Youth geographies of urban estrangement in the Canadian city: risk management, race relations and the ‘sacrificial stranger’

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto. We analyze a cross-national subsample of 60 disadvantaged youths’ perceptions of urban social conflict and changing race relations in their city and school. We raise the larger question of how and why economically disadvantaged young people might embody particular understandings of safety, race, the other and security in different spatial registers of the city. We utilize an ethnographic methodology drawing from diverse but interrelated fields: border studies, the phenomenology of estrangement and a materialist version of critical race studies [(Ahmed, S. 1999. “Home and Away Narratives of Migration and Strangeness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347, Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ahmed, S. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge; Kearney, R., and V. E. Taylor. 2005. “A Conversation with Richard Kearney.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6 (2): 17–26)].

KEYWORDS:

• Urban security anxiety
• borders
• disadvantaged youth
• race
• Canada

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Erin Graham, Carol Lynne D’arcangelis and Jennifer Muir for research assistance on this aspect of the project and Jackie Kennelly for earlier work on this project. Thanks also to Phil Gardner and Reana Maier for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Economics Intelligence Unit conducts this ranking but does not account for cost of living in its calculations.

2 For this and all other quotes, ellipses inside square brackets indicate a truncated excerpt.

3 An overview of the original project is presented in Dillabough and Kennelly (2010).

Additional information

Funding

Ethics approval was obtained through university and provincial Ministry of Education review procedures and was funded by SSHRC and the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education.