This paper explores how adolescents face increasing challenges in finding somewhere to belong in a seemingly ever-more fragmented world. These struggles are further exacerbated as they balance developing a stable sense of self and identity within the context of this postmodern era from which they emerge and their ever-growing reliance on a world governed by digital connections. Intensifying this further, they must also contend with an image of them perceived as the ‘Snowflake Generation’ from older groups, undermining this apparent battle to transition into adulthood during this time.

Drawing on a psychosocial theoretical framework, this research recognises how we are all psychosocial beings and, therefore, inextricably interconnected with our environment. So, we are influenced and shaped both internally and externally. Therefore, in adapting Hollway and Jefferson’s Free Association Narrative Method to incorporate the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, beginning with a Single-Question-Inducing Narrative, this research utilised the purpose of a free-associative interview to explore the rich tapestries from which adolescents shared their stories of how they made meaning from their lives and learnt how to adapt and develop a stable working sense of self and identity within the complexities of their worlds. Drawing on the case studies of six participants between the ages of 16 and 18, each narrative was analysed and interpreted using the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and counter-transference

Preliminary findings illustrate an intense need to belong and the struggle to achieve this. As each young person describes their unique history and how they strive to emerge as themselves, they share the challenges that arise when making sense of this ever-changing time, leaving me believing they are anything but ‘Snowflakes.’

Flight and migration movements as a result of global crises are associated with hope for improvements for parents and their adolescent children. In the face of geographical distance through migration and flight, changing forms and places of communications in the light of digitalization, in particular social media, are opening up new ways and forms of interaction and opportunities for families to connect. While migration and flight is determined by national borders and conditions, the rapidly increasing global spread of mobile devices provides access to the digital world. Here, borders can potentially be crossed, places connected and spatial distance bridged. In view of the dependence on digital media and the internet due to separation and absence, the question arises as to what psychological significance digital media, especially the mobile phone, can have for communication and relationship in processing and coping with migration and flight experiences. Using case studies from a pilot study, the talk will discuss the psychosocial significance of mobile phones in the adolescents' and young adults' processing of flight experiences (including being separated from the family) in connection of dealing with adolescent developmental issues.

Traditionally, the study of youth violence has been dominated by criminologists who have focused their efforts on trying to explain the causes of violent juvenile crime and devise deterrent strategies for reducing its occurrence. Recently however, youth violence has been treated as a public health issue; which includes identifying a set of variables involving the individual, family, school, peer group, and community; which could be conceived as ‘risk factors’ associated with violent behaviour. Studies evidence a social gradient in relation to poverty and/or economic inequality, and poorer mental health and wellbeing. The assumption underlying behavioural study is that a set of discrete causal variables can be identified, isolated, and acted upon. It may be however, that certain aspects of the human condition cannot be explained through traditional forms of scientific inquiry, and black youth violence may be such a phenomenon. The recent increase in violence among young black men must be understood as more than just an expression of aggressive individual behaviour. There appears to be no moral code or value system. The violence must then be considered a cultural phenomenon; one that is inextricably woven into the history and social fabric of our society. Behind each of these offences is a young life derailed; a family traumatised and a community damaged. Responding to violence as a cultural phenomenon has important implications for the interventions required to address this problem. There is no excuse for criminality, but the factors that drive young people into violence are often complex and powerful.

Self-harm is generally conceptualised as an indicator of internal psychological distress, or a symptom of mental illness; it is also highly personal and often private to the individual who practices it. But to understand the epidemiological trends in self-harm on the level of the collective - which shifted dramatically across the 20th century and are still shifting today - requires that we resituate self-harm in the socio-political field. A classic psychological interpretation of an act of self-harm might see it as a sign of inner breakdown, silent, secret, and remote from social context. Reframed psychosocially, it can be more usefully read as an oblique communication; a route or maneouvre oriented towards breakthrough; a method of purposive ‘embodied emotion work’ (Chandler, 2012). And if we repoliticise self-harm, we can visibilise the kinds of situations and power dynamics self-harm occurs within, and also begin to question the popular cultural image of self-harm as a maladaptive habit belonging mostly to white, Western youth. We may begin to read self-harm as speech, tactic, or strategy, and better comprehend how it functions as a tool against disempowerment.

Based on my doctoral research into the cultural emergence of self-harm in the 1990s, this paper will use a critical deconstruction of the gendered, raced stereotype of self-harm popularised during this era to begin an examination of self-harm in broader socio-political context. This builds on sociological and historical scholarship and lived experience perspectives on self-harm by Amy Chandler, Veronica Heney, and Sarah Chaney, and on Banu Bargu’s work on corporeal politics of resistance and refusal. By deploying feminist questions of embodiment and representation while attempting to decentre white, Western/European experiences which dominate the literature on self-harm, this work will explore how self-harm can function as an expression of body sovereignty and biopolitical resistance amid experiences of extreme duress.