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This is a study of youth and urban marginality set in the inner city neighbourhood of St Pauls, Bristol. The study centres on and around a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project undertaken with seven young Black British men aged 15 to 24, over eighteen months in the period immediately before August 2011, when rioting dramatically broke out in several English metropolitan cores, including St Pauls. The research belongs to a literary tradition in the human sciences concerned with oppression and resistance, and draws from ideas across anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural and critical theory more generally. It is postmodern in orientation, but engages politically with the structural inequalities and economic exclusion that shape the young subjectivities at its ethnographic heart. In its positionality, the study tests and extends theories of participation in spaces and categories of marginality under-represented in the existing literature. It also re-politicises mental health, setting in context the behaviours, emotional states, and structure of feeling experienced by a demographic of young men consistently over-represented in acute psychiatric and criminal justice settings. But because the research is dialectical enquiry by participatory ethics, this is as much a study of the oppressors as it is the oppressed, one concerned for the enduring capacity of ideology to insert itself into everyday social, professional and economic relations by various state technologies and interpersonal techniques of power. The voices of the young men in this study de-stabilise our ideas of what and who is healthy and pathological, oppressor and oppressed. In so doing they lay an ethical charge of (in)justice at the door of the state, one that unites their mental health with discourses on social class, participation, citizenship and democracy. Indeed, though marginalised, these are young masculinities made in the image of neoliberalism, and their crystallising economic and psychocultural exclusion is evidence of a social polarisation that will increasingly threaten the basic social contract if left structurally untouched.

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This dissertation compares aspirations and life-choices among highly educated young adults in urban China and Taiwan: places that, at least notionally, share a cultural heritage while having very different political-economic systems. The objective of my research is to assess how the different socioeconomic and political trajectories of China and Taiwan have influenced young people's decision-making and hopes for the future. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic research, I analyze young adults’ choices in the areas of education, career and marriage under consideration of their individual social backgrounds and economic resources. In this context I also discuss how feelings of hope, doubt and disenchantment are mitigated by the specific societal atmospheres and ideological discourses. Whereas stable employment and marriage appeared to be universal goals among my informants, I found that young adults in Beijing had much more autonomy in decision making than those in Taipei. In my research, I consider various factors behind these findings, which are linked inextricably to the specific socioeconomic and political trajectories of China and Taiwan. Among other things, China's demographic controls and urban migration policies appear to increase the independence of young people. Further, the prevalence of boarding school education in China compared to Taiwan provides an opportunity for earlier autonomy and independent decision-making in China. Due to China’s specific socio-political history, parents of informants in Beijing perceived spatial separation from children as a necessity to secure the future well-being of the family, while parents in Taipei appeared to be more likely to interpret a child’s prolonged absence as unfilial behaviour. As a consequence, young adults in Beijing arguably have greater autonomy than young adults in Taipei when it comes to issues such as partner choice, premarital cohabitation and job selection. These differences have an important impact on future expectations of family life and the realization of filial obligations. However, while young Chinese showed more agency and autonomy in the pursuit of personal goals, their Taiwanese peers were more engaged in communal political activism prompted by an economy with lackluster opportunities for the next generation. Due to the political propaganda of the CCP, young Chinese held a positive outlook for the future of their society which made them less prone to engage in communal action against the ruling party, while disenchantment with the government among young Taiwanese ignited unprecedented student protests in 2014.

Young people are arguably facing complex life situations in their transition into adulthood and navigating their life trajectories in a highly individualised way. For youth in post-compulsory education, their training years have been extended, their years of dependency have increased and they have greater individual choice compared to previous youth generations. This study develops an understanding of the process of individualisation applied to youth in late modernity and explores it in relation to the neo-liberal climate. It compares the life situation of this youth generation with youth in the early 1960s, brought up with more predefined traditional conditions, cemented in traditional social structures. The processes that led to generational changes in the experiences of youth in the last forty-five years are examined, linked to structural transformations that influence subjective experiences. Specifically, the shifts of the conditions of youth in post-compulsory education are studied in relations to socio-economic, technological and cultural changes. This study discusses the Western Anglo-American model of changes in youths life experiences and examines how it (mis)fits in a more conservative Catholic Mediterranean setting. The research investigates conditions in Malta, an ex-colonial small island Mediterranean state, whose peculiarities include its delayed economic development compared to the Western setting. The core of the research comprises of primary data collection using in-depth, ethnographical interviews, with two generations of youth in different socio-historical context; those who experienced their youth in the early 1960s and youth in the late 2000s. This study concludes that the concept of individualisation does indeed illuminate the experiences of youth in late modernity especially when compared to the experiences of youth forty-five years ago. However the concept of individualisation is applied in a glocalised manner in line with the peculiarities of Malta that has lagged behind mainstream developments in Western Europe and still retained traditional features. Building on the individualisation concept, I use an empirically grounded concept of compromised choices to describe the increase in the bargaining of choice happening at different fronts in the life experiences of youth, especially in the life biography of women, choices in education and the job market and choices in consumption.