Abstract

In the Lent and Easter terms of this academic year (2009-2010) Maria Nikolajeva and Mary Hilton will be holding an interdisciplinary discussion group on teenage life. We hope to draw out in-depth discussion on the ways that the second decade of life is characterised by physical changes to the body and brain, the differential nature of teenage experience, and the wide-ranging ways experience and existence is represented and enacted in Young Adult fictions, in theatre, school, home and politics. Our overall ground plan is very capacious at this stage as we are hoping to involve a range of members of the faculty with a view to feeding ideas into the forth-coming Faculty conference The Emergent Adult (September 3-5, 2010). The discussion group will be held throughout Lent and Easter terms on every third Monday late afternoon 5- 6.30pm starting Monday 18th January. Each session will be led by a discussant who will address a key reading which will be circulated beforehand to participants. This might be an important article or chapter that has informed or changed the discussant’s outlook or work in progress by the discussant. THEMES : Youth Cultures Representations of teenage existence, theatre and enactments Agency (in texts and in life) The body, the brain and mind – growth and change The family – ambiguous status as young adult School, work and daily grind

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 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 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 centres, 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 (to be published in Feb 2010) sets a productive and generative agenda for the field of critical youth studies.