the challenges young people face in an ever increasingly transient and exploitative labour market.

“A huge amount of young people work in the service industry and so we are interviewed young people who work in bars, to understand the demands on them,” Steve says.

“We are looking at the concepts of affective and immaterial labour, which are theories about how capitalism isn't just about extracting the value out of your work, it is actually extracting the value out of your very subjectivity, extracting value from who you are.”

“They feel very at home in that bar and that creates a vibe which attracts the actual customers that are like that person,” he says.

“And that's a key part of how that bar scene works. There is a whole lot of pleasure involved in this work as well, along with the basic exploitation.”

VIDEOOnline Taste Cultures, Distinction and the Creation of Value

Moving forward

Steve has had a fair amount of lived experience when it comes to the casualisation of the workforce and exploitation of young people within the labour market.

“I did an electrical apprenticeship back in the 90s then had about 27 jobs. Then I played cricket here and overseas, before I came to university to try to become a music or sports journalist,” Steven recalls.

“I soon realised that I liked sociology, did Honours, got offered a PhD scholarship, and never left.”

Asked about his future direction, Steve says he is committed to his path as a youth sociologist.

“The bad faith representations of youth are now well known. The avocado and toast eating young person, apparently too short-term consumer driven to be able to buy a house, despite the average cost of a house going up $1000 per day in Sydney for a while there. Or the apathetic young person, who is endlessly presented as not caring about politics, but when they do get out on the streets such as in global rise of youth-led climate protests, are told that they should be at home concentrating on their schoolwork or careers. Or the apparently lazy young person who cannot get a job when there are usually only tens of thousands of vacancies for hundreds of thousands of unemployed and underemployed people.”

“Ultimately I hope my work can contribute to actually understanding young people’s lives rather than blaming them for things that they have no control over, and that they are often aware and autonomous in their own situations, while recognising the role class plays in the struggles they face to try to create a viable life,” Steven says.

“Class is always going to be important, particularly as inequality is getting worse.”

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