Three notes on a political economy of youth

ABSTRACT

The paper seeks to makes a contribution to a recent debate in the Journal about what a political economy of youth might look like. The paper will take up aspects of Sukarieh and Tannock’s [2016. ‘On the political economy of youth: a comment.’ Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289] response to the initial contributions by Côté [2014. ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.’ Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543, 2016. ‘A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.’ Journal of Youth Studies.] And France and Threadgold [2015. ‘Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.’ Journal of Youth Studies], and will take the form of three ‘notes’: Capitalism: From the first industrial revolution to the third industrial revolution; Youth as an artefact of governmentalised expertise; The agency/structure problem in youth studies: Foucault’s dispositif and post-human exceptionalism.

These notes will suggest that twenty-first century capitalism is globalising, is largely neo-Liberal, and is being reconfigured in profound ways by the Anthropocene, bio-genetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). A political economy of twenty-first century capitalism, let alone a political economy of young people, must be able to account for a capitalism that in many ways looks like the capitalism of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but which is at the same time profoundly different as it enters what has often been described as the Third Industrial Revolution. It is these profound emergences that pose the greatest challenges for engaging with a political economy of youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy of youth
• Third Industrial Revolution
• youth studies
• structure and agency
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 https://www.fya.org.au/our-research/

2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai

3 I initially discussed some of these ideas in Kelly 2017.

4 See, also, the Australian Government’s Productivity Commission (AGPC 2016 - Digital Disruption: What do governments need to do? – for one example of the ways in which policy discussions frame these developments.

5 See also, Coffey and Farrugia (2016) for a productive response to that debate that highlighted the orthodoxies of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ that shape much of the work in contemporary Youth Studies.

6 See Gray 2015 for a critique that is grounded in a critical imagining of the limits of what we imagine as ‘human freedom’.