Making sense of intersecting crises : promises, challenges, and possibilities of intersectional perspectives in youth research

The COVID-19 global pandemic is having a profound effect on young people worldwide. This Special Issue locates this single, significant crisis within broader, socio-historically situated intersecting crises (Ang 2021) that are shaping contemporary lives. These intersecting crises, including precarity, criminalisation, Black Lives Matter, austerity, and the climate crisis, are disproportionately affecting young people. The intersection of such crises is profoundly transforming contemporary young peoples' lived experiences and imagined trajectories in diverse, contextual ways. Critically, they are exacerbating and extending persistent structural inequalities associated with class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and age at a time when 'transitions to adulthood have become longer, fuzzier, and more complex' (Macdonald et al. 2019:1). Yet, in grappling with these intersecting crises and troubled transitions, young people are giving rise to new spaces, practices, and conversations that challenge the status quo and create possibilities for more hopeful futures (Hanckel and Chandra 2021; Woodrow and Moore 2021; Nunn et al. 2021; Bowman and Pickard 2021). Centering these intersecting crises and their effects is critical for the field of youth studies as we seek to make sense of contemporary young people's lives and experiences.