Reconsidering Youth Well-Being as Fluid and Relational: A Dynamic Process at the Intersection of Their Physical and Social Geographies

Abstract

Well-being is historically conceptualized in vague terms related to psychosocial variables and researched through the absence of poor health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, suicide risk, and poor overall mental health. However, recently, there has been a shift in the literature so that wellness scholarship includes basic rights and access to factors associated with mental health. The World Health Organization (2011) considers mental health synonymous with a state of “wellbeing, in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.” While this definition begins to hint at the historical, political, economic, and other sociocultural systems that profoundly affect a person’s wellness, it continues to neglect the co-constitutive elements of a person in context. A co-constitutive understanding acknowledges and emphasizes a relational dynamic that includes the productive interactions between people, culture, and the various social and physical places and spaces they at once shape and inhabit. This predominant and limited understanding is particularly pronounced when considering young people’s well-being. Developmental theories are frequently conceptualized in sequential, linear, decontextualized ways. Moreover, developmental processes are often understood as static, predetermined, and staged accomplishments that are linked in a de facto way to future prospects. Through this developmental perspective, young people are often understood non-relationally or through a series of dichotomies separating, for example, individual from society and person from place; youths are often characterized as passive non-agents: as dependent recipients or receptors of culture, history, and education or as victims of poverty, racism, class, etc. This dominant developmental perspective obscures young people’s active roles in their life endeavors, their abilities to impact the very contexts that shape them, and their potential to reimagine their possible futures. This blind spot not only limits our understanding of the dynamic systems involved in youth well-being but hides from view the powerful impact young people are making in their own worlds as they at once create and are created by the places they live in and through. In this chapter, we reconsider youth well-being as a fluid, dynamic, and relational process that is constituted by and through historical, political, economic, physical, and social geographies. The chapter illustrates this process through examples from the lives of indigenous young people in New York City, NY, rural subarctic Canada, and a remote village in Alaska, USA.