Spaces of Youth: Work, Citizenship and Culture in a Global Context

147 Pages·2017·1.253 MB·English

by  David Farrugia

Spaces of Youth
Contemporary young people are situated within a complex and disorienting set of
social changes that are reshaping how youth is constructed, governed and experi-
enced across the globe. Historically, it has been taken for granted that youth pri-
marily 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 pop-
ular 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 disci-
plines interested in space, youth, globalisation, work, citizenship and culture.
David Farrugia is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle,
Australia.
Youth, Young Adulthood and Society
Series editor: Andy Furlong, University of Glasgow, UK
[email protected]
www.routledge.com/Youth-Young-Adulthood-and-Society/book-series/YYAS
The Youth, Young Adulthood and Society series brings together social scientists
from many disciplines to present research monographs and collections, seeking
to further research into youth in our changing societies around the world today.
The books in this series advance the field of youth studies by presenting original,
exciting research, with strongly theoretically- and empirically-grounded analysis.
Published:
Young Migrant Identities
Creativity and Masculinity
Sherene Idriss
Young People in the Labour Market
Past, Present, Future
Andy Furlong, John Goodwin, Sarah Hadfield, Stuart Hall, Kevin Lowden and
Henrietta O’Connor
Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles
Steven Threadgold
Youth Homelessness and Survival Sex
Intimate Relationships and Gendered Subjectivities
Juliet Watson
Spaces of Youth
Work, Citizenship and Culture in a Global Context
David Farrugia
Forthcoming:
Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation
Beyond Neo-Liberal Futures?
Perri Campbell, Lyn Harrison, Chris Hickey and Peter Kelly
Spaces of Youth
Work, Citizenship and Culture
in a Global Context
David Farrugia
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 David Farrugia
The right of David Farrugia to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-91191-8 (hbk)
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Contents
1 Making spaces in youth 1
2 The spatio-temporality of ‘Youth’ in the modern episteme 21
3 The formation of youth within the global dynamics of
contemporary labour 40
4 Beyond the abstract global: youth, politics and post-
national citizenship 65
5 Young people and the global politics of mobility
and displacement 86
6 Symbolic economies and affective flows: the production
of the spaces of youth culture 109
7 Conclusion: youth, spatiality, and time 128
Index 137

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 (Wil-
lis, 1977; McRobbie, 1978; Wyn and White, 1997; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007).
The relocation that took place with this move was from the biological individ-
ual 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 ques-
tion 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
2 Making spaces in youth
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 dis-
courses 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). Devel-
opmental 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 Alla-
har, 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 dif-
ferentiated ‘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 deter-
minants, 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 pro-
duce 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
Making spaces in youth 3
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 dra-
matic 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 develop-
ment (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 contempo-
rary 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 con-
temporary 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 ontologi-
cal 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 politi-
cal 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