Читать книгу Youth Urban Worlds - Julie-Anne Boudreau - Страница 18

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the historical urban context in Montreal since the 1960s. We strive to first provide a larger and more detailed rendering of Montreal’s urban feel by discussing some of the elements that are reciprocally affecting politics and urban youth worlds lived in this city. We then discuss Montreal’s place in the global urban political moment of the 1960s and 1970s and highlight how, at one end of a historical protest cycle, this moment reveals changing relations to time, space, and alternative rationalities that contribute to the affirmation of an urban logic of action alongside a nationalist state‐centred logic of action.

In Chapter 2, we enter into the urban political world of racialized youth in the neighbourhoods of Little Burgundy and Saint‐Michel. We explore how an individual becomes a political subject through daily encounters and situations of negotiation with the state (represented in this chapter through the figures of police officer, school teacher, and social worker). In the context of public debates around street gangs, racial profiling, and radicalization, we argue that analysing these youth worlds as ‘anti‐social’ or ‘at‐risk’ blinds us to what is being constructed on a daily basis. It shows that racialized youth are politically active beyond debates and representations. The ‘universe of operation’ that characterizes their neighbourhoods requires that we adopt what Simone calls an epistemology of Blackness. With material such as accounts of their daily movements in the city, collective cartographies of their neighbourhood, song lyrics and poems written by the youths themselves, and video vignettes they co‐produced with us, the chapter illustrates how racialized youths act through movement, seduction, and distributed agency.

In Chapter 3, we explore the emotional and spatialized experience of youths who participated in the 2012 student strikes. While this ethnography focuses on a more explicitly political event, we do not analyse it using the traditional sociological tools that focus on power relations, strategies, and organization. Instead, we work with emotional mapping, life narratives, biometric data, and video showing how transforming conceptions of time, space, and rationality in the contemporary urban era produce new forms of political action. Through an analysis of students’ urban trajectories and their emotionally charged places, we reflect on the effective reach of different modalities of power. Important figures such as the red square and Anarchopanda allow us to reflect on distributed agency and the negation of leadership. The sound of pots and pans and the vibration of ecstatic screaming under the Berri tunnel are used to show how these aesthetic experiences have changed the students as much as the streets of Montreal.

Chapter 4 draws us into the urban political world of beginning and aspiring urban farmers on the terrain of City Farm School, an urban agriculture training programme operating from within marginal and interstitial spaces at Concordia University. Through this ethnography, we follow urban farmers to explore how embodied experiences of the spatialities and circuits of food give meaning to urban agricultural practices as an aesthetic mode of political action. Although the market gardeners we meet are critical of the industrial, corporate‐led global food system and are aiming to spatialize alternative foodways and agrarian resources, their logic of action is based not so much on antagonism and contention as on impulsion and aesthetics in a field of interactions with numerous non‐human actors. We further analyse how seduction and attraction are twin modalities of power at play in the urban market garden by focusing on the charismatic appeal of non‐human earthly beings and the political ecologies that are sustained or disrupted through aesthetic relations.

In Chapter 5, we encounter ‘voluntary risk‐takers’ and edgeworkers. We begin with the story of Hubert, a skateboarder. We also meet dumpster divers, Greenpeace building climbers, explorers of abandoned industrial buildings, practitioners of extreme sports, and graffiti writers. Here, we move through the world of mostly White, university‐educated, middle‐class youths who choose alternative lifestyles involving variable levels of legal, physical, and social risk. The chapter argues that fear can have a politically empowering effect. It illustrates how fear circulates among these youths, how it is spatialized, how it participates in transforming both youths and the spaces in which they practice, and how this results in distributed forms of political agency. In this chapter, we work with the concepts of choreographic power and urban diviners in order to reflect on provocative subjectivity and the importance of political gestures visible beyond words.

In the Conclusion, we offer an epistemological reflection about ethnography and aesthetics. Responding to structural and dichotomous approaches to politics, we discuss how a situational and performative approach can contribute to better understand how politics unfolds in the contemporary period. This entails adjusting our understandings of agency and power. We insist that class and racial markers are important elements affecting aesthetic political relations. Indeed, looking back at our four ethnographies, we discuss how aesthetic political relations are differentiated in terms of forms and political effects. But, in all four ethnographies, youthfulness is a springboard for political action.