Youth subjectification and resistance in the settler state

Examining the subjectification of young people, particularly from marginalized communities, has had a long history in education scholarship and continues to be an important topic for curriculum studies. The authors in the recent special issue of Curriculum Inquiry, titled “The Child in Question,” offered a range of new perspectives for understanding how the very idea of what a child is comes to be formulated, calling into question the “stories of childhood that society uses to delimit concepts of futurity, personhood, otherness, belonging, normalcy, and development” (Farley & Garlen, 2016, p. 228). This issue of CI brings together four articles that examine similar questions with a focus on “youth” and the conditions that shape the subjectivities of those who are positioned as “young people” or “adolescents.” Together, the four articles in this issue provide a comparative view, by focusing on experiences in three different nation states: Canada (Yoon), South Africa (Gacoin), and the Unites States (Sarigianides and Stiegler).

By focusing on the subjectification of youth within these three nation states, the articles contribute to a discussion of the ways in which certain lives continue to be valued more than others within settler colonial contexts. Although the papers in this issue do not directly draw upon the framework of settler colonialism, each paper contributes to an understanding of how youth are always-already subjected to white settler colonial ideology. This is important as youth also continue to mobilize in unprecedented ways in resistance to the forces that shape their social conditions within settler states, a point of contrast to which we will return later.

The issue begins with Sam Stiegler's article, “Privacy for all students?: Talking about and around trans students in ‘public’.” Stiegler analyses campaign materials from a group named Privacy for All Students (PFAS), which purports to “protect” students’ safety by arguing against Assembly Bill 1266. The AB1266, which was passed in 2013 by the California State Legislature, gives students the right to participate in sex-segregated school activities on the basis of their own sex identification, thus protecting the rights of trans students. Disguising anti-trans rhetoric through the discourses of children's privacy, PFAS argued against AB1266 without mobilizing an explicitly transphobic discourse or appearing as being against the rights of trans students. Stiegler's focus on what these campaign materials do exposes the systems of knowledge that allow for the arguments against trans students to be misrecognized and not perceived as transphobic. Moreover, Stiegler shows how these violent discourses further oppress marginalized groups despite the claim that the aim is to protect all students.

Focusing on students in K-12 schools, Stiegler explains how the figure of the trans student is constructed as “Other” to a normative construction of the student who is “always already innocent, at-risk, asexual, and white” (p. 352). The author further extends this argument to conceptualizations of private and public spaces as being constituted by discourses of whiteness. Such discourses grant status to those who conform to the white settler colonial ideology, which “concurrently normalizes whiteness, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and other forms of privilege” (p. 357). Because the status hierarchy risks being disturbed by the very presence of the trans body, PFAS’ arguments reinforce the hierarchies by indirectly blaming the trans body for disturbing the status quo.

These status hierarchies are also implicitly reinforced through other dominant discourses, and in the context of neoliberalism, the notion of choice has played a significant role in shaping youth subjectivities. In “Neoliberal imaginary, school choice, and ‘new elites’ in public secondary schools,” Ee-Seul Yoon examines how Canadian youth come to see themselves as worthy of school advantages through notions of choice. Through what Yoon calls a “critical socio-phenomenological approach,” the author utilizes critical, anthropological and interpretative approaches to understand how students attending elite public schools in Vancouver, British Columbia, construct self-identifications “through the processes of competition, choice, and mobility in the education market” (p. 371). Although these “choice schools” are not equivalent to traditional elite private schools, the students who attend them become valued as elites within the framework of selective public schools. This privileging is made possible by neoliberal discourses that promote competition, choice and mobility.

Much research has been conducted on the advantages that certain kinds of private school programs grant to affluent families (Brown & Lauder, 2009; Weis, Cipollone, & Jenkins, 2014, etc.). In this article, Yoon focuses on how a District Specified Alternative Program, which operates within a public school system, shapes the way that students become aware of their status and construct their own elite identification. Through this paper, Yoon utilizes Bourdieu's concepts of cultural, economic, and social capital, which help to “analyze how hierarchical social and educational structures are created and maintained by continuing production and appropriation of social and educational labor borne by an exclusive group of individuals, especially students in the context of schooling” (p. 373). In order to understand the impact of neoliberal policies on the production of youth subjectivities, Yoon interviewed 59 students between grades 7 and 12 and analyzed a district-published school choice brochure that introduces Grade 7 students to different choice programs. Yoon labels these students neoliberal elites, as they “have become the most exceptional and exemplary students in the newly configured market logic and practice of competition, choice, and mobility” (p. 383).

Observing that the large majority of the students enrolled in selective public choice schools come from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds, Yoon concludes that parents’ levels of economic, social and cultural capital largely determine the educational choices and outcomes of their children. Yoon's analysis sheds light on how neoliberal discourses guide the way students successfully adopt the “dominant imaginary” through which they construct particular elite identifications (p. 383). These subjectivities rely upon, and further entrench, dominant systems of power and oppression within the Canadian settler nation state.

Returning to the United States and shifting the focus on to teachers, Sophia Sarigianides draws from Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to examine teacher's implicit beliefs about adolescents’ race and sexuality. In “Shifting the abject: Examining abjected adolescence in teacher thinking,” Sarigianides argues that such beliefs have a direct influence on how youth are subjected to particular hierarchies, and the subject positions that are made available for youth in particular classrooms. Based on interviews with four teachers who were part of a professional development workshop for seven months, Sarigianides explores how the teachers’ ideas of adolescents rely on dominant discourses of sexually innocent adolescence, which further relies on the abjection of black and brown bodies. Sarigianides argues that these developmentally based and racist ideas about adolescence construe adolescent identity through innocence in ways that are racialized as white through an implicit contrast to the risky body of the non-white racialized subject position.

Through the article, Sarigianides shows how these violent forces of oppression remain prevalent, yet often invisible, in our classrooms. The author utilizes Kristeva's work to show how the abject youth haunts the borders of the dominant group and risks uncovering the performative nature of the norm. Sarigianides argues that because the goal of education is to avoid the abject through success, educators are reluctant to bring the abject into the curriculum. Ultimately, Sarigianides reminds educators that “many of us engage in these social practices [of abjection] unknowingly, and by doing so, deepen the suffering of youth already excluded from social expectations mapped onto their age” (p. 389). The author explains that educators should shift their ideas about youth away from those views that maintain dominant narratives of who youth ought to be.

This examination of how youth are imagined in ways that reinforce dominant racist ideologies continues in Andrée Gacoin's article, titled “Who am I? Identity and the facilitation of local youth lives within sexuality education as an HIV prevention strategy.” In this article, based on an ethnographic study conducted in South Africa with a national HIV prevention sexuality education program, Gacoin theorizes identity as an ongoing site of struggle within sexuality education. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth and Doreen Massey, the author understands the “local” context as “already a site of struggle over who is targeted as needing sexuality education within it” (p. 410). Through this lens, the author focuses on “pedagogical encounters” or the pedagogical possibilities at play within the place of sexuality education.

Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and a close reading of documents related to the program, Gacoin shows how the sexuality education program assumes a youth identity in relation to a conception of the Other that is entangled in power-resistance relationships. Here, we can see how the legacies of apartheid are still strong in the way that identifications are understood and compared. The sexuality education program in this study targets “South African youth,” but in reality it targets racialized groups, as they are seen as needing sexuality education programs, while white youth are seen as not needing these resources.

Using vivid vignettes, Gacoin further illustrates how sexuality education is a contested and contradictory space, where “who youth are (or should be) is already impossible” (p. 413), because identities are preconceived through racial discourses rooted in the settler colonial history of apartheid in South Africa. The paper showcases how educators are often immersed in “empowering” discourses that aim to critique and challenge oppressive forces. Yet, culture often works through these programs, as “defining who youth are in terms of ‘culture’ risks both reifying and redeploying diffuse relations of power and knowledge that continually refuse to stay in place” (p. 417). Noting the implicit connection that the program makes to Paulo Freire's work through the concept of facilitation, Gacoin argues that the way in which this sexuality education program is implemented as an HIV prevention strategy frames racialized youth as “at risk,” undermining the goal of promoting student-centred liberation.

Gacoin concludes that who youth are cannot be scripted or predetermined and that educators should examine “how a more structured pedagogical approach risks becoming a violent closure of the very possibility of engaging differently with one another within the pedagogical encounter” (p. 421). The idea that youth can be targeted through sexuality education simplifies complex identities and erases differences along categories of race, class, and gender, for instance, assuming instead a coherent, stable, and neoliberal youth subject. Here, we see clear overlaps between the four articles, as each sheds light on the power of contemporary discourses to shape youth subjectivities. Yet, all four authors also point to the possibilities of resistance against normative ideologies that prescribe who youth ought to be. This is crucial if we are to connect such analyses to the ongoing resistance efforts of various activist groups.

Within activist spaces, white settler colonial ideology is increasingly becoming the object of explicit analyses as an oppressive force that continues to reinforce dominant hierarchies. Much like the dominant discourses that shape youth subjectivities within schools, the settler colonial state also produces laws and policies that regulate who does or does not count as a proper citizen. In Canada, as in other settler states, this regulation often occurs under the guise of protecting the public, for instance, through laws like Bill C-51, or the “Anti-terrorism Act.” While ostensibly about protecting the public, such laws frame who is allowed to organize on behalf of social justice efforts as well as who is construed as a proper citizen, which has major consequences for activists of colour involved in justice efforts. These acts of protectionism are intimately linked to a multicultural narrative in which the idealized citizen is construed as “tolerant” through a contrast to an imagined “Other” who must be properly positioned (and controlled) within a white settler colonial framework in order to reinforce colonial orders of power. This settler colonial ideology, as the articles in the issues suggest, also shapes the subject positions available to young people in ways that are always-already embedded within the white settler colonial ideology of white innocence.

This line of analysis has led to the emergence of strong connections of solidarity between movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, as activists come to recognize the ways in which settler colonialism shapes the experiences of various marginalized groups. Recently, for example, following the suicides in the Cree community of Attawapiskat, Black Lives Matter activists joined the Idle No More movement in their occupation of Indigenous and Northern Affairs offices across Canada to demand action over the water, housing and suicide crises that affect Indigenous communities (Da Silva, 2016; Goodman, 2016). These analyses are also generating not only sophisticated critiques, but also significant movements against major institutions. From the critique of whiteness in the movie industry and the boycott of the Oscars (Gordon, 2016), to the uprisings in host cities like Rio de Janeiro against the devastating impacts of the “roving colonization” brought by the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Sykes, in press), critiques of white settler colonialism are generating new movements and alliances.

Young people are playing a central and significant role in these movements, despite the ways in which educational institutions have attempted to delimit who they can become and how they enact their youth subjectivities. Indeed, to the extent that educational institutions delimit who youth can become, as the four articles in this issue demonstrate, we should be intrigued by the phenomenal role that youth are playing in social movements and their immense potential for imagining futures otherwise.