CUENTAS COMERCIALES Y OTRAS CUENTAS POR COBRAR

This project writes about ‘non-elite’ young people, and there is a delicate balance to be struck in this between avoiding sensationalism³ and examining the realities of social inequality for young people. Representational violence abounds. In this study, many young participants were framed by schools and youth groups as ‘at risk’, a label linked to imaginings of difference and criminalisation. Under New Labour,

‘risk’ became applied in policy to wide-ranging concerns about young people, from youth offending to generalised ‘failure’ and ‘not reaching potential’. The slippage between seeing young people as ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’, means that the label often justifies pre-emptive intervention and individualises responsibility for making ‘bad choices’, assuming ‘agency within the individual to overcome, or at least navigate through, inequalities and structural barriers that exist’ (Turnbull and Spence, 2011:

948). Ambiguous use means that factors such as class and race become ‘risk factors’, subjecting certain individuals and families to scrutiny.

Cindi Katz theorises the interconnections between structural inequalities, spectacular representations and young lives. She argues that global economic restructuring (rapid and highly uneven industrialisation and deindustrialisation) and the erosion of the welfare state has caused a ‘disruption of social reproduction’, that is, the physical and cultural practices by which the labour force is maintained. In this context, adult anxieties about the political-economic future have dramatic material effects on young lives. The lives of some are saturated with economic and psychological resources as privileged parents attempt to ensure their kids ‘make it’

(Katz, 2008). On the other hand, many young people worldwide are managed as

‘waste’ in terms of being an ‘excess’ population whose bodies need to be contained and disciplined. An example of the way representational and material violences

3 A ‘spectacular’ focus on marginality goes back to early social scientific interest in young people, in Chicago School studies of youth ‘delinquency’ in the 1950s and ‘60s. Straightforward views of deviance were problematised by the scholarship of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the 1970s, much of which explored young white working-class men’s ‘subcultures’ of resistance - through leisure or in school - as an affirmation of working-class identity (Willis, 1977).

These studies opened a valuable interest in style, culture and class, though were criticised for a romanticised and blinkered focus on young men, and a tendency to portray subcultural identities as an ‘authentic’ and cohesive class resistance (Huq, 2006).

mesh can be seen in ‘the school to prison pipeline’ where dynamics of

under-education, surveillance and unforgiving punishment are accompanied by a rhetoric of personal responsibility for young men of colour in the US (Katz, 2011:51).

Young people face intersectional prejudice. The young people who participated in this project lived on, or were associated with youth groups based in council estates (low-income urban areas). ‘Inner city’ and ‘urban’ can be tropes which link danger and social dysfunction with minority communities (Kulz, 2014; Vanderbeck, 2008).

In the UK, prejudicial readings of council estates go hand-in-hand with a renewed demonisation of a ‘failing’ underclass (Gunter and Watt, 2009, McKenzie, 2013).

Prejudice congeals around intersections of age, race, class and gender, as well as comportment, dress, speech and ‘attitude’ (Allen et al, 2013; Vanderbeck, 2008). In particular, young men of colour in low-income areas are associated with ‘gangs’.

While tight loyalties, territorial belongings and criminal activity do occur and young people themselves talk of ‘gangs’, the term is also used to pathologise young people and their social bonds (Lucas, 1998). These representational violences have deeply embodied effects⁴. Experiences of being feared in public space inscribe racialised hierarchies onto young people’s bodies (Day, 2006). Relations with police are a visceral form of everyday prejudice, particularly ‘stop and search’ policies, which subject young people to intensely painful experiences of being ontologised as criminal, asked to ‘prove their innocence’ in a huge range of spaces and times.

Disproportionate policing of young men is experienced collectively as community discrimination, as women and older people feel intense anxiety about young male family members and friends (Cahill, 2015)⁵.

Many young people also face narrow future socioeconomic horizons. A strong vein of work critiques education as a powerful forum for reproducing inequality in the UK. For instance, the intensified privatisation of education through Academy schools arguably undercuts redistributive models of localised provision. As schools                                                                                                                

4 Representational violence can have directly violent effects, even constituting a ‘politics of death’

(James, 2014). Increasing awareness of the deaths of young black men and women at the hands of police at the US illustrates this idea with visceral power. However, it is also present in the contexts of this study, as the catalytic role of the fatal shooting of unarmed Mark Duggan by police to the UK’s nationwide riots in the August 2011 shows.

5 In the borough of Haringey in April-June 2011, in the lead up to the riots, there were 6894 ‘stop and search’ instances, in 6806 of which there was no conviction (Back, 2012).

face pressures to market themselves as ‘successful’ this can cut time for relational care, and increase the criminalisation of ‘problem’ pupils. Outside of education, young people face flexible, insecure service-sector employment (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2007). In London, ‘sweated’ labour - involving long hours, poor conditions and extreme job insecurity - has become paradigmatic of sectors such as cleaning, care, construction and hospitality (Wills, 2015).⁶ Employers avoid

responsibility for the social wage under euphemisms of ‘flexibility’ and ‘freelancing’.

Following Katz’s call for ‘counter topographies’ - associations with analytical similarity which cut across space (2001b, 2011) - we see resonance between the constraints young people face in the global north and south: education as a route to social mobility is limited in the face of privatisation, and young adults face chronic employment insecurity which frustrates achieving ‘successful adulthood’ (Jeffrey, 2010; Langevang, 2008; Mains, 2007).

In the UK, a ‘politics of aspiration’ takes shape against the backdrop of these issues and concerns about welfare dependency (Allen et al., 2013; Brown, 2013). For instance, Kulz (2014) examines how a much-lauded strict Academy school⁷ runs on a discourse of ‘urban children’ as chaotic subjects requiring discipline. Beneath the veneer of ‘aspirational citizenship’ it is non-white young people who are asked to

‘adjust themselves’ - in speech, comportment, dress and the performance of mixing across ethnic lines. Brown (2011) examines how discourses of aspiration in higher education policies focus interventions on working-class young people deemed ‘not aspirational enough’. Through affective ‘wow’ moments such as university taster days, these initiatives have had success in raising desires to attend to university.

These cultivated ambitions come into painful conflict with facing the difficulties of the withdrawal of state support (e.g. high university fees) and actually achieving social mobility post-university.

These scholarly explorations, and dramatic events such as the UK’s August 2011 riots, powerfully highlight that young people experience a sense of disposability and

6 In London in recent years there has been a fall in real wages and around 18% of the workforce are paid less than the living wage. A huge proportion of those at the bottom end of the spectrum are migrants (Wills, 2015).

7 Which, despite a pseudonym, I surmise that several of my research participants attended.

‘blocked futures’ (Back, 2012). However, such work can underplay how ‘received meanings and relations are refused or reworked’ (Katz, 2011: 56). Young people are not just ‘pliant victims’ but resourceful negotiators seeking alternative forms of learning, and enacting politics of ‘reworking, resilience and resistance’ (Katz, 2001a, 2004; Jeffrey, 2010: 500). Young people’s ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’ can take the form of explicitly political action (Jeffrey, 2013), but also be seen in everyday intentional acts and is often seen as ‘inappropriate’ (Skelton, 2013). For instance, ‘street

culture’, a term which should be used with caution⁸, can be understood as a form of

‘bounded agency’. James (2015) analyses violent grime music produced by young people in east London as an ironic and nihilistic reproduction of the ‘appetites of neoliberalism’ as young people face unemployment against constant reminders of consumer ‘freedom’. Bourgois’s (2002) beautiful ethnography of Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York argues that fundamentally, they are ‘in search of respect’ in the face of unemployment, racial prejudice, and a lack of ‘cultural capital’ to navigate the formal economy. Drug dealing provides a forum for responsibility, stability and self-worth as well as economic benefits, even as it incurs degrading and damaging costs in its use of violence for reputation-based control. These performances can be understood as deeply ambivalent forms of resistance, a sort of ‘negative agency’

(Jeffrey, 2010).

Less spectacularly, Gunter and Watt (2009) found that in east London young men viewed ‘living on road’ as a form of work, refusing the low pay, subservient

performances and everyday racism they faced in formal jobs. Dipping in and out of

‘hard graft’ manual labour work and the street economy is part of the local labour history of east London (Gunter and Watt, 2009). These agentive performances can be contextualised at the intersection of spatialised ‘structures of feeling’ over time, informed by expressions of pride at a masculinity formerly dominant, but now out of place in the context of gentrification and feminised service-sector labour (Kraack and Kenway, 2002).

8 These terms should be approached with caution given the propensity of the term ‘culture’ to essentialise, and ideas of ‘urban-ness’ to serve as a vehicle for racialised prejudice. Many analyses of

‘the codes of the street’ have been criticised as poor theorisations ‘sealed off’ from political-economic dynamics (Wacquant, 2002). It must be emphasised that spectacular forms of hyper-aggressive behaviour are only embraced by a small number of young men, but exert a wider imaginative influence on many other young people, or may be temporarily and opportunistically embraced by others (Bourgois, 2002: Gunter and Watt, 2009).

Volunteer tourism is a phenomenon in which spatial mobility is central to young people’s efforts towards social mobility. These accounts of youth agency amid socioeconomic constraint support the focus on ‘space not as a static container for action but as actively entangled in the drama of youth in practice’ (Jeffrey, 2012:

249). ‘The street’ is a forum for negotiating reputation and status. Scholarship from diverse contexts provides examples of how young people’s agentive performances are deeply spatialised. Young adults in a low-income area of Accra, Ghana, constantly move around the city to evaluate opportunities and sustain social networks in differentially gendered ways. Balancing a constant state of readiness with ‘aimless’ waiting is a tactic of improvisation towards ‘becoming somebody’

(Langevang, 2008; Langevang and Gough, 2009). Middle-class young men in urban Ethiopia seek a ‘spatial fix’ to blocked employment opportunities, moving to avoid the shame associated with low-status occupations (Mains, 2007). Young Ghanaian men, seen in western eyes as victims of football trafficking, see themselves as agentive ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, embracing a dream of ‘being a footballer’ in Europe in contrast to constrained labour options at home (Esson, 2013). Although volunteer tourism originates from a much more privileged position, this project engages questions of how non-elite British volunteers draw the experience of

mobility into their aspirational identity work. However, the trips and their visions of ideal young subjects are also strongly defined by adult agendas. To explore this, I review work on education and subject formation.

2.3.3. Forces of Improvement and Subject Formation in Spaces of