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- Convenors:
-
Olivia Casagrande
(University of Sheffield)
Johannes Sjöberg (University of Manchester)
Philipp Horn (University of Sheffield)
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- Chair:
-
Angela Giattino
(LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/006A
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores future urban visions emerging from youth activism. Addressing youth imaginations as embodied and affective experiences, political horizons and potential urban transformations, we invite papers that engage with these topics collaboratively in different global settings.
Long Abstract:
Two years into the Covid19 pandemic, our urban world is characterised by multiple crisis. Ecological and climate hazards, unemployment, political polarisation, deepening racial divides, seemingly infinite epidemiological risks make our present more and more precarious. Such a dystopian reality has particularly adverse effects for youths who are increasingly representing the urban majority (UN-HABITAT 2013). And yet, even if reported to experience deepened levels of climate and health anxiety, socio-economic uncertainty, and political exclusion, youths are not passive victims of such trends. They engage in protests and movements (Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matters, International Indigenous Youth Council) through which they confront their precarious present and (re)imagine their urban futures.
This panel seeks to explore the implications of multiple crisis for urban youths as well as alternative visions emerging from youth activism by addressing the following questions: How do multiple crisis shape the everyday lives and aspirations of urban youths? What are their hopes, desires, imaginations and how are these articulated? How does a focus on urban youth activism and futurism help us rethink urban lives? How can we collaboratively envision the challenges and alternatives of urban youths, in pandemic times characterized by a displaced co-presence?
We seek to pursue a transdisciplinary and multi-located exploration of the ways in which youth future imaginations represent embodied and affective experiences, political horizons and the possibility for urban transformations. We invite papers from authors who work on this topic with urban youths in different global settings, mobilizing distinct disciplinary backgrounds, conceptual and methodological orientations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Young people trend to dissociate their views on their own futures from those on the global futures. The aim of this contribution is to explore young people’s imagined futures with their internal tensions and, through this, inquire some challenges of futures research.
Paper long abstract:
Being able to project futures and to project oneself in those futures means, on the one hand, to mediate and negotiate our hopes and uncertainties with wider contextual phenomena and discourses; and, on the other hand, to identify the social position recognizable as suitable and desirable for oneself. When asked about the future, young people trend to dissociate their own futures from the global futures, expressing completely different and distant attitudes towards the two spheres. The aim of this contribution is to explore young people’s imagined futures with their internal tensions and, through this, inquire some challenges of futures research.
First, I expose the main elements constituting youth's imagined own futures and its distance from their views of society’s future. Then, I explore the particularities of studying “what hasn’t happened yet” in the case of youth population. Specifically, I focus on the methodological and analytical access to young people’s imagined futures in a context of increasing uncertainties that makes them adopt “defence strategies”, which are based on avoiding to have a discourse about the future -by the absence of projection or the embarrassment in expressing it- or having a discourse absolutely distant from their daily life.
The data for this contribution is based on an ongoing case study conducted in an academic upper secondary high school in Catalonia (Spain). Data includes field notes, 24 in-depth interviews with biographical techniques and 186 letters written “from the future”, both with first years in different tracks of academic upper secondary studies (16yo).
Paper short abstract:
We understand gangs as an elementary and spontaneous mode of youth informal sociability. Observing youth street groups as forms of youth culture to resist the hegemonic discourses and practices and as institutions of social resilience to confront and combat the stigmatization
Paper long abstract:
Gangs are described as an episodic phenomenon comparable across diverse geographic spaces, with the stereotype of American gangs often operating as an archetype. This means that a gang is an informal group of peers with local roots, in conflict with other peer groups and sometimes with adult institutions. In short, we understand gangs as an elementary and spontaneous mode of informal sociability. When delinquency was not considered a fundamental attribute of youth street sociability, other concepts were used such as peer groups, street groups, subcultures, countercultures, lifestyles... reserving the term gang for groups of street youth. with members of migrant background or minorities marginalized by contextual situations, and not for other youth groups. Based on a comparative analysis of the various regions involved in the TRANSGANG project, we will observe youth street groups as forms of youth culture to resist the hegemonic discourses and practices and, at the same time, as institutions of social resilience to confront and combat the stigmatization
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Albanian youth transform exercises geared towards reckoning with the socialist past to describe their present desires. As my interlocutors demonstrate, youth juggle feelings of hope and disappointment in their reflections of the present and imaginations of the near future.
Paper long abstract:
The Albanian film Cuca e Maleve, or The Girl of the Mountains, is a socialist-era film that deals with tropes of resistance and change via the actions of youth. The film addresses the fate of a young woman who is killed for challenging the long-standing authority of her villages' traditional codes. Cuca, an advocate for gender equality and women's right, is depicted as a martyr for the new socialist cause and an idealized proponent of urban socialist progress over rural feudalism and patriarchy.
In 2018, the Institute for Democracy, Media, and Culture invited Albanian students from Tirana and nearby cities to confront films like Cuca e Maleve as products of the socialist moment. This activity was held within a broader societal debate about how to engage with socialist-era media that obfuscated the hardships many Albanian families faced during that time period. It also coincided with a separate protest critiquing urban neoliberal development regimes. In this paper, I draw on both the film itself and interviews with youth in attendance to discuss how this exercise became a means for youth to express dissatisfaction with life in contemporary Albanian and their desires for their present and future. While many were cognizant of this film's place in past propaganda, they were equally critical of contemporary forms of propaganda and some even found kinship with characters, like Cuca. Their own stories of activism, of seeking out pathways in the present, were caught within the overlapping affective spheres of disappointment and hope.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on the narratives and experiences of youth following the precarious development of the gas industry and crises born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. It demonstrates how youth negotiate and form subjectivities of self-employment as they seek societal and economical markers of adulthood.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on the narratives and experiences of youth ten years following the discoveries of natural gas and the precarious development of the industry in Mtwara Tanzania. The discovery of gas reserves in 2012 brought forth expectations of economic growth and development for the country but more so for the marginal region of Mtwara. Entangled in these promissory expectations were youth from the region who were propped up as the key beneficiaries for the hoped-for employment options that would become available. As such, embedded within the anticipated success of the industry were young people’s lives and hope for a more secure future that was later punctuated by multiple crises. This paper demonstrates how youth continue to navigate the nonlinear development of the gas industry, marked by a pause in the extractive processes, and the uncertainties born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of their then aspirations, the paper analyzes how working youth continue to negotiate through these uncertain times, their refashioned aspirations, and reconstructed subjectivities. At its core, this research paper aims to demonstrate how youth negotiate, strategize, and form subjectivities of self-employment as they continuously seek societal and economical markers associated with adulthood.