Spaces of Youth

Work, Citizenship and Culture in a Global Context

David Farrugia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367351311
• eBook ISBN: 9781317432623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary young people are situated within a complex and disorienting set of social changes that are reshaping how youth is constructed, governed and experienced across the globe. Historically, it has been taken for granted that youth primarily concerns time, especially with regards to personal and social development.

In Spaces of Youth, Farrugia shows that the concept of developmental time has become a regulatory framework that is used to govern aspects of globalisation, including the formation of labour forces and the boundaries of liberal citizenship regimes. Interrogating this context, this volume explores the changes in the social organisation of youth within the spatial dimensions of work, citizenship and popular culture in a global context. Thus, Farrugia establishes a new interdisciplinary research agenda into youth and spatiality, including young people from across the global north and the global south, and which situates young people within the key dynamics of contemporary globalisation in its economic, political and cultural dimensions.

An enlightening and timely volume, Spaces of Youth is an important resource for post-graduate and post-doctoral researchers across all social scientific disciplines interested in space, youth, globalisation, work, citizenship and culture.

Chapter 1

Making spaces in youth

Introduction

Contemporary young people are situated within a complex and disorienting set of social changes which are reshaping how youth is constructed, governed and experienced, and which raise questions about how best to locate youth as a social process. This problem – the problem of location – is familiar in youth studies, although it is not often recognised as such. While youth was once confidently located within the bodies and minds of the individual ‘adolescent’, sociologically inspired youth researchers successfully argued for its socially constructed and historically variable character, and positioned youth as a social process emerging within labour markets, education systems, political frameworks and relations of consumption, all of which were differentiated by class, gender and ethnicity (Willis, 1977; McRobbie, 1978; Wyn and White, 1997; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007). The relocation that took place with this move was from the biological individual to the immediate material and social conditions within which young people forged lives, and to the structured biographies emerging as part of distributions of resources and subjectivities within societies. Now, changes in the social fabric of young people’s lives call for another relocation. In a world where labour markets are positions within transnational networks of capital investment and divestment, and where cultural ideals and lifestyles mutate and flow across the increasingly permeable boundaries that produce both localities and nation states, the problem of location comes into sharp relief and becomes pressing once again. The question of how to locate youth now gestures beyond young people’s immediate social environments, or the societies in which they have until now been positioned, towards processes distributed across taken for granted social, geographical and disciplinary boundaries. In this book I want to suggest that the problem of locating youth now pertains to the increasingly complex issue of space.

The issue of youth and spatiality has been difficult to apprehend in the social sciences due to an explicit or (more usually) implicit emphasis on time within the discourses and conceptual frameworks used to understand youth (more on the spatial dimensions of these knowledge production practices later). Youth is generally taken for granted as a phenomenon that begins at one time and ends at another, and temporal markers play an important role in assessments of how young people are or should be faring. This emphasis on temporality itself has a history that intersects with developmental and evolutionary approaches within the emerging human sciences taking hold in Western Europe. Early modern discourses of youth and adolescence constructed the development of children and young people as rehearsals of evolutionary history and aligned youth colonial depictions of racialised Others as developmentally delayed (Lesko, 2001). Developmental psychology constructs adolescence as a period that begins with puberty in the early teens and concludes with physical maturation, and as a time at which young people are vulnerable to falling off this ideal temporality and becoming poorly adjusted adults. In contemporary youth studies as practiced in the global north, debates have focused on the nature of young people’s ‘transitions’ through biographical milestones (such as work and family formation), and the time taken to reach these milestones is used as an indicator of the nature of youth. As the ‘transitions’ into work and family formation that once marked the end of the youth period in the early twenties are pushed back into the thirties, youth is now seen to take up more time than it once did. As discussed by Wyn and White (1997), normative assessments about whether this is a lamentable delay (Cote and Allahar, 1996; Cote, 2000) or an exciting period of flexible experimentation (Arnett, 2000) are both based on the timing of these milestones. Critics of this perspective increasingly argue for a sociologically informed theory of generational change as a means by which to come to terms with these new temporalities (Woodman and Wyn, 2015), and the focus on time as the basic characteristic of youth remains.

There is however an implicit spatiality working in the background of youth studies that can be found in the metaphors that mark milestones within the time of youth. In tracing young people’s movements and developments over time, researchers have used spatial language to signify the structural differences between young people’s biographical transitions. Metaphors of young people finding their ‘niche’, travelling along various ‘pathways’, being launched on structurally differentiated ‘trajectories’, or undertaking ‘navigations’ (Evans and Furlong, 1997) are all intrinsically spatial, depicting young people’s movements within a space of possibilities and into particular locations within a given society. These metaphors also suggest frameworks for understanding how young people come to be located within these positions, emphasising ‘trajectories’ strongly shaped by social determinants, or the active personal work of ‘navigating a pathway’ through the territory of life. Spatial metaphors can be found throughout social theory (Silber, 1995), and their use in youth studies has been critiqued by Cuervo and Wyn (2014), who suggest that contemporary metaphors of youth impose a pre-determined space of possibilities on a diverse and socially variable experience. As these authors observe, the spatial metaphors currently used in order to understand youth produce static spaces of pre-defined, taken for granted possibilities that young people are expected or encouraged to conform to. By assessing young people according to their position within this pre-determined space, the spatial dimensions of youth are rendered inert, reduced to positions within an abstract container of objective possibilities located within a bounded society. Taken for granted in this way, space can then safely make way for an ongoing focus on time.

This taken for granted spatiality is especially unhelpful at a time when dramatic changes in the spatial dimensions of social life are reshaping the youth period. This is clearest in the (much contested) consequences of globalisation. In a chapter on the ‘spatialisation of social theory’, Featherstone and Lash suggest that globalisation has become ‘the successor to the debates on modernity and postmodernity in the understanding of sociocultural change and as the central thematic for social theory’ (1995, p. 1). This presents a challenge to how young people are understood. As in the classic work of Willis (1977), young people’s lives have traditionally been theorised within webs of relationships and systems of social structures rooted within their local communities, and an insistence on the importance of immediate material conditions has been an important means by which to counteract the reduction of youth to individual psychological development (e.g. Roberts, 1968). However, the social processes which produce youth as a phenomenon can no longer be easily located within ‘the local’, or within the boundaries of entities such as nation states. The processes that shape contemporary young lives escape the taken for granted boundaries between localities and societies, as well as distinctions between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world. As described by Katz (2004), the lives of young people in the ‘global city’ of New York are connected to those in rural Sudan by virtue of their positions within networks of capital investment and economic exchange that transcend the vast geographical distances between them. As in the case of Japanese hip hop (Condry, 2006), the digitally mediated flows of signifiers and practices that make up contemporary youth cultures allow for mutable and unpredictable local articulations of youth identities across multiple spaces and places. In a world characterised by both new connectivities as well as globally orchestrated structural ‘expulsions’ (Sassen, 2014), it is increasingly obvious that there can be nothing static or taken for granted about the spaces of youth.

In this context, the study of youth in terms of spatiality is a significant ontological and epistemological shift that repositions youth within the key social changes that characterise contemporary globalisation. In this book I explore the theoretical possibilities of a spatial approach to youth and open up new theoretical territory in the study of youth and spatiality. My method will be to critique theoretical debates in each core area of youth studies from the perspective of spatiality and to locate youth as a phenomenon that unfolds through economic, cultural and political spatialities that escape the contemporary emphasis on temporality currently organising this field of research. As well as describing the consequences of social changes related to globalisation, the book will develop the spaces of youth from a static system of bounded locations to a fluid assemblage of social processes and relations that are active in the construction of youth as such. This will also require the development of spatial heuristics and explanatory frameworks required to understand the social and spatial dynamics of the youth period. With this in mind, the book draws together the experiences of young people across multiple spaces and places to develop new approaches to young people’s biographies, cultural practices, forms of political participation and day to day lives.

The project I pursue here requires theoretical interdisciplinarity. While the social scientific speciality of ‘youth studies’ refers to no particular discipline, the field is largely dominated by sociological perspectives developed within the metropolitan centres of the global north, especially Western Europe and the United States. As I describe in more detail below, this means that theoretical development in this field has mirrored broader epistemological and disciplinary divisions in social theory which themselves reflect the way that social science has participated in the epistemological and political project of modernity. Studies of youth participate in a global geography of knowledge production that installs the urban metropolitan cities of the global north as the epistemological centres of youth studies and positions northern metropolitan experience as emblematic of youth in general, whilst the experiences of those outside of these spaces fall within the purview of anthropology or critical geography without impacting on theoretical debates within youth studies as such. In response, this book draws on sociological, anthropological, and geographical theory and empirical work to situate youth studies as an interdisciplinary field of study and positions the field as a critique of epistemological and disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Critically, this is a means by which the experiences of young people in locations currently positioned as marginal to youth studies can be included in theoretical debates in the study of youth. The consequences of existing geographies of knowledge production in youth studies are discussed in more detail below.

The spatial contours of youth research: metrocentrism and its discontents

A recent study into the lives of rural young people by two Australian researchers begins with the following observation:

In our increasingly urbanised society, urban-based lives have come to be taken for granted as standard. When researchers want to gain an understanding of contemporary youth, they turn to metropolitan lives where, in the relationship between the biographies of individuals and the forces of social change, new approaches to life are forged… . Urban settings are seen as ubiquitous, globalised and undifferentiated, and so place often disappears from the analysis of young people’s lives in general.

(Cuervo and Wyn, 2012, p. 1)

This short quote brings into sharp relief the theoretical consequences of the geographies of knowledge production that shape youth studies. Here, Cuervo and Wyn highlight the unacknowledged metrocentricity that structures studies of youth, in which a narrative of urbanisation underpins a focus on metropolitan young people as globally emblematic of young people as a whole. This focus is true of major strands of youth research, both the ‘transitions’ and ‘subcultures’ perspectives. Contemporary analysis of young people’s biographical transitions, focused primarily on the structuring of young people’s biographies, have focused on the movement from industrial to post-industrial labour markets in the metropolitan cities of the global north. Studies of youth cultures have focused on spectacular youth subcultures and scenes that are profoundly metropolitan in their organisation, and which promote the glamour and sophistication of the urban metropolis (Farrugia, 2014). By universalising the experiences of a single group of young people, it is the large metropolitan centres of the global north – Western Europe, the United States, Canada and (arguably) Australia – that are installed as signposts of youth as such. The consequence of this is the construction of a wide variety of Others to these experiences, including rural young people, young people from the global south and others whose lives are rooted elsewhere. Cuervo and Wyn also observe that it is in this way that place – the uniqueness of the environments and local communities within which young people grow up – is erased from what appears as a spatially homogeneous youth period.

As studies of youth are formed into a ‘canon’, the geographies of knowledge thereby consecrated as the foundational texts of the field achieve a kind of epistemological power which goes beyond the sites at which they were produced. The power of this process of canonisation can be seen in the publication of a recent volume of key concepts and texts in youth studies (Furlong and Woodman, 2014). Described by the publishers as a ‘mini library’ collecting the paradigmatic works in the field, this canon-building collection was established after a period of consultation, in which the editors conducted a survey of youth researchers in order to collect what current knowledge producers considered to be the canonical works in youth studies. This process included researchers based across the globe, including in places outside of the traditional focal points of the field. The result is a collection which foregrounds the experiences of young people from the metropolitan centres of the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States. Researchers from across the globe were active in the consecration of this canon. Both scholars from the global south and from the global north canonised the same key texts, both installing the northern metropole as the epistemological centre of the field.

In a sense, this is unsurprising. Distinctions between spaces and places have been fundamental to the development of social theory, and studies of youth participate in a long history of knowledge production in which the metropolitan cities of the global north have been positioned as privileged vantage points for observing the world. The way that this has taken place is part of the role of theory in the constitution of societies as modern, and can be seen in the theories which were eventually installed as ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. These foundational thinkers, including Durkheim, Tonnies and Marx, all created theoretical distinctions between modes of social organisation that map on to spatial divisions. For Durkheim (1933), modernisation describes a move from simple, homogeneous, static societies which offer a narrow range of identities and social positions and which thereby operate according to ‘mechanical’ solidarity, to societies that are complex, heterogeneous, increasingly individualised and differentiated in terms of the social roles they include. Characterised by ‘organic solidarity’, the societies forming in the urban centres of Western Europe at the time were positioned as the focus for the new discipline of sociology, and mechanical solidarity was positioned outside of these places in pre-modern and rural spaces. Similarly, Tonnies’s (1974) distinction between ‘gemeinschaft’ and ‘geselleschaft’ describes a movement from societies held together by collective identities and close social bonds, to an impersonal and individualistic urban European modernity. Similar distinctions operate within Marx and Engels’s (1970) distinction between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, which describe alienation (the fundamental attribute of all capitalist identities) as related to urbanisation. All of these theories describe a process whereby other places give way to the power and significance of a metropolitan modernity, and all are written from the urban centres of Europe.

The notion of a single bounded ‘society’ as the basic unit of analysis for social theory was institutionalised within this geography of knowledge production. The consequences of this can be seen most clearly in the work of Parsons (1937) in the United States. At a time when the Second World War was to cast doubt over the notion of modernisation as a process of enlightened, rational progress, Parsons’s work defined societies as coherent, bounded entities consisting of functional relationships between abstract parts of a social system. Children, young people, families, and the education and labour market systems were all positioned within a bounded, abstract space, a territory synonymous with the boundaries of the nation state. Connell (2007) positions Parsons’s work as a key moment in the development of ‘Northern Theory’. Critiquing the way that the northern metropole has been positioned as the epistemological centre of social theory, Connell describes the way that theories produced in the metropolitan centres of the global north have aspired to universal applicability whilst forgetting their connections to other spaces and places. For Connell, universal theory imagines each society as consisting of a clear space with no history, within which the various functional parts of the system can be imagined to float. The bounded society is seen to develop out of itself, free of relationships to the outside.

The geography of knowledge production that underpins metropolitan theories has been established by producing separations between spaces that are fundamentally interconnected and mutually constitutive. Contemporary globalisation aside, the notion of a coherent bounded society as the central unit of analysis for social theory has always been deeply problematic. As observed by Connell (2007) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), narratives of modernisation have been built through forgetting the central role of colonialism in the emergence of modern capitalism, thereby ignoring the fundamentally interconnected nature of spaces held separate by distinctions between pre-modern and modern societies. Modern capitalism did not develop from itself, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Making spaces in youth
• 2 The spatio-temporality of ‘Youth’ in the modern episteme
• 3 The formation of youth within the global dynamics of contemporary labour
• 4 Beyond the abstract global: youth, politics and post-national citizenship
• 5 Young people and the global politics of mobility and displacement
• 6 Symbolic economies and affective flows: the production of the spaces of youth culture
• 7 Conclusion: youth, spatiality, and time
• Index