Lost Youth in the Global City

What does it mean to be young, to be economically disadvantaged, and to be subject to constant surveillance both from the formal agencies of the state and from the informal challenge of competing youth groups? What is life like for young people living on the fringe of global citie

Lost youth in the global city: Class, culture and the urban imaginary

What does it mean to be young, to be economically disadvantaged, and to be subject to constant surveillance both from the formal agencies of the state and from the informal challenge of competing youth groups? What is life like for young people living on the fringe of global cities in late modernity, no longer at the center of city life, but pushed instead to new and insecure margins of the urban inner city? How are changing patterns of migration and work, along with shifting gender roles and expectations, impacting marginalized youth in the radically transformed urban city of the twenty-first century? In Lost Youth in the Global City, Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly focus on young people who live at the margins of urban centers, the "edges" where low-income, immigrant, and other disenfranchised youth are increasingly finding and defining themselves. Taking the imperative of multi-sited ethnography and urban youth cultures as a starting point, this rich and layered book offers a detailed exploration of the ways in which these groups of young people, marked by economic disadvantage and ethnic and religious diversity, have sought to navigate a new urban terrain and, in so doing, have come to see themselves in new ways. By giving these young people shape and form - both looking across their experiences in different cities and attending to their particularities - Lost Youth in the Global City sets a productive and generative agenda for the field of critical youth studies

The interrelation of twenty-first-century education and work from a gender perspective

This paper analyses the interrelation of twenty-first-century education and work from a gender perspective. The analysis is carried out theoretically by asking whether human capital theory and Bourdieu's reproduction theory are adequate instruments for such an endeavour. It is argued that the explanatory power of the human capital concept of the interrelation between education and work is extremely weak, because the human capital concept conceals costs necessary to create human capital. In contrast, reproduction theory comprehends investments in education through reproductive work. But, reproduction theory fails short to explain ongoing gender hierarchies within employment. Therefore, analysis of social and societal structure needs to go beyond the focus on education and work to explain the maintenance of gender hierarchies

Lost and found? Globalised neoliberalism and global youth resistance

This article aims to offer a critical understanding of the recent wave of global youth resistance activities through the conceptual notion of lost youth and the material conditions that give this descriptive term its concrete expression in the lives of youths across the world. It aims to explore the materiality of this loss through the prism of neoliberal economic and political policies that have become commonplace in the restructuring of national economies and societies since the latter part of the 20th century. The article also contends, however, that the recent outbreaks of youth protests and uprisings across the world against a long-running oppressive and hegemonic global system signal instances of breaking the silence on the part of youth as a social group long rendered mute and nondescript by society. These outbreaks, as well as ongoing attempts by young people to devise their own solutions to systemic problems, amount to an announcement of youth agency in determining their own future, in a way that relocates the social category youth from lost to found in contemporary global consciousness. © 2014 Critical Arts Projects and Unisa Press