Craig Jeffrey

Youth in a Comparative Perspective Global Change, Local Lives

Neoliberal economic and social changes are radically transforming young people’s experiences of youth and early adulthood in many parts of the world. Young people face a greater range of uncertainties than perhaps in any previous era. This introduction sets out some of the key themes within recent social science research on young people as well as illustrating the contribution to these debates of the articles included in this special issue. The value of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work that analyzes young people’s transitions from the perspective of both the First World and Third World are highlighted. Particular emphasis is placed in this introduction on the need to foreground an understanding of social inequalities and the discourses and spaces in and through which inequalities are reproduced, contested, and transformed.

Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of life:

Global transformations are rapidly altering people’s experiences of growing up. This report offers a comparative perspective on some of the challenges facing young children and youth across the world, focusing especially on young people’s practices in the fields of education and employment. The paper discusses conceptual frameworks for analyzing young people and evaluates these theoretical ideas through attention to interdisciplinary writing on educational restructuring, the privatization of school curricula, children’s work, and youth unemployment. The common predicaments or ‘vital conjunctures’ (Johnson-Hanks, 2002) of children and youth — for example, their inability to remain in formal schooling or experience of unemployment after leaving education — offers a basis for a globally comparative human geography attuned to the relationship between structural change and sociospatial marginalization.

Geographies of children and youth II Global youth agency

This report offers a comparative perspective on the nature of youth agency in different parts of the world, demonstrating how ‘youth’ can provide a window on subaltern responses to economic restructuring. I outline key points about the theorization of agency within human geography and then describe the importance of young people’s resistance. I then discuss young people’s resourcefulness as a form of agency as well as ‘negative agency’: instances in which children and youth reproduce and deepen dominant structures of power. Finally, I identify a need to reflect further on the social nature of young people’s action and the importance of humour and irreverence in youth practice.

‘A fist is stronger than five fingers’: caste and dominance in rural north India

This paper explores the spatiality of caste and power in contemporary rural north India. I aim to introduce the social institution of caste to a non-specialist audience and illustrate how caste is changing. The paper draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of social capital and habitus and the India-based research ofSrinivas (1955) andMendelsohn (1993). I argue that while caste as a religiously sanctioned system of resource transfer is in decline, caste organization and identity are important forms of social or symbolic capital for rural elites. Drawing on detailed empirical research in western Uttar Pradesh, I demonstrate the continuing importance of caste dominance in the reproduction of social inequality and relate caste to other axes of power.

'Generation Nowhere': rethinking youth through the lens of unemployed young men

Rising unemployment among educated young men is a key feature of neoliberal economic change. This paper reviews recent research on the strategies of educated unemployed young men in the global south to stress the importance of class, politics and environmental transformation for an understanding of contemporary youth geographies. Transnational reflection on the lives of educated unemployed young men provides an example of how human geographers might combine political economic analysis with recent theorizations of subjectivity formation and fluid identities.

Caste, Class, and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India*

Abstract Corruption has reemerged as an important issue in research on geography and development, but there has been little research on the relationship between corruption and class reproduction in rural areas of poorer countries. This article presents insights into how low-level economic corruption actually works within institutions that are responsible for purchasing sugarcane in rural western Uttar Pradesh, India, and the role of this corruption in perpetuating material inequalities within rural society. The discussion is based on 12 months of intensive field research on the economic and social strategies of a dominant caste of rich farmers in Meerut District, western Uttar Pradesh. In this article, I note periodic rural protest against the government’s mismanagement of sugarcane marketing and corruption and describe everyday, disguised, and discrete forms of corruption that allow rich farmers to obtain privileged access to lucrative marketing opportunities. I also show how discourses surrounding corruption are politicized along the lines of caste and class. I conclude by relating my empirical material to debates on local state-society relations in India. I stress the need to understand corruption with reference to local political economy and the broader distribution of social and economic opportunities in rural society and point to future avenues for geographic research on corruption in the Indian countryside.

Democratisation without representation? The power and political strategies of a rural elite in north India

Abstract This paper examines how an agrarian elite in Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), India, seek access to the local police force. I argue that rich farmers belonging to the intermediate Jat caste have been quite successful in perpetuating their economic and social advantage through placing relatives in the police force and nurturing political networks that link them to the police and politicians. The analysis complements macro-structural political economic accounts of Indias flawed democratisation by offering a ‘thick description’ ( Geertz, C. (1983) . Local knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology . New York: Basic Books) of local state/society relations, including attention to spatial and symbolic dimensions of political networks. The paper provides a basis for re-evaluating popular accounts of the relationship between rural people and the local state in India and highlights the broader relevance of this research for political geography.

Fixing Futures: Educated Unemployment through a North Indian Lens

In April and May 1996, while conducting doctoral research, I spent a month living in Meerut College, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). In September 2004 a new project brought me back to Meerut, and I was nervous about my return to the college. Would I get on with the new batch of students? What of the age gap that had opened up between my informants and I? Do I mention my previous visit? These concerns quickly evaporated when I entered the college. Many of the students I had met in 1996 were still living in the same hostel rooms. Between 1996 and 2004 I had completed my Ph.D., married, and obtained an academic job. During the same period, many of my informants, now in their mid-thirties, had, it seemed, stood still. Unable to obtain salaried employment, one of these students asked me: “What can we do but study and wait?”

When schooling fails Young men, education and low–caste politics in rural north India

Scholarly discussions of formal education in the global South are increasingly moving away from a narrow focus on human capital to consider the meanings that people attach to ‘being educated’. This article advances current debates on the social construction of educational value in South Asia by examining how educated Chamar (Dalit) young men reflect on their education in the face of poor occupational outcomes. Since the 1960s, Dalits’ investment in formal education in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP) has seen a marked rise, in part through emulation of higher castes. The pro–Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has also been instrumental in promoting a vision of empowerment through formal education and entry into white–collar employment. Our research in rural Bijnor district suggests that the most recent generation of high school and college graduates amongst the Chamars has failed to find salaried employment. Some young men respond to this exclusion by reaffirming their faith in the BSPs model of progress and establishing them–selves as local political figures (netas). Other young men voice a growing alienation from the BSPs vision of empowerment and speak of themselves as people ‘trapped’ by education. Nevertheless, both these sets of young men continue to value education as a source of ‘cultural distinction’, sign of their ‘modern’ status, and means of challenging caste–based notions of difference.

Kicking Away the Ladder: Student Politics and the Making of an Indian Middle Class

In many poorer countries, middle classes are reshaping economic and political life, and nowhere is this process more evident than in postcolonial India. This paper uses ethnographic research on student politicians from rich farming backgrounds to reflect on class ‘in the making’. Building on a critical reading of the work of Bourdieu, I document the ability of young men from rich farming families in western Uttar Pradesh to entrench their middle-class standing in the space of university politics. I pay particular attention to the local-level political networks through which upwardly mobile young men from rural middle-caste backgrounds seek to express, legitimate, and secure their power. The paper points to the imaginative and energetic manner in which middle classes in poorer countries may defend their interests within local politics. I stress the importance of studying middle-class formation relationally and with reference to the spatiality of power.