Creación de una aplicación web para jugar a Cuatrola

This project is about non-elite young people’s subject formations through volunteer tourism. It is informed by - and contributes to - diverse work across youth

geographies and other social scientific scholarship on young people. Most broadly, the project contributes to countering static and dualistic understandings of young people’s lives. Nicola Ansell (2009) points out the limits of much children’s and youth geographies, based on critical theorisations of scale and space. She argues that young people are often associated with ‘agency’ at the ‘local’ scale, and portrayed as acted upon by forces of ‘structure’ at a higher ‘global’ level. Instead, she invites us, following Massey (1998), to understand young people as not simply autonomous individuals either acted upon or wholly agentive, but always situated in

networks which connect multiple places. Such a focus does not mean space is devoid of power relations: spatial claims remain central to strategies of inclusion and

exclusion, and certain spaces have more ‘intimacy’ for young people, who often have less capacity to influence locales than adults (Ansell, 2009). Investigating volunteer tourism provides a direct forum in which to unpack the influences of both

‘the local’ and ‘the global’ upon young people, and how they engage space with agency.

The project particularly disrupts dualisms of structure and agency, local and global in relation to understandings of classed youth (see also Cheung Judge, 2015b). The last section highlighted a need to move beyond portrayals of volunteers as all-powerful, entirely mobile, elite subjects. On the other hand, although literature on working-class young people illuminates how many of them face severe inequalities, a blinkered focus on their experiences in ‘the street’, neighbourhood and school can reproduce a framing of them as living particularly localised and bounded lives. This project takes seriously both the way non-elite young participants are subject to intense forces of ‘improvement’ but also exert agency that exceeds these, and how the transnational mobility of volunteer tourism is drawn into both these dynamics.

This concern with moving past dualistic views of young people mirrors the way I take issue with polarised views of volunteer tourism.

This section will first review work on the socioeconomic contexts relevant to the young participants in this study. Literature highlights how young lives often become

‘spectacle’, ‘a tremendously fertile figuration upon which all manner of things, ideas, affective relations, and fantasies are projected’ (Katz, 2008: 7). Young people

labelled as ‘urban youth’ face intersecting prejudices around class and race and are asked to become ‘more aspirational’. The section proceeds to discuss how work on spaces of learning – informal and formal education – can illuminate processes of subject formation relevant to the study of volunteer tourism. Young people are acted upon as ‘becomings’, and spaces of learning are often driven by anxieties about constituting the ‘normal’ subject in ways which reinforce social hierarchies.

However, there is room for diverse relationships and dynamics and learning spaces are often enjoyable. The section will end by looking to going ‘beyond’ repeating the refrain that young lives are framed by adult anxieties, or that young people’s agency

must be recognised (Kraftl, 2013). Theorising young people as navigating shifting constraints and opportunities through mobility and emotion furthers our attempts to understand volunteer tourism as a process of social reproduction or its potential for social transformation.

Before embarking on the core of this section, I must briefly make reference to some conceptual debates on young people, ‘transitions’ and ‘becoming’. Although this review has had to be selective within the huge range of work on young people, it is hard to avoid reference to these debates, given that common-sense understandings of volunteer tourism portray it as a catalytic point in young people’s transitions towards adulthood, an experience preparing young people for independence and the labour market. Notions of ‘transition’ have been criticised as based on the idea of a passage through the life course which is not universal but based on western psychological approaches to ‘healthy development’. This plays into normalising visions of young people as in linear progress towards the ‘higher’ destination of adulthood (Jeffrey, 2010), which has been a powerful logic for governing young people. In contrast, drawing attention to ideas of childhood and youth as socially constructed has been a key tenet of the ‘new social studies of childhood’. This argues that the modern Western binary view of young people as innocent ‘angels’ or

potentially anarchic ‘devils’ emerged from the historical specificities of the industrial revolution (Hopkins, 2010; Valentine, 1996; Skelton and Valentine, 1998) and emphasises that children and young people are (political) agents in their own right.

These pertinent critiques form a backdrop to the discussion at hand: non-elite adolescent youth are subject to moral panics, volunteer tourism work with children idealises childhood as a time of safety and freedom from responsibilities and politics (Valentine, 1996; Boyden and De Berry, 2004), and trips seek to ‘develop’ young people as ‘becomings’. In this study, these dynamics were exacerbated by the way particular young people are subject to more intense efforts of ‘improvement’ than others, which is the focus of the next section.

2.3.2. Marginalisation and Agency for Classed and Racialised Young