Lost Youth in the New Global City

The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) is hosting a seminar entitled Lost Youth in the New Global City on 15 April 2009 in Pretoria.

What does it mean to be young, to be economically disadvantaged, and to live in the post 9/11 urban inner city, where intimations of incipient terrorism, both considered and casual, have become the characteristic channel for everyday racism and ethnic hysteria? What does it mean to be young 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 the ‘lost youth’ of late modernity, no longer at the centre 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 upon marginalised youth in the radically transformed urban city of the 21st century?

Lost Youth in the Global City seeks to examine the nature and extent of these questions as part of a rising moral panic through sustained empirical investigation, concentrated upon two Canadian urban centres. This presentation seeks to offer a window on the lives and educational experiences of Canada’s young city dwellers in a time of accelerating globalization and urban malaise. It sets out a detailed comparative exploration of the ways in which groups of young people, marked by poverty and ethnic and religious diversity, have sought to navigate a new urban terrain and in so doing, have come to see themselves in quite new ways.

The Gangstas, Thugs, Nammers, Hardcare Asians, Ginas and Ginos who we meet throughout the course of this account are no strangers to surveillance, monitoring and exclusion. Nor are they unrehearsed in complex strategies of self-protection as they encounter new forms of racism, peer rivalry, shifting urban space, and radically changed demographies in the post-welfare urban city. The primary contribution of this work lies in its enduring promise for understanding new youth subcultural communities in the radically changed conditions of a new, trans-national economic and cultural world. Its compelling accounts from young people are the product of extensive ethnographic case studies (e.g. using photo-narratives, video diaries, time-lines, self-portraits, historical archival photos, urban geography methods of neighbourhood mapping) of two Canadian cities in the complex contemporary moment of globalisation, post-industrialism, urban dislocation, and the post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’

Time: 12H15 for 12h30 – 13H30
RSVP: 10 April 2009