Time for Vocational Students! (Amiksen aika) Hanging-Out Ethnography of Young People’s Relationships with Time and Society in Vocational Education

Time for Vocational Students! (Amiksen aika! in Finnish) is an ethnographic study that explores how young people in vocational education are doing by examining their experiences of time and society. The idea for the study emerged from the public debate in spring 2025 concerning the state of vocational education, in which young people became the objects of adult-centric and stigmatising discourses of concern. This study challenges that perspective and argues that the everyday lives of young people in vocational education cannot be understood without taking young people’s own viewpoints seriously.

Through the research, a youth researcher becomes a long-term participant in young people’s everyday lives. The study is conducted as a form of “hanging out research” within a vocational educational institution, on young people’s terms and in spaces beyond formal teaching. During 2027, the researcher will spend six months in the institution, hanging out in its corridors, common rooms, cafeteria, work halls, and other spaces where informal hanging out with young people is possible. At the heart of this approach is valuing young people’s knowledge and producing knowledge together with young people, in other words, a youth-centred approach.

Time for Vocational Students! challenges adult-centric discourses of concern about young people in vocational education. Its aim is to produce youth-centred knowledge that opens up a different perspective on “vocational students”, while also offering a new perspective on how youth research is conducted. First, it builds on a finding from the Under Pressure research project, according to which, for some young people, vocational education institutions may function as spaces of respite from the pressures of a performance-oriented society and its fast-paced rhythms of life. Drawing on social theories of time (Hartmut Rosa, Barbara Adam), the study therefore asks what time and everyday life in the 2020s look like from the perspective of young people studying in vocational education. Second, the study engages with the epistemological and ethical questions of youth research: whom does hanging out research reach, and how do young people relate to the process of research itself?

In other words, the study examines the views and experiences of time among young people and young adults aged 15 to 29 who are studying in vocational education. It is interested in the diverse ways in which young people experience time, including pressures to perform in education and working life, questions of becoming adult, relationships, hopes and aspirations. In addition, the study is interested in what young people think about social inequalities, previous generations, the climate crisis, global security, and democracy.

The ethical and epistemological questions of youth research will be explored and analysed together with young people: what kinds of experiences and knowledge about youth research does hanging out in vocational education produce for the researcher? What do young people think about youth research, the practice of conducting research, and participation in research? In their view, what might good youth research look like?

Time for Vocational Students! study produces significant social knowledge by foregrounding the everyday lives and voices of young people in vocational education while challenging the assumptions associated with them. In addition, it develops approaches to conducting youth research through methodologies centred on slowing down and sharing time with young people, and especially through young people’s own reflections on and solutions for how research concerning young people should be conducted.

The study is funded by the Kone Foundation (personal postdoctoral research grant, 2025).