Abstract
Drawing on data from a study of young people and neighbourhood risk, this paper examines the interconnected discourses utilised by professionals and young people as they talk about youth and their social networks in an urban UK neighbourhood with high levels of youth crime and social deprivation. Working with theories of discourse and subjectivity, we focus in particular on the multiplicity of meanings in talk, with both conscious and unconscious motivations, in order to understand how riskiness and vulnerability are woven into professional accounts and in the young people's narratives. Young people in urban neighbourhoods have often been conceived in dichotomous terms as 'risky' or 'at risk' of entry into cycles of crime and violence. While these discourses were echoed in the talk of professionals we interviewed, their accounts varied considerably in relation to professional accountabilities and personal trajectories. Sometimes, in avoiding labelling young people themselves, professionals constructed signifying chains around the risky family or neighbourhood. Young people both critiqued and creatively reworked these discourses in order to strive for a more resilient, autonomous self-positioning within the neighbourhood. Through tracing how some signifiers are over-emphasised, while others are submerged, we build an account of some of the fragile and disrupted discursive articulations of young people and professionals reflecting on the contexts where they live or work.