Youth and community: Connections and disconnections (Connected Communities)

Connected Communities was a cross-council programme led by the AHRC in partnership with a range of external partners and designed to help researchers understand the changing nature of communities in their historical and cultural contexts and the role of communities in sustaining and enhancing our quality of life.

Youth and Community: Connections and Disconnections comprised a research team largely of colleagues from the University of Brighton (and one from the University of Kingston) awarded AHRC ‘Connected Communities’ research to explore the idea that young people had become ‘disconnected’ from their communities.

Partners:  CUPP (Community University Partnership Programme), The Crew Club (Brighton), East Brighton Community Crime Prevention Forum, North Laine Community Association.


The scoping project sought to:

> engage with critical issues concerning the ‘connectedness‘ of young people with their communities and with formal and informal agencies and institutions within and servicing those communities.
> review academic and research literature via critical re-interpretation of discourses of ‘community‘ and concepts of ‘social capital‘ being deployed to further problematise poor communities
> consider research findings which explored the life-worlds of poor communities and interrogate the connections that individuals in distressed and impoverished environments established amongst themselves and with the extended state.
> advocate the adoption and development of research methodologies which enhance investigation of these issues, exploring the nature and consequences of neo-liberalism whilst contributing to problem-solving and social justice.

Teaming up with colleagues from the Universities of Kingston and Birmingham, the research team secured another AHRC Connected Communities research award to pursue further aspects of our work in respect of processes of ‘gangsterisation’ and ‘radicalisation’, two dynamic forms of social exclusion affecting young people.

Disconnection is often associated with notions of community fragmentation, crime and disorder, moral decline and of feral and dangerous young people joining gangs and becoming a threat to the areas in which they lived.

In fact, however, we found young people’s lives were best described in terms of a range of connections and disconnections within and across their communities.

They often had strong connections with families and one another but, partly as a consequence of the collapse of youth labour markets, the loss of youth services and educational (FE/HE) opportunities, socially excluded and underqualified young people, in particular, were being disconnected from mainstream avenues of opportunity and social mobility. In some areas this meant that they became more involved in illegal local economies, in others, gangs and other forms of age-specific socialisation.

The research evidence in the literature provided ample testimony to the complex and ambiguously connected lives of young people in poor communities and, in feeding our findings back to community meetings, we compared these themes and issues with the issues voiced by community members.

Community respondents were concerned, chiefly, by the impact of social change upon lives and communities; by the ways growing inequalities and blocked opportunities impacted upon young people and, above all, by a sense that dis-connection and social fragmentation were resulting from political and economic decisions resulting in the loss of community resources and a diminishing public ‘commitment to welfare‘.