Georg Streißgürtl: Leaving Care in Österreich: Dimensionen von Agency beim Aufbau einer selbstständigen Lebensführung. Budrich, 2023 (Schriftenreihe der ÖFEB-Sektion Sozialpädagogik)

In international discourse, care leavers are young people who have spent a period of their lives outside the family in youth welfare centres or foster families. In Austria, the end of these measures is legally stipulated at the age of 18. This transition is often experienced as very abrupt and is associated with many challenges for young people.

In addition, the transition to adulthood is associated with socially prefigured ideas of normality. These send an ambivalent message to young people with care experience, which can be highly unsettling: On the one hand, a socially recognised practice – clearly visible in the life courses of their peers – calls on them to try things out, take paths of their own choosing and accept setbacks; on the other hand, the same society, in the form of the welfare state actor, sends them the message that they are already finished with the process of growing up at the time of transition, so to speak. Care leavers also generally have far fewer resources at their disposal when it comes to adapting to this construction of normality. In particular, stable social relationships and support networks are often weak, so that the transition process can often be accompanied by loneliness and a feeling of social isolation.

These fictions of normality and the associated subjective ideal-typical ideas of independence are taken up in the book, discussed in detail and linked to the discourse on agency. Agency, usually translated as the ability or power to act, is currently the subject of a broad and heterogeneous debate in the social sciences. This work is based on a relational understanding of the term, which asks, among other things, how agency is socially enabled, limited and produced, and supplements this with a narrative view of the working definition of relational narrative agency.

This provides a basic theoretical perspective that opens up a comprehensive scientific approach to the topic of care leavers. Accordingly, the book comprises a comprehensive theoretically orientated section, which is followed by a qualitative empirical study that combines a biographical-narrative approach with an agency analysis.

The results point to the multi-layered ideas of a responsible life, which are closely linked to the question of identity and the subjective striving for meaning and agency. This striving is also an expression of diverse interdependencies within the relational social structures and the associated fictions of normality.

This also presents professional social work with challenges that cannot be met with simplistic answers. Nevertheless, an attempt will be made in conclusion to translate the findings into ideas for social pedagogical practice.

Georg Streißgürtl is currently a research associate at the Institute for Educational Science and Educational Research at the University of Klagenfurt.