Jackie Kennelly

This paper explores the material effects of an array of cultural and subcultural forces on three groups of urban Canadian young people: youth activists in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. The main argument of the paper is that histories of liberal discourses, symbolic and material forms of racism, colonialism and class conflicts, as well as the contemporary ascendancy of neoliberalism, have created a specific cultural space that have identifiably shaped youth activist subcultures in Canada. The paper builds this argument on the basis of a year-long ethnography with 38 young people (ages 13-29) engaged in youth activist subcultures contesting globalization, war, poverty, and/or colonialism across Canada’s three largest cities. In the first section of this three-part exploration, I consider the influence of liberalism and neoliberalism, reading the pressures faced by young activists through the lens of these two ideological forces.