Disjunctive belongings and the utopia of intimacy: violence, love and friendship among poor urban youth in neoliberal Chile

Settling down in time and place? Changing intimacies in mobile young people's migration and life courses

“…As Wyn (2015) has noted, one of the most significant gaps being addressed in youth research is regarding young people's relationships to people and place as a core aspect of managing increasingly fluid, unstable and mobile lives. This work examines, in particular, place attachment in the context of immobilities, aspirations, and rural/urban/neighbourhood/township belongings and identifications (Butler, 2016; Risør & Arteaga Pérez, 2018; Swartz, Hamilton Harding, & De Lannoy, 2012) but has not yet connected deeply with transnational mobility scholarship. Little is known about how transnational mobility figures in young people's efforts to be connected, included and engaged in their local social worlds and through their mobile place‐making practices (Wyn, 2015), especially as these become more dispersed spatially and less predictable temporally (Woodman & Wyn, 2015).…”

Migrant youth ‘between mobilities’: Sessility as a working concept

“…As youth studies scholars in particular have observed, the increasing attention to mobilities of people has often been at the expense of those that have remained in place (see Cook & Cuervo, 2020). Place, space and localities have always been regarded as integral to youth identities (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014; Farrugia, 2016; Hall et al., 2009; Nayak, 2003; Thomson & Taylor, 2005), and although successful transition is often associated with ‘moving on’, there is increasing attention to place‐attachment, at times in the context of thwarted aspirations and rural/urban/neighbourhood/township belongings and identifications (Risør & Pérez, 2018; Swartz et al., 2012) or to trouble dichotomous ideas of belonging and mobility (Fallov et al.,2013). Sometimes this work has taken the perspective of local attachment as a way for ‘emplaced’ young people to defend themselves against the pressures and imperatives of globalization and the false promise of mobility to those who are stuck at the bottom of its hierarchy, whilst other research has focused on nuancing views of ‘staying put’, noting that global flows continue to influence young lives regardless of physical mobility (Dolby & Rizvi, 2008), and that mobility/immobility is not a simple binary and nor should agency be only associated with leaving (Cook & Cuervo, 2020; Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016; Harris & Prout Quicke, 2019; Somaiah et al., 2020).…”

Civil victimhood: Citizenship, human rights and securitization in post-dictatorship Chile

“…Maria fails and ends up being stigmatized as a criminal even though nobody in her local community has suffered from a crime. Her case illustrates how the poor are often unable to fully participate in publically acknowledged claims of citizenship and it indicates how the divide between ‘citizens’ and ‘criminals’, first introduced by the right wing, works to morally justify the continued exclusion of the poor in the context of a neoliberalism imposed during the dictatorship and perpetuated in the new democracy (see also Risør and Arteaga, 2018). Tellingly, both cases also indicate that appropriate civil conduct becomes a de facto requirement for gaining substantial citizenship and that not everybody succeeds in performing civil victimhood as well as Bachelet.…”