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Lecture slides of Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies
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Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies (GEO2-7027)Lecture 1: Introduction to the Course – why Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies?
Odd hangouts: Where do young people meet in your city?
Young people’s landscapes of security and insecurity
“Future changes and transformations in social and cultural relations are, after all, often first witness
amongst younger people” (Hopkins et al, 2019)
1) Ontological security, insecure selves
– when are u feeling safe? Is your position grounded?
2) Home security; insecure households
3) Global security; insecure worlds
4) Online security; digital insecurities
Complex relations with securities and insecurities are seldom addressed from young people’s
perspective.
Why is this important?
• ‘Youth’ is often critically interchanged with ‘the future’ in public debates
• But often not as agents or individuals in their own right
o Voorbeeld: alleen experts praten, jeugd niet. Feeling unheard
• In fact, young people are frequently misunderstood misrepresented and stigmatised
Young people as ‘agents of change’
“Young people are not simply beings or becoming’s, they are more significantly doings that have the
potential to become and do something different, something yet unimaginable” (Aitken, 2019).
Three themes of the course
1. Identities
2. Inequalities
3. Public space
Are we designing young people out of our public spaces?
No universal definition of ‘child’ or ‘youth’
United Nations definitions:
1. ‘Children’ as persons aged 0 – 17
2. ‘Youth’ as persons aged 15 – 24 → main focus of this course
Based on ‘Western’ perspective, but varies across countries and organizations (Ansell, 2016)
Initiation rituals or rites-of-passage more important in other contexts.
Different approaches to understanding age (Pain, 2001)
, - Chronological age → the length of the time since people were born
- Physiological age → how old you are, perceived by other people, how healthy you look. Body
age
- Social age → age in relations to what is an appropriate behavior. Age identity
Age discrimination
Ageism: ‘the result of the ways in which assumptions are made about people having other things in
common alongside their chronological age” (Hopkins, 2010)
→ Constantly shifting phenomenon! (Opposed to racism or classism)
Youth as a ‘transition’
- Drawing on socialization theories, youth has therefore been understood as a period of
transition between childhood and adulthood, marked predominantly by increasing
responsibility and independence (Hopkins, 2010)
- Children and young people are temporally set apart from the adult world and that childhood is
a time of innocence and freedom from the responsibilities of adulthood” (Valentine et al.,
1998)
Youth as a relational concept
- Taken from Hopkins
- Illustrates how power is part of being or
feeling young
- But, diversity! Young people can embody a
mix of different notions of youth and adult.
‘Generationing’
“Based on the premise that children and young
people’s lives are situated in generational relations
operating at various scales and that their agency
must be understood as situated generationally”
(Huijsmans 2019)
,Problematic definitions of youth
- Lump together all young people
- Relevance of geography
- Dominant knowledge production systems
- Young = identity, but identity ≠ young
Spoiled snowflakes versus pechgeneratie
Youth as a social or cultural construction
- Youth is a social construct, i.e., a category or group that is made ‘real’ by convention or
collective agreement
- In fact, ‘youth’ is a plural and heterogeneous category and varies across space and time due
to different societal meanings
But, inequality and power ...
“A child in the First World may be given a pair of expensive trainers that have been stitched together
by someone of a similar age working for low wages, in poor conditions in a Third-World sweatshop.”
(Yarwood and Tyrrell, 2012, p. 124).
Who is allowed to be ‘young’ and who is not?
‘Millions of children around the world miss out on their childhood as a
result of poverty. Poverty deprives them of the capabilities needed to
survive, develop and thrive. It prevents them from enjoying equal
opportunities. It makes children more vulnerable to exploitation, abuse,
violence, discrimination and stigmatization’ (UNICEF, 2012).
Skelton, T. and Valentine, G. (1998). Cool Places: Geographies of
Youth Cultures
- First attempt to ‘map’ young people’s lived spaces and embrace
youth as integral to society.
- Response to focus on youth subcultures and criminalisation.
Geography matters!
- Places used, inhabited and associated with young people matter!
- “Rather than having fixed boundaries, place is now recognized as having open and
permeable boundaries, shaped by complex webs of local, national and global influences and
different social and cultural flows and processes.” (Hopkins, 2010, 11).
Various processes that define the relationship between youth and place (Hopkins, 2010)
- People have different access to and experiences of space and place on the basis of their age.
- Spaces have their own aged identities, which have implications for those who use them.
- People may actively create and resist particular age identities through their use of space and
place.
, Youth as spatial construction
Doreen Massey (1998)
- Young people tap into influences and references by ‘leaping’
geographical scales such as body, home, neighborhood, nation,
global.
- Local youth identities and cultures are a product of interacting social
relations (and thus power!).
- In each place the mix of ‘local’ and ‘global’ will be different (, 1998, p. 123)
→ complexity
Various themes → leg uit met voorbeelden
Urban/Rural
Institutions
Migration and mobility
University
Various sites of resistance
- Places are imbued with new meaning as children and young people (re)imagine existing
places to shape their own worlds (Yarwood and Tyrrell, 2012).
- Resistance by youth on their own terms by using the margins of or subverting the use and
significance of official spaces (Skelton and Valentine, 1998)
Globalization and development
“International organisations and meetings are also at the centre of the export of Western ideas about
childhood and youth to other parts of the world. Both discourses of development and ‘global’ models
of childhood and youth are the basis for interventions at local, national and international level” (Ansell,
2016, p.6).
Economic restructuring
- Cindy, Katz (2004)
- Global capitalism.
- Translocal relations between Global North and Global South.
- E.g. agriculture, garment industry
Migration and societal change
Voorbeeld: Shazlin Rahman – Islamophobia in Canadian public spaces: How to go from trauma to
solidarity. Spacing.ca 11 June 2017.
Climate Change
Voorbeeld: klimaatmars
Demographic change
→ Lecture 4 on ‘Urban vs Rural? – Youthful migration, mobilities and transitions
Why ‘Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies’?
- To listen to young people’s voices and understand how young people in different
circumstances see, experience, use and claim places.
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