Fear and youth citizenship practices: insights from Montreal

Abstract

This article explores how fear contributes to empowerment and citizenship practices among youth who choose alternative lifestyles. Fear is conceived in a threefold manner: (1) as a manipulated resource in the political process, (2) as energy to be tamed through individual will, and (3) as radiating from actors and flowing through situations of action. Through an examination of how ‘risk-taking’ youths play with fear, the article critically reflects on the modern and advanced modern conceptualizations of the political ‘heroic’ actor and its articulation with an understanding of political action as decentered from human actors. Citizenship practices, it is argued, operate on five distinct levels of political engagement ranging from an awareness of the world outside of oneself to empathy for others and activism. Rather than being state-centered, the article develops an understanding of intersubjective citizenship based on affective memory.

Keywords::

• citizenship practices
• fear
• risk
• youth
• political engagement
• alternative lifestyles
• aesthetic relations
• affective memory

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Programa Interinstitucional de Estudios de la Región de América del Norte (PIERAN). We thank Maria Moreno, Guénola Capron and Greig Chrysler for their joint work in this comparative project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. In this paper, youth is not defined by a specific age category, but as a social subjectivity. Is young whoever feels and acts as a youngster.

^2. As further explained in what follows, fear is defined as the urge to overcome felt danger (de Courville Nicol 2011). It can take various forms such as terror, horror, stress, thrill, and so on.

^3. We conducted 11 semi-structured interviews between January and November 2012, along with informal participant observation in public spaces in Montreal, either practicing slackline or marching on the streets during student demonstrations. Fieldwork was conducted during a very intense political moment in Montreal, known in French as the ‘printemps érable’. What started as a massive student strike lasted over 5 months and evolved as a major socio-ecological contestation against neoliberalism and corruption.

^4. As D. Harvey suggests:

The right to the city is far more that the individual liberty to access to urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious, yet most neglected of our human rights. (Harvey 2010, 23)

^5. We are thus proposing a tensed reconciliation of approaches with very different epistemological standpoints.

^6. Highlining consists of stretching an elastic and dynamic rope between two high platforms, mountains, buildings or trees and to walk from one extremity to the order like a tight rope walker. The main difference is that the highliner does not use a pendulum.

^7. A BMX professional is an athlete supported by private companies for giving shows and competing.

^8. COP-watching consists of secretly filming police officers in order to produce evidence of abuse.

^9. Dumpster diving is the practice of retrieving edible items from commercial trash to avoid food waste.

^10. The gendered aspect of voluntary risk-taking is not discussed here, but remains central to understanding the relationship between fear, urban environments, and empowerment. For an excellent discussion, see Olstead (2011).

^11. All of the participants (except for one) are white and from middle class backgrounds. This was a deliberate choice for methodological and analytical purposes given that we had already conducted research on the experiences of racialized ‘at-risk’ youth with the police (Boudreau et al. 2012). Our goal was thus to understand the experiences of white middle-class youth who voluntarily take part in ‘risky’ activities.

^12. Antoine told us: ‘I would be more worried if i was arrested in Russia where your rights are not guaranteed at all’.

^13. All names are fictional.

^14. Upon request from our informant, we kept his graffiti artist name.

^15. In their analysis of the evolution of the Batman character in various movies from the 1980s and 2000s, Boudreau and De Alba (2011) show, however, how the fearless hero of the 1980s has been transformed into a non-hero experiencing intense emotional turmoil 20 years later.

^16. Saville's (2008) work on Parkour enthusiasts illustrates, for instance, how practitioners ‘let go of fear’, how this sense of abandonment to the thrills entailed in the situation stimulates their imagination. Their relation to the urban built environment where they practice this sport then mutates in a creative appropriation of the objects.

^17. ‘In group, it is easier. And it is really convivial. It's a gang trip, exploratory.’