Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation: Beyond Neo-Liberal Futures

251 Pages·2019·4.471 MB·English

by  Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell, Luke Howie

Rethinking Young People’s
Marginalisation
In the 21st century myriad earth systems – atmospheric systems, ocean systems,
land systems, neo-Liberal capitalism – are in crisis. These crises are deeply related.
Taking diverse and multiple forms, they have diverse and multiple consequences
and are evidenced in such things as war, everyday violence, hate and extremism,
global flows of millions of the dispossessed and homeless; and in the precarious,
uncertain, and marginal existence of millions more.
Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation is concerned with the experience,
affect, and effects of these earth systems crises on:
• young people’s life chances, life choices, and life courses
• young people’s engagement with education, training, and work
• the character of young people’s being and becoming, their gendered
embodiment, their participation in cultures of democracy, their resilience,
and their marginalisation.
Indeed, in setting out to rethink young people’s marginalisation, this insightful
volume makes a contribution to troubling key concepts in Youth Studies, primarily:
structure and agency; transitions and pathways; gender and embodiment,
citizenship, risk, and resilience. It does this by drawing on a variety of critical,
theoretical traditions, including Bauman’s engagement with the ambivalence
of the human condition; Foucault’s studies of mentalities of government and
genealogies of the subject; the critique of the politics of disposability and violence
of neo-Liberalism undertaken by Giroux, and the authors of Kilburn Manifesto;
Braidotti’s vitalist posthumanism; and Haraway’s figure of the Chthulucene.
Analysing the ways in which young people engage in and develop new
cultures of democracy, Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation will appeal
to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as
Youth Studies, Youth Sociology, Education Studies, and Critical Social Theory.
Peter Kelly is a professor in the School of Education, RMIT University, Australia.
Perri Campbell is a research fellow at Swinburne University, Australia.
Luke Howie is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Monash
University, Australia and Deputy Director of the Global Terrorism Research
Centre (GTReC).
Youth, Young Adulthood and Society
Series editors:
Tracy Shildrick
Newcastle University, UK
John Goodwin
University of Leicester, UK
Henrietta O’Connor
University of Leicester, UK
The Youth, Young Adulthood and Society series approaches youth as a distinct area,
bringing together social scientists from many disciplines to present cutting-edge
research monographs and collections on young people in societies around the world
today. The books present original, exciting research, with strongly theoretically-
and empirically-grounded analysis, advancing the field of youth studies. Origi-
nally set up and edited by Andy Furlong, the series presents interdisciplinary and
truly international, comparative research monographs.
Published:
Spaces of Youth
Work, Citizenship and Culture in a Global Context
David Farrugia
Transitions to Adulthood through Recession
Youth and Inequality in a Eur opean Comparative Perspective
Edited by Sarah Irwin and Ann Nilsen
Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience
Adults Understanding Young Lives
Edited by Liam Grealy, Catherine Driscoll and Anna Hickey-Moody
Youth, Risk, Routine
A New Perspective on Risk-Taking in Young Lives
Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson and Signe Ravn
Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation
Beyond Neo-Liberal Futures?
Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell and Luk e Howie
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/
Youth-Young-Adulthood-and-Society/book-series/YYAS
Rethinking Young People’s
Marginalisation
Beyond Neo-Liberal Futur es?
Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell
and Luke Howie
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell and Luke Howie
The right of Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell and Luke Howie to be
identified as authors of this w ork has been asserted by them in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Cop yright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book ma y be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in an y form or by any electronic,
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe .
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is a vailable from the British Librar y
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been r equested
ISBN: 978-1-138-12097-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-65136-1 (ebk)
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Peter. For Georgia
Perri. For Margaret and Craig
Luke. For Maree and Margaret

Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Young people’s marginalisation: after neo-Liberalism? 11
2 Thinking technologies: a sociological imagination for the
Anthropocene? 35
3 Neo-Liberal capitalism, education, and work 61
4 Refiguring pathways and transitions 97
5 Troubling gender and embodiment 123
6 Outrage, hope, and cultures of democracy 151
7 From risk to resilience 178
Coda: staying with the trouble 208
References 213
Index 233
Acknowledgements
The very nature of the job that we set ourselves here – re-thinking young people’s
marginalisation, re-visiting the work that we have done, collectively and individu-
ally, over the last two decades – means that we have many and varied people to
acknowledge, and that, inevitably, we will not adequately acknowledge all those
people – individuals, groups, organisations – who have influenced our trajectories
during this time.
We do, however, want to recognise the contribution of our collaborators at vari-
ous times over the last 10–15 years. Important here are Lyn Harrison and Chris
Hickey, who have been colleagues and collaborators for all that time. Lyn and
Chris were involved in initial conversations about this book, and were involved
in an earlier iteration. Their involvement at that time has been important in the
development of this project. Annelies Kamp, Kerry Montero, and Jo Pike have
been, variously, co-authors and co-editors on a number of projects that have led
to this moment. Their contributions in those projects have also been influential in
shaping what we have tried to do here.
We have been told stories of growing up, becoming, and survival by different
people, each with particular connections to place, politics, justice, and the future.
We would like to thank the young people who have shared their stories with us
at different times and in different places. To HNK, Aunt Najma, and Riverbend,
your stories continue to have meaning in our lives long after our first encounter
in digital spaces. We struggle still to come to terms with the horrendous impact of
invasion, war, occupation, for young women ‘growing up’ in Iraq.
To the young people we spoke to in Australia, New Zealand, and North America
who participated in and pushed the agenda of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter
movement, we thank you. Your accounts raise questions about the hinterlands we
wander in, in our everyday lives, in our academic lives.
To the young people of Charcoal Lane we would like to acknowledge the time
you contributed to our research and to our understanding of what it means to be a
trainee and work at Charcoal Lane. The significance of your role in the develop-
ment of the social enterprise is forefront in our minds.
We would like to thank the writers who have inspired us to think and work
in rewarding and relational ways – Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Judith
Acknowledgements ix
Butler – who together form a critical infrastructure for our engagement with
many of the struggles, events, and troubles we encounter in our world and in our
research. The work of Youth Sociologists including Julia Coffey, Steven Thread-
gold, Dan Woodman, Anita Harris, and Steve Roberts has also been an inspiration
to us and shaped generative spaces in which to work.
We would also like to thank to our families, friends, and colleagues who have
supported and inspired us in different ways, including: Hamish, Margaret and
Craig Campbell; Oliver, Kent and Chantelle Hodgson; Hayley Samuels; Chris-
tine Trost; Shane Duggan; Brian Coffey; Grace McQuilten; Eve Mayes and Chris
Mayes; the Newcastle Youth Studies Group; the Melbourne University Youth
Studies Group; Paul Strangio; Nick Economou, Zareh Ghazarian, Ben Mac-
Queen; Peter Lentini; Shandon Harris-Hogan; Rich Swenson; colleagues in the
School of Social Sciences at Monash University; colleagues in the Schools of
Art, Education, and Global Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University; and
colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of
California at Berkeley.
Thanks go to the organisations who have supported us and our work, including:
Charcoal Lane; Youth Impact Hub; Youth UpRising; East Oakland Boxing Acad-
emy; Crossfit Bellarine; the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, University
of California, Berkeley; Deakin University, Geelong; Monash University, Mel-
bourne; RMIT University, Melbourne; the Centre for Higher Education Equity
and Diversity Research, La Trobe University.
More personally, Peter would like to thank Julie for her support, her willingness
to listen, and her commitment to asking the obvious, and the hard, questions about
many of the things that have been of interest to us here.