INTERMEDIATE GENERATIONS: Reflections on Indonesian Youth Studies

07 Januari 2011 - 15:04:38 | admin

Indonesian youth studies have in many ways followed the pattern and trends of youth studies generally. They have tended:

  • to focus largely on urban youth, and particularly in the capital and larger metropolitan cities;
  • to be interested overwhelmingly in male youth – sometimes implicitly equating ‘youth’ with ‘young men’- except in certain limited fields of study like sexuality;
  • in recent years to show great interest in youth cultures and lifestyles, and much less in youngpeoples’ practical and material activities and interests (for example, in school-work transitions and youth underemployment);
  • (among many Indonesian and some foreign researchers) a strong focus on youth ‘defectology’ – what’s wrong with the nation’s youth, what needs to ne ‘fixed’ – as an intended contribution to policy (i.e., better youth ‘governance’)
  • a tendency not yet matched by the emergence of critical explorations of youth governance a one important dimension of contemporary Indonesian ‘governmentality’.

This paper provides a critical review of selected studies about youth in Indonesia. One important strength of the field of youth studies, as it has evolved in recent decades, is its insistence that we study young people in their own right and in their own perspectives, thus claiming a certain autonomy for youth studies which had previously been hidden in various applied disciplines such as criminology, social work, health and family studies (Prout 2001: xii).


*Silakan klik untuk mengunduh makalah: Seminar Bulanan S.367 – Ben White and Suzanne Naafs (International Institute of Social Studies, the Hague) | 7 Januari 2011