‘Off the wall’: reading community mural making as a contestable site of urban youth governance

ABSTRACT

This paper weighs in on discussions contemplating the current state of arts programing targeting ‘at risk’ youth as handmaiden to a strategic neoliberal cosmopolitanism. I examine a City of Toronto, Canada, youth governance initiative that sought to link graffiti abatement, neighborhood beautification and gentrification through mural production, and ‘at risk’ youth civic engagement and crime prevention. While these coordinates were designed to harness racialised youth within a matrix of disciplinary practices concerned with risk mediation and economic productivity, program participants and youth workers drew from the aesthetics of multiculturalism as resource to navigate the governance dictates of the Grafitti Transformation Project. I focus on one particular incident that unfolded over a week-long period at a youth serving agency located in one of Toronto’s designated ‘Priority Neighbourhoods’. The incident illustrates in granular detail a politics of multicultural citizenship and belonging articulating at the limits of what was conceived for the project. I then consider analytical and practice lessons to be learned about the political aesthetics and ‘cultures of youth praxis’ by examining the workings of power leveled in such moments of tension, and by assessing the contours of an alternative multicultural sensibility forwarded when disruption occurs.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth work
• ethnicity
• exclussion
• citizenship
• youth culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this paper I draw from French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s consideration of political aesthetics for thinking through the types of disruptions possibly transpiring to normative ways of doing and seing social and political life. Ranciere’s understands dissensuous acts as the declaration of a ‘way of bringing about’ a redistribution of a space/time, material/object, places/identities configuration such that different modes of the sensible are brought into tension with one another. In this moment of disruption, that which was rendered unsayable, unthinkable, and those who were rendered speechless, invisible are introduced to be heard, to be seen (Ranciere 2009, 24).