Sukarieh Mayssoun - Youth rising?: the politics of youth in the global economy

YOUTH RISING?

Over the last decade, youth has become increasingly central to policy, development, media and public debates and conflicts across the worldwhether as an ideological symbol, social category or political actor. Set against a backdrop of contemporary political economy, Youth Rising? seeks to understand exactly how and why youth has become such a popular and productive social category and concept. The book provocatively argues that the rise and spread of global neoliberalism have not only led youth to become more politically and symbolically salient, but also to expand to encompass a growing range of ages and individuals of different class, race, ethnic, national and religious backgrounds.

Employing both theoretical and historical analysis, authors Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock trace the development of youth within the context of capitalism, where it has long functioned as a category for social control. The books chapters critically analyze the growing fears of mass youth unemployment and a lost generation that spread around the world in the wake of the global financial crisis. They question as well the relentless focus on youth in the reporting and discussion of recent global protests and uprisings. By helping develop a better understanding of such phenomena and critically and reflexively investigating the very category and identity of youth, Youth Rising? offers a fresh and sobering challenge to the field of youth studies and to widespread claims about the relationship between youth and social change.

Mayssoun Sukarieh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University.

Stuart Tannock is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.

Critical Youth Studies

Series Editor: Greg Dimitriadis

Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for Americas Youth
Edited by Shawn Ginwright, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota

Youth Learning On Their Own Terms: Creative Practices and Classroom Teaching
Leif Gustavson

Youth Moves: Identities and Education in Global Perspective
Edited by Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi

Youth Culture and Sport: Identity, Power, and Politics
Edited by Michael D. Giardina and Michele K. Donnelly

Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism
Edited by Anita Harris

Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion
Edited by Julio Cammarota and Michelle Fine

Theory and Educational Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation Jean Anyon with Michael Dumas, Darla Linville, Kathleen Nolan,
Madeline Perez, Eve Tuck, and Jen Weiss

The Means to Grow Up: Reinventing Apprenticeship as a Developmental Support in Adolescence
Robert Halpern

Black Youth Matters: Transitions from School to Success
Cecile Wright, Penny Standen and Tina Patel

Lost Youth in the Global City
Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly

Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism
Anita Harris

Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED
Eve Tuck

Negotiating Ethical Challenges in Youth Research
Edited by Kitty te Riele and Rachel Brooks

Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change
Edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East
Edited by Linda Herrera

Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy
Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock

YOUTH RISING?

The Politics of Youth in
the Global Economy

Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock

First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sukarieh, Mayssoun, author.
Youth rising?: the politics of youth in the global economy / by Mayssoun Sukarieh
and Stuart Tannock.
pages cm.(Critical youth studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. YouthPolitical activity. 2. Young adultsPolitical activity. 3. Youth
movements. 4. Political participation. 5. Capitalism. 6. Social justice.
7. YouthEmployment. 8. Young adultsEmployment. 9. Student loans.
I. Tannock, Stuart, 1969 author. II. Title.
HQ799.2P6S85 2014
305.235dc23

2014007959

ISBN: 978-0-415-71125-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-71126-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-88466-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk, UK

CONTENTS

Greg Dimitriadis

Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannocks Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy comes at an opportune time for this book series. When I began the series in 2005, I saw it as a venue for critical work on youth that moved across disciplines including education, sociology, and media studies (among other fields). I saw the series as an outlet for creative work that looked to understand a range of social, cultural, and economic phenomena in and through the lives and experiences of youth around the world. Since 2005, the global financial crisis as well as a series of worldwide protests put youth very much into the spotlight. Like many, I have operated under a series of assumptions about the last several years. Youth have been the primary victims of the global economic collapse (as evidenced by ubiquitous unemployment figures) and have responded to these and other injustices through worldwide protest movements (as evidenced by the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the Occupy Movement in the US and elsewhere). This is a narrative that has gripped scholars from across the political spectrum, differences emerging only in their responses to it.

Of course, the focus on youth has been longstanding in critical scholarship, including work associated with cultural studies. For example, Lawrence Grossberg has argued that a war on youth has been raging in the US since at least the 1990s. Kids are being subjected to forms of economic, political, legal, penal, medical, and rhetorical attack (2005, p. 364). For Grossberg, this war on youth is tantamount to a war on the future itself. That is, the attack on kids is about the relationship between individuality and time. It is a struggle to change our investment in and the possibility for imagining the future (p. 366). The struggle over youth is a struggle over modernitythe ability to aspire or to imagine a progressive set of social, cultural, and material relationships.

This work has been critically important for understanding the empirical experiences and conditions of youth today. Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy