Lost Youth in the Global City

Distant cities, travelling tales and segmented young lives: making and remaking youth exclusion across time and place

“…By using the term imaginary representation, we are not suggesting that what people remember about being young or representations of young people are imaginary, in that they never existed. Rather, we are interested in how people remember and imagine youth exclusion in both the past and present, and how such memories reveal, in Balibar's (2009aBalibar's ( , 2009b terms, embodied understandings of 'seeing like a border' as well as nostalgic narratives of a lost time (Dillabough and Kennelly 2010;Erikson 2010;McLeod 2012;Wright and McLeod 2012). Putting this differently, we ask: how do memories and representations of youth represent border narratives that stretch across time and place?…”

“…These people had extensive experience of living or working in these areas, over periods of around 40 years. Data are also drawn from interviews with young people involved in Dillabough and Kennelly's (2010) ethnographic study in Vancouver. For the Melbourne site, we draw on materials from another strand of research in which the first and second authors were involved, using interview data with social workers and oral history interviews and focus groups conducted with older residents who grew up in the adjacent inner-city areas of Abbotsford and Collingwood, where some of the joint research took place.…”

“…These mobile narratives are reconfiguring the nature of youth cultural activities on a global scale, as well as young people's localised experiences of everyday exclusions in the 'global city' (Dillabough and Kennelly 2010;Sassen 2010;Rumford 2011Rumford , 2013. Increasingly sophisticated visual, electronic and print media transmit fears as well as strategies for risk management at regional, national and global scales (e.g.…”

“…We draw on a range of different but related sources derived from our own individual empirical research projects, a joint research project (McLeod and Dillabough 2007) and the public record. Research in Vancouver was part of a larger cross-national project (see Dillabough and Kennelly 2010) based in an area near a former industrial port that is deemed the poorest postal code in Canada. The research in Melbourne was conducted in an inner-city suburb that also began as an industrial hub in the nineteenth century, and while it is now more socially diversified, it retains a large public housing estate where much of the research with young people was based (McLeod 2012).…”

Being Chosen and Performing Choice: Young People Engaging in Imaginative and Constrained Secondary School Practices in Vancouver, BC, Canada

“…Charter schools in the three largest urban areas in the US provide limited access to students from socially, racially, and economically marginalized neighbourhoods (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011;Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009). In Canada, recent small-scale qualitative studies have found that educational choices are unequally distributed and that possible futures are unequally constructed in ways that reinforce social class hierarchies; consequently, students at low-performing schools feel stigmatized, invisible, neglected and "warehoused" (Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010;Gaztambide-Fernandez, VanderDussen, & Cairns, 2012). Students in these studies have referred to this as the "ghetto effect" (Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010).…”