Arab Youth

Social Mobilisation in Times of Risk

Samir Khalaf, Roseanne Saad Khalaf

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780863568213
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 2011, Arab youth took to the streets in their thousands to demand their freedom. Although it is too early to speculate on the ultimate outcome of the uprisings, one auspicious feature stands out: they reveal the genesis of a new generation sparked by the desire for civil liberties, advocacy for human rights, and participatory democracy. This unique volume explores some of the antecedents of the upheavals and anticipates alternative venues of resistance that marginalized youth - from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine to Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran - can mobilize to realize their emancipatory expectations. Themes covered include the forging of meaningful collective identities in times of risk and uncertainty; youth militancy, neighborhood violence and youth gangs; the surge of youthful activism; and youths' expressive outlets through popular arts and street music.

Part 1

Youth as a Social Category

Youth as a Social Category and as a Social Process

Johanna Wyn

I am delighted to have the opportunity to share some ideas about the young people, the idea of youth, and the ways in which individual experiences are formed in social, political, and historical context. I have previously made a case for conceiving of youth as a social construct which has different meanings over time and place (Wyn & White, 1997). I have argued that youth is a social process – a way of defining individuals that is linked to complex social, political, and economic processes, much in the same way as gender and class are also social processes.

In order to elaborate on this idea I focus on one aspect of the context of young people’s lives – policy discourses, interventions, and practices. I look at the ways in which these contribute to the meaning and experience of youth and to reflect on the ways in which this impacts on young people’s lives. My paper focuses on Australian policies, with a specific focus on the generation that were born just after 1970, and who were leaving secondary school around 1991.

This was an especially significant time for young people in Australia. Much has been written elsewhere about changes that occurred at this time (Wooden, 1998; te Riele & Wyn, 2005; Wyn 2008). For the purposes of this discussion I highlight the collapse of the youth labour market in the late 1980s and the dramatic increase in tertiary and further education in the early 1990s. These and other changes gave particular salience to ideas and theories of social change (Bauman, 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Beck & Lau, 2005). An interest in understanding the impact of social change on youth was widely shared across a number of developed countries (Leccardi & Ruspini, 2006; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; White and Wyn, 2007a; Henderson et al., 2007). The related processes of individualization, the fragmentation of institutional processes, the significance of biographical ‘choice’, and requirement to take responsibility for processes that are out of individual control (responsibilization) have arguably had a profound impact on young people at this time. Indeed, as young people were struggling to make sense of their (changing) world, youth researchers and commentators alike began to coin terms to describe this ‘new’ generation. In the 1990s, concerns about youth transitions began to emerge in policy reports and academic literature, and in the popular press; labels such as Gen X, Y, Z, Generation Me, Millennials, Baby Boomers, Baby Busters, and many others came into usage (Twenge, 2006; Sheahan, 1996). Many of these terms are based on market and human resources management research (see for example Jurkiewitz, 2000 and Howe & Strauss, 2007). However, their claim that there are differences between generations based on the context in which they have been born and grown up, and that these differences are not simply age effects, is compelling. Although these terms are simplistic descriptions and sometimes gross stereotypes, they lend weight to the idea of the formation of a social generation. Indeed, there is a surprising convergence of thinking about the time period that each of these cohorts (especially Gen X and Y) represent, based on a consensus about social conditions and their impact on the possibilities and constraints on individuals who are born into and forge their lives through these time periods (Wyn & Woodman, 2006).

These ideas form a backdrop to the main focus of this paper, which is the impact of education, health, and labor market policies on young Australians in the 1990s. In arguing that age is attributed with a particular and relatively unique meaning at every historical period (Mitterauer, 1993; Mizen, 2004), I also make a case for recognizing the role of institutions in the social construction of age and reflect on assumptions about youth that inform policies and programs.

In the following discussion, I provide a brief discussion of the ways in which policy impacts on the idea of youth. I illustrate this through discussions of three distinctive areas of policy and then offer some reflections on the implications of these arguments for youth as a social process:

a. Education policies framing youth;

b. Health discourses naturalizing youth as a stage of life and providing technologies to define and measure youth; and

c. Labor market policies that have unintended outcomes.

POLICY: YOUTH AS A RESOURCE AND A PROBLEM FOR THE FUTURE

Government policies have a powerful impact on the way in which youth is defined and experienced. Although they are not deterministic, government policies, programs, and institutional processes frame possibilities and limits on young people. The institutions of education and health have a broad reach into young people’s lives, ensuring a degree of conformity with government directions and defining, creating, and protecting the vulnerable. Employment and labor-market policies too impact directly on the majority of young people. These jurisdictions legitimate ideas, concepts, and narratives that form the foundation on which the construction of youth rests. I agree with Rose (1999) that the objects of political concern are not invented by political thought as such, but are assembled “out of the work of a plethora of practical empiricists” who find “inventive” techniques of government through the development of measurement procedures, classifications of deserving and undeserving, and ways of processing individuals. In other words, policies are not the source of discourses about youth, but they provide an insight into the nature of these discourses and often serve to amplify particular approaches to youth.

Those who work in the youth sector and related areas are likely to be well aware of the differences between education, health, employment, and labor market jurisdictions. Differences in disciplinary background, training, and institutional practices between these areas make inter-sectoral practice and partnership very difficult (Milbourne et al., 2003; Wyn, 2009). However, there are many underlying similarities in their approaches to “youth” – to the concept of this phase of life and its significance – and to the management of young people.

Some of these commonalities are outlined by Rose (1999) in his discussions of the social implications of late modernity. In a powerful critique of Giddens’ Third Way politics that dominated Britain’s Labor Government in the 1990s, Rose argues that government policies actively shape new ways of becoming. He calls this process of framing human action the “capitalization of citizenship”, through the implementation of a wide range of policies across all areas of government that assume that the main source of value and competitive advantage in the modern economy is human and intellectual capital (Rose, 1999: 438). The focus on human capital, Rose argues, is based on the conception of the human actor as an entrepreneur – of his or herself strictly to maximize his or her own human capital by choices which are, as it were, investments for the purpose of the capitalization of one’s own existence (Rose, 1999: 438).

The impact of policies on young people’s lives is illustrated through a consideration of the shift from policies framed by Keynesian economic approaches to monetarist ones. Mizen’s analysis of the impact of these different policy frameworks on the construction of youth by the state is informative (Mizen, 2004). He describes how Keynesian state policies, which informed government policies in the immediate post-war years from 1946 to 1975 in the UK (and it can be argued, also in Australia and New Zealand), established inclusive measures such as support for a welfare state, a commitment to full employment, the expansion of secondary schooling and public hospitals, and the inclusion of youth into civic life.

By 1976, in the face of changing economic conditions, monetarist economic policies began to dominate. These policies made economic goals the primary focus. Under monetarist policies through the late 1970s to the 1990s (in the UK and NZ) and to 2007 in Australia, the state progressively reduced public support for young people, by reducing the scope of the welfare state and developing the exclusionary categories of “deserving and undeserving” youth. In essence, as Mizen (2004) argues, monetarist policies have relied on the category of age as a primary mechanism for narrowing the responsibility of the state for young people’s lives while at the same time hugely expanding the reach of monitoring, surveillance, and control over both young people and the institutions in which they spend their time.

A range of monetarist policies has contributed to the increased cost of being young because as the state withdrew support a greater share of the responsibility for resourcing education and health fell to young people and their families. The impact of monetarist policies has been especially significant as Australian (and Western governments) have acted on concerns about global labor market competitiveness. In Australia the reduction of state support included a significant reduction in funding for public education, increases in government funding for non-government schools, and a move to align education more closely with the country’s economic goals by focusing on vocational education. The concern about labor market competitiveness has made education and training the centerpiece of youth policies in most Western countries.

Other elements of monetarist policies included the replacement of universal provision of health and education services with targeted and more exclusive approaches, supported by the development of a research industry that can provide the tools to identify young people who are at risk. The policy preoccupation with targeting the health and education dollar has inevitably positioned the period of youth as a time of immense vulnerability and identified youth as a problem for the future of our society. From the 1990s on, policies have positioned youth as primarily a (dangerous and risky) transition to adulthood.

Exploring the relevance of these ideas for youth policies in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s, Kelly (2006) argues that adulthood as a taken-for-granted category should be problematized, and suggests that it should be re-imagined in terms of the Entrepreneurial Self. Drawing on Foucault (1988), he suggests that prevailing discourses about youth-at-risk are truths about what adults should become. He argues that the Entrepreneurial Self represents a desirable set of positive dispositions that government policies and programs aimed to achieve in the young population.

This can be seen in the way in which Australian health and education policies position youth as a resource and as potentially a problem for the future. Both provide the foundations of normative expectations of youth by favouring particular types of transitions as the standard and in creating categories of vulnerable, at-risk, and excluded youth. Both of these policy domains also draw primarily on bio-medical discourses about youth, drawing on the loosely related sets of ideas that contribute to the concept of youth as primarily a stage of biological and psychological development and a universal age category, and the use of these ideas as a justification for policies and practices that are enacted on young people.

In the following sections I explore three dimensions of policy and their impact on concepts of youth. Firstly I discuss the impact of educational policies and then I explore discourses of youth that derive from the health sector. Thirdly, I discuss an example of the unintended consequences of policies through a consideration of labor market policies.

EDUCATION: MANAGING YOUTH

Over the last twenty-five years there have been significant changes in education in Australia, some of which are the result of direct policy interventions and others that are related to broader processes of economic, social, and political change. It is now considered normative for young people to complete secondary school, although this only became a reality for the generation born after 1970. In 1976, only 12 per cent of twenty-year olds were participating in some form of education. By 2001, a quarter of all young Australians in their twenties were engaged in education. Secondly, learning is now a life-long process, and it is common for young people to combine study with work during their secondary school years and beyond, until they are well into their thirties (Wyn et al., 2008). Education has become both more significant and more marginal in young people’s lives. This is because formal educational credentials have never been more important to labor market security, and yet at the same time, young people are learning from an increasingly wide range of sources, including informal learning. Schools and educational institutions are just one of many sites (including workplaces, leisure activities, the internet, and non-credentialed education and training) where young people engage in learning. Finally, tertiary education has become the new mass education sector. It replaces secondary education (which was the “new” mass education sector in the 1950s) as the desired completion point of an educational career.

Against this backdrop of change, educational policies have contributed to the strong identification of youth with being a student, and have primarily positioned young people as an economic resource and tool for the purposes of ensuring Australia’s global economic competitiveness and youth as future workers and citizens.

Youth as Category: Student

Youth in Australia is almost synonymous with student because of the requirement for young people to complete secondary education (Wyn & Woodman, 2006; Cohen & Ainley, 2000). Student is a category based primarily on age, underlining the use of age as a management tool (Mizen, 2004). The use of age as mechanism for governing youth ignores the increasing evidence of diversity amongst young people and the increasingly complex relationship between young people’s lives and age (Wyn & Woodman, 2006). In Australia, the close alignment between youth and stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Youth as a Social Category
• Part 2: Negotiating Identity in Times of Risk
• Part 3: Representation and Self-Perception
• Part 4: Militancy and Street Violence
• Part 5: Voluntarism and Civil Society
• Part 6: Popular Culture and Music
• About the Contributors
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index