Young people mobilizing the language of citizenship: struggles for classification and new meaning in an uncertain world

Abstract

This paper presents research findings from an ethnographic study carried out with 24 low‐income youths (ages 14–16) living on the economic fringes of urban inner‐city Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our primary aims are: to expose the stratified subcultural articulations of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and symbol, by the young people within our study; and to demonstrate how critiques of (neo‐)liberalism in political thought, when combined with a cultural sociology of youth, might alter our subcultural reading of young people's conceptions of citizenship under the dynamics of radical social change. Our ultimate goal is to develop a more nuanced sociological examination of the ways in which young people deploy and utilize the language of citizenship as part of their own cultural struggles, exacerbated in times of state retrenchment, to classify themselves and others as one method of achieving visibility and legitimacy in urban concentrations of poverty.

Keywords:

• youth
• citizenship
• subcultures
• social class
• identity
• urban space

Acknowledgements

We wish to extend our gratitude to Dr. Philip Gardner for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. This research was funded by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Standard Research Grant and the Spencer Foundation.

Notes

1. Mitchell describes the strategic cosmopolitan as ‘motivated not by ideals of national unity in diversity, but by understandings of global competitiveness, and the necessity to strategically adapt as an individual to rapidly shifting personal and national contexts’ (2003, 388).

2. Massey (1994) defines ‘emblematic class related places’ as places that have historically been defined as urban concentrations of poverty and still retain a symbolic class history, which is projected on the space and place in which young people live.

3. Following Cohen and Nayak, we define this term as the location of young people in particular subgroupings that are both cohesive and fluid but are located in working‐class arenas of urban life.

4. Williams (1989) states that ‘culture is ordinary […].’ He goes on to suggest that ‘these are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings’ (1989, 4).

5. We use ‘working class’ here to signify the ongoing importance of class relations to young people's experiences within a stratified social system.

6. Data collection for this project was completed by the two authors (the first author as a graduate research assistant, and the second as principal investigator) alongside two other graduate research assistants, Jennifer Muir and Eugenia Wang. We wish to extend our gratitude for their involvement in this research.

7. http://www.english‐vancouver.com/canada‐human‐development/ (accessed April 5, 2006). Ranking as follows: first by Condé Nast Traveler Magazine; second in 1996 by the UN Human Development Index; and third by Mercer Human Resources Consulting in 2005.

8. One exception to this was one young Aboriginal student who included the importance of ‘voting’ within her list of strategies for being a good citizen, making note of this after the injunctions to obey the law and ‘do good deeds’. Noteworthy is that this participant had engaged in activities at the Aboriginal Friendship Centre, where she may have been given some alternative education in the importance of asserting her social and political rights within Canada.

9. In recent years, a safe injection site has been operating in the neighbouring DTES under the auspices of a ‘Harm Reduction’ programme. Since the sites opening, a more aggressive policing system has been implemented such that drug users are charged with a crime if they are found in possession of drugs. Before the injection site opened, individuals were rarely charged with possession or the use of drugs on the street (Graham 2007). Consequently, many users living in the DTES were migrating towards the neighbourhood where many of our participants were students and living with their families.

10. All teachers in this study were white, which stood in stark contrast to the very diverse youth participants who participated in this study.