Trial lecture
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
Title: How have conceptualizations of authority within the family changed over time? What do different paradigms offer and what lessons can be learned?
Public Defence
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 12:00 -
Adjudication committee
- 1st opponent: Professor Rachel Thomson, University of Sussex, UK
- 2nd opponent: Professor Niels Ulrik Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
- Chair of committee: Professor Inga Bostad, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
- Deputy Head and Head of Studies, Professor Anders Mørch, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Professor Kristinn Hegna, Department of Education, UiO
- Senior Researcher Ingrid Smette, NOVA, OsloMet
Summary
It is broadly agreed that there has been an increasing emphasis put on young people’s autonomy the past 60/70 years. At the same time, there are contemporary circumstances that appears to challenge that autonomy. While families seem to engage in more democratic practices than before, these practices are sometimes associated with covert parental power. There has been described a new culture of intensive parenting, where parents are highly involved in managing and monitoring their children. Also, with increased demands for education and heightened costs of living, young people have become more dependent on their parents. These circumstances represent contemporary paradoxes of young people’s autonomy.
Against this background I am interested in exploring how young people understand their own autonomy, especially within the context of the youth-parent relationship. Using biographical interviews from three generations of parents and youths, I compare how the three generations talked about their own upbringing and adolescent years in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary youths. I draw broadly on Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘social imaginaries’ and approach the cultural notion of autonomy as a way to imagine the self in the world. The research questions of this thesis are: 1) What imaginaries do young people hold about the self and the world, and what notions of autonomy are associated with these imaginaries? 2) How, if at all, do these imaginaries differ from those of previous generations? 3) How should we understand dynamics of autonomy and power within the youth–parent relationship? The research is positioned in the interdisciplinary, scholarly field of youth–parent relationships, drawing on and speaking to research from the fields of family, parenting, and youth research.
In the first article, I use narrative analysis to investigate how each of the three generations talked about parental authority from the perspective of their own youths. The narratives of the three generations seemed to support a notion of democratic ideals having become increasingly influential in family life. However, I also found that these ideals, in the stories of the youngest generation, functioned to legitimise parents’ emotional authority.
In the second article, I use Foucauldian discourse analysis to find out how the youths reconciled parental involvement with ideals of autonomy. I found that the youths did this by discursively constructing the world as permeated with risk, and their ‘selves’ as the result of their upbringing. As such, passions and dreams were conflated with parental influence, and adhering to parental advice of making prudent choices became a prerequisite for being autonomous. In this way, the youth co-constructed the position of the intensive parent.
In the third article, I use narrative analysis to explore what meanings the middle and the youngest generation attributed to independence. By outlining the two generations’ imaginaries of ‘future’ and ‘self’, I found that the parent generation anchored their projects of independence in an ideal of authenticity, while the youth generation talked about independence in instrumentalist terms. I use these findings to discuss how we can understand contemporary expressions of autonomy.
In combination, the aim for this research is to contribute to our understanding of the lived reality of youths, to inform how we can conceptualize ‘autonomy’ in research, and to better grasp the conditions of contemporary modernity that young people form their imaginaries within.