Generation Nowhere: Rethinking Youth through the Lens of Un/under-employed Young Men
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Conclusions Educated un/under-employed young men in their later teens and twenties have become major players in processes of global change. In this paper I have used a review of recent scholarly work on this cohort to identify three emerging key themes in the strategies and experiences of these men: first, the important but non-determining role of class inequalities in the social and political strategies of young men; second, the continued salience of politics in young men’s lives; and finally, the significance of gendered environmental ideas in the discourses and practices of un/under-employed young men and youth more generally. Rather than simply adding the empirical complexity of recent work on educated un/under-employed young men into broader human geographies, I believe that the material reviewed in this paper can be used to re-evaluate geographies of youth, which have focused largely on the West (e.g. Valentine et al., 1998; Panelli, 2002) and which, as a result have largely ignored and in some cases inadvertently misrepresented the lives of young people in the global south. In particular, my account underscores a need identified elsewhere (McDowell, 2003; Philo and Smith, 2003) to integrate theoretical emphasis on new fluid identities and forms of individualization with an appreciation of the durable social inequalities and formal political opportunities and structures that mark the lives of present-day youth. Rather more than most anthropological, sociological and geographical studies of “youth at risk” in the West, I have insisted on situating an analysis of “Generation Nowhere” with reference to the issues of social inequality, political transformation, and local environmental change that continue to loom large in the social imaginations of many young people in the global south. From a broad human geographic perspective, comparative analysis of global youth highlights three themes that have been stressed in recent political economies of global transformation: the salience of class inequalities in framing people’s experience of rapid neoliberal economic change (Peck, 2001; Corbridge et al., 2005); the range of ways in which those marginalized by broader structures have tried to co-opt, resist or rework dominant economic formations (Herod 1997; Larner, 2000; Hart, 2003); and how economic restructuring has encouraged people to re-evaluate their relationship with their natural, built, and technological environments (Katz, 1998; 2004). The paper links in especially closely with recent critical geographies of labor by emphasizing the agency of underemployed workers (c.f. Herod, 1997) and the connection between people’s employment/non-employment and their subjectivities (Castree et al., 2003; Chari 2004). Young men are not dwarfed by larger structures of class and capital but rather shape regional labor regimes, for example by investing new meanings in their un/under-employment, negotiating over the social organization of their temporary jobs, and utilizing the time, space and energy that un/under-employment sometimes provides to engage in political resistance (see especially Gidwani 2001; Dyson 2006; 2007). My account also provides a basis for constructing a conceptual framework for understanding how young people navigate situations of intense economic insecurity. This framework can be glossed as a culturally and environmentally sensitive political economy approach to the post-colonial geographies of young people and it starts from the argument of Willis (1977) that young people engage in active forms of cultural production, shaped by their structural circumstances and available symbolic resources, which are implicated in broader processes of social reproduction. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical constructs, I nevertheless remain alive to the possibility that ideas of cultural capital, social capital and habitus may also help explain the strategies and trajectories of youth. Finally, influenced by Foucault, I have stressed a need to temper the rather agency-centred nature of Willis’s work with attention to the hold over young people’s minds maintained by regionally-inflected environmental sensibilities, particularly notions of masculinity. Our attempts to understand the lives of educated un/under-employed young men, and threatened youth more broadly, therefore depend less on the rigorous application of a single theoretical schema and more on the craft of holding in our minds simultaneously a set of meso-level theoretical concepts – cultural production, habitus, youth spatialities – that cast light on different aspects of young people’s lives and demand an ethnographic approach to post-colonial youth geographies. 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