Voicing gender identities and exploring the lived experiences: at-promise youth, non-formal education, and community-based interventions

This presentation is a hybrid of a synopsis of a PhD project and literature review on at-promise youth. At-promise youth is a strength-based replacement term for at-risk youth, referring generally to young people who face situational circumstances that the society believe will inevitably lead to their personal and professional failures. The PhD research utilises interpretative phenomenological frameworks to create conversations between at-promise youth and non-institutional educational settings on the issues of gender identity (GI). Young people, especially Generation Z, are challenging rigid social norms when it comes to GI and are exploring what it means to them. It can be an extraordinarily perplexing time for at-promise youth, whom are not typically part of this conversation. The qualitative approach aims to provide examinations of personal lived experience as it produces accounts of lived experience in marginalised youths' own terms and recognises this is an interpretative endeavour as adolescents are sense-making organisms.