Revisiting qualitative studies of young people and social values: archives for educational and youth studies scholarship

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Revisiting qualitative studies of young people and social values: archives for educational and youth studies scholarship

By Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

Date and time

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM AEST

Location

Frank Tate Room, Level 9, Melbourne Graduate School of Education

100 Leicester Street University of Melbourne Carlton, Victoria Australia

Description

Youth Research Centre Seminar Series 2017

Professor Julie McLeod, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

This paper considers how notions of the archive – as practice, as source, as knowledge – are being taken up in the social sciences. Renaming and reframing qualitative sources as ‘archives’, responding to the data revolution and the opportunities afforded by digital archiving, and calls for greater utilization, open access and re-use of data sets, signal some of the more immediate changes underway, alongside calls for greater dialogue between historical and sociological endeavours (Savage 2010). This is especially evident in a ‘revisiting impulse’, such as returning to and re-analysing earlier sociological and qualitative studies as historical or comparative sources and archives (McLeod and Thomson 2009). The discussion develops in reference to a genealogy of youth identity and youth studies in Australia since the 1950s that combines conventional documentary and archival research with re-analysis of earlier qualitative studies, working towards a history of shifting expert knowledge on adolescence. This presentation draws from preliminary review and re-analysis of large-scale mixed-methods studies of and reports on adolescence in Australia during the 1950s. In revisiting such studies I am trying to understand aspects of the history of youth studies scholarship and also looking at the form, design, data and ambitions of earlier research projects on young people as shedding light on the transnational history of social science research methods and the movement of educational theories across time and space.

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