Jackie Kennelly, Educational Studies, UBC: “Learning to protest: youth activist struggles for recognition and symbolic authority in a neoliberal moment”
Youth Research Symposium
April 2, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. | St. John’s College Social Lounge
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education and sponsored by the University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
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. Here, I argue that histories of both liberalism and the construction of the ‘good and moral citizen’ play a specific kind of regulating role for young activists, creating a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) that is marked by substantial burdens of guilt and responsibility. I also argue that the forms of individualism central to the operation of the liberal state, and the specific relationship this implies between citizens and the nation, is undergoing a transformation via the pressures of neoliberalism and the ongoing shift of the burden of citizen well-being away from the state and towards individuals (Brown, 2001, 2005; Rose, 1999).
In the second section, I consider the classed and raced nature of contemporary Canadian youth activism, drawing primarily on the cultural sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1997; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), and the work of two contemporary youth theorists who have made use of his ideas (Sarah Thornton (1996) and Julie Bettie (2003)). My primary argument here is that the symbolic economy of belonging within youth activist subcultures is bound by a particular set of cultural codes that can perhaps be best understood through Thornton’s notion of ‘subcultural capital’ and Bettie’s concept of ‘class performance.’ Layered upon histories of classism and racism, as well as the wide-spread pressures of liberalism and neoliberalism, I argue that this combination of social/cultural forces yields specific subcultural permutations that have a material impact on who feels that they ‘belong’ within youth activist cultures, and what such cultural belonging entails. The third and final section turns to rituals of style and their relation to consumption and identity; this segment will look more specifically at who carries symbolic authorization within youth activist subcultures – who, in other words, are the bearers of authorized language (Bourdieu, 1991), and what consumptive strategies do they use to maintain their position as agents within this cultural field? Drawing on ethnographic data concerned with such symbolic elements of subcultures as dress and appearance, as well as the ways in which specific people acquire the elusive and desirable status of being ‘radical,’ I argue that the subcultural rules of comportment required within youth activist cultures are embedded within neoliberal frames of individualized consumption that have specific implications for social movements and progressive social change more broadly.