Youth Identity Formation: Contemporary Identity Work

The study of youth identity and its formations today is diffuse and widely expansive, charted across a variety of disciplines, including Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Education, History, English, and Cultural Studies. This review essay is largely concerned with youth identity formation as a socially bound process as understood by sociologists. I sketch some of the thematic currents that guide contemporary sociologists' investigations of youth identity formation as socially constituted process, and some of its exemplars. I highlight two conceptual framings of note: (a) youth identity formation as 'project' captured in the concept of 'identity work' and (b) youth identity formation as historically contingent phenomenon shaped by changes to the life course and changes in conceptions of the self in late modernity.