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This article proposes a narrative approach to studying 'risk'. A narrative approach moves away from common attempts to identify individuals 'at risk' of social problems on the basis of static characteristics – risks – that are assumed to have uniform 'effects' on individuals. Instead, a narrative approach to analysing 'risk' entails a focus on how people make consequential links between events in their lives. By focusing on three cases from a qualitative study in Denmark the article analyses how young people who have extensive experience with 'risky' practices – mainly drug use – make sense of these experiences. A particular focus on imagined futures produces two types of insights. First, by analysing how past and present experiences are seen by young people themselves as pointing towards their imagined futures, the article demonstrates how seemingly similar events (risk-taking experiences) can be inscribed in very different future narratives. Second, analysing the process of imagining futures illuminates how the participants see themselves in the world, to what extent they see themselves as agents in their own lives and if their futures are seen as within or beyond their control.

This article explores the link between masculinity and violence in socially integrated young men's discussions about risk-taking and violence. Traditionally, violence, or rather the capability of violence, is depicted as a key cultural marker of masculinity. However, recent theoretical developments point to changes in the normative boundaries for performing appropriate masculinities not least among young people. These discussions about potential cultural changes form the backdrop of this article. By combining focus group methodology and an interactionist analytical approach, I investigate how the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate physical aggression is negotiated and how acceptable masculine identities are performed as part of these negotiations. Through this, the article sheds light on the narrow boundaries between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence, the highly situational character of these judgments and the intersections between gender and ethnicity in the performance of morally superior masculinities. The research is conducted in Denmark in 2013–2014.

The article analyzes Danish clubbers' strategies for taking drugs in night clubs. This exploration is framed within the discussion of a possible normalization of youth drug use. Thus, the article investigates how young drug-users experience the level of acceptability of drug use in clubs and how this perceived acceptability—or rather lack of acceptability—affects their practices around drug-taking. The analysis points towards two distinct strategies which the clubbers make use of when taking drugs in clubs: an assimilative strategy and an opportunistic strategy, and it is shown how these strategies are indicative of the level of acceptability of drugs in club settings. Through this focus on the micro-level, the article adds to the limited amount of literature on this dimension of the normalization thesis. Empirically, the article is based on a Danish mixed methods club study.

Supported by the editors' popular podcast Narrative Now, this interdisciplinary volume explores the capacities and limitations of narrative research. It maps out new directions for the field while honouring its legacy.

This interdisciplinary collection charts the experiences of young people in rural and regional areas and city outskirts around the world. International experts investigate aspects of marginal spatiality including citizenship, materiality and belonging, and look at the complex relationships between place, history, politics and education.

Analyses of young feminine identities have often focused on consumption, career and intimate life as separate spheres. In this article, we bring these together to nuance the concept of the 'top girl'. Drawing on a qualitative study of young Norwegian 'top girls'' alcohol consumption and lifestyles we explore how 'appropriate' feminine identities are configured in the present and in the future. We analyse how the egalitarian context shapes the contours of the 'top girl' and find that 'progressive' values are central to our participants' present lifestyles. However, these progressive lifestyles are expected to collide with the 'square' lives the participants see awaiting them as middle-class adult women and mothers. We argue that as the participants grow older, the range of legitimate, middle-class femininities is narrowing. Further, we suggest that in an egalitarian context such as the Norwegian context the 'top girl' lacks an attractive, adult equivalent.

Much research has investigated how young women with tertiary education fare in contemporary labour markets and pointed to persistent gender inequalities. However, very little is known about how young women who leave school early fare in the present climate. In this article we shed light on the challenges facing these women in the 'new work order'. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative methods, we investigate how young Australian women who have left school before completing upper secondary education fare, and how they make choices regarding education and work as they envision their futures. Our analyses reveal a perceived and real tension between education and 'real' experience in the labour market. This leaves young women without upper secondary qualifications in a difficult position when making decisions about their futures.

This article makes the case for understanding young people's engagement with 'sexting' as a social practice. Moving away from the dominant focus on teenagers and (sexual) risk and instead approaching sexting as an 'everyday' practice sheds light on how sexting is perceived and situated as a normalised part of contemporary youth culture. Drawing on 10 focus groups with 37 undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, our data reveal young men's significant emphasis on consent, mutuality and respect, marking out 'appropriate sexting' practices as distinct from harassment or image-based abuse. Nonetheless, the centrality of a transactional approach to sexting questions those seemingly positive dispositions. Social practice theory permits sophisticated understanding of these nuances, seeing them as bound up and produced in correspondence with the broader meanings, embodied skills and material artefacts that are associated with sexting.

This article argues for a need for spatial analyses in the study of youth cultures and youth subjectivities. With this aim, we propose a theoretical framework drawing on concepts from cultural class analysis and human geography. Empirically, the article is based on 10 focus groups with young people (n = 80) in four different parts of Denmark. The interviews included a photo elicitation exercise and the analysis in this article focuses on one particular picture of two young 'hipster' men. By using the figure of the hipster as an analytical case, the article illustrates how individual and spatial identities are co-constructed, not just alongside each other (relationally) but also hierarchically. Hence, 'place-making practices' are also 'people-making practices' and vice versa. Through this, the article engages with discussions in youth studies as well as in human geography about the importance of paying attention to structural inequalities.

The paper analyzes young cannabis users' experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees' underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees' social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal "outsiders" to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.

Introduction: why study youth and risk? -- Setting the scene : growing up in denmark -- Looking back : "risk" in the sociology of youth -- Looking ahead : towards a new framework for analysing youth risk-taking as practice -- Being young : risk-taking practices and youth culture -- Coordinating practices : risk-taking and everyday life -- Embodying risk-taking : risk, embodiment and gender -- Contextualising risk : risk-taking, youth transitions and processes of social marginalisation -- Conclusion: routines of risk in young lives -- Routinisation -- Coordination -- Embodiment -- Social context -- Temporality -- A turn to practice: practical implications -- Appendix: the two empirical studies