Jacqueline Kennelly

Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.

Sanitizing public space in olympic host cities: the spatial experiences of marginalized youth in 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London.

This article is based on a cross-national qualitative study of homeless and street-involved youth living within Olympic host cities. Synthesizing a Lefebvrian spatial analysis with Debord’s concept of ‘the spectacle’, the article analyses the spatial experiences of homeless young people in Vancouver (host to the 2010 Winter Olympics) and draws some comparisons to London (host to the 2012 Summer Olympics). Tracing encounters with police, gentrification and Olympic infrastructure, the article assesses the experiences of homeless youth in light of claims made by Olympic proponents that the Games will ‘benefit the young’. By contrast, the authors argue that positive Olympic legacies for homeless and street-involved young people living within host cities are questionable.

Young people mobilizing the language of citizenship: struggles for classification and new meaning in an uncertain world

This paper presents research findings from an ethnographic study carried out with 24 low‐income youths (ages 14–16) living on the economic fringes of urban inner‐city Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our primary aims are: to expose the stratified subcultural articulations of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and symbol, by the young people within our study; and to demonstrate how critiques of (neo‐)liberalism in political thought, when combined with a cultural sociology of youth, might alter our subcultural reading of young peoples conceptions of citizenship under the dynamics of radical social change. Our ultimate goal is to develop a more nuanced sociological examination of the ways in which young people deploy and utilize the language of citizenship as part of their own cultural struggles, exacerbated in times of state retrenchment, to classify themselves and others as one method of achieving visibility and legitimacy in urban concentrations of poverty.

Seeing Olympic effects through the eyes of marginally housed youth: changing places and the gentrification of East London

This paper examines the impact of the 2012 London Summer Olympics on low-income and marginally housed young people living in the London borough of Newham – one of six east London ‘Olympic boroughs’. Drawing on photo-journals created by the youth the summer before the Olympic Games were scheduled to begin (July 2011), the research makes use of photo-elicitation techniques in order to explore such Olympic-related impacts as gentrification, displacement and the loss of a sense of place for local young residents.

Good Citizen/Bad Activist: The Cultural Role of the State in Youth Activism

This special issue calls for an examination of the ways in which cultural studies can respond to the pressures of urgency, perhaps never felt so strongly as in our rapidly changing times. For example, within the Canadian context, a sense of urgency can easily be located in the ever-expanding ethical and political dilemmas associated with Canadian participation in international conflicts (e.g., Afghanistan), new trade and security agreements (e.g., Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America [SPP]), and escalating surveillance and restriction of the nation’s most marginalized members. Cultural studies is positioned to address these dilemmas by asking, among other important and relevant questions: Who is responding to current urgent social issues, and how are these responders both regulated by and resisting the wider cultural forces within which they navigate? The project of this article is to offer some response to these questions, with a specific focus on young activists. Beginning with the assumption that a healthy democratic public sphere requires that urgent sociopolitical dilemmas be the subject of vigorous public contestation such as that provided by activist groups (Benhabib 1996), this article considers how young activists in contemporary urban Canada respond to, engage with, and=or refute state claims and activities. It does so through two related, though separate, lenses: by examining the idea of the ‘‘good The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 31:127–149, 2009 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714410902827135

Youth cultures, activism and agency: revisiting feminist debates

Following the invitation issued by the London Feminist Salon Collective in the pages of Gender and Education, this paper offers further theoretical suggestions for understanding agency. Based on an ethnographic study with young people engaged in activist politics, I offer a conception of agency that is at its core relational. I build this theoretical contribution upon a lineage of feminist theorising about the nature of agency, which began in debates about poststructuralism/postmodernism but have since moved to incorporate Pierre Bourdieus cultural sociological approach. I suggest that while previous theorising has been enormously important for yielding insights into the possibilities for agency, it has not adequately accounted for the everyday means by which agency takes place. My empirical work highlights one of the modalities through which young people come to take political action – that is, through relational processes. I suggest that such an understanding about agency can further illuminate the means by which progressive and feminist goals might be reached.

Restricting the public in public space: The London 2012 Olympic games, hyper-securitization and marginalized youth

In contrast to Olympic organizers’ claims about the London 2012 Games as a celebration for all, we recount the experiences of low-income and marginally housed young people as experiencing exclusion from the benefits of the Games being held in their neighbourhood. Drawing on qualitative methods with young people living in the ethnically diverse and economically deprived Olympic host borough of Newham, we focus on public space and its limitations in the context of the 2012 Games. The article discusses the sense conveyed by young people of their neighbourhood being made beautiful for visitors, but of themselves being overly policed and subject to Olympic-related dispersal orders. We conclude by querying for whom is public space made available during the Olympic Games, suggesting that the benefactors are not economically marginalized young people living in the shadow of the Games.

‘You’re making our city look bad’: Olympic security, neoliberal urbanization, and homeless youth

Drawing on ethnographic research with homeless and street-involved youth in Vancouver before, during, and after the 2010 Olympic Games, this article offers a portrait of neoliberal urbanization as experienced by a city’s most marginalized residents. Taking as paradigmatic the aspirational goals of Olympic host cities to enhance their reputation as ‘global cities’, the article explores what this means for homeless youth through three processes: city cleansing, city marketing, and self-regulation. Examining how each of these are imbricated with policing and security practices, the article offers an in-depth look at how these abstractions are lived by homeless youth in the everyday. The article concludes by suggesting that marginalized young people are not the beneficiaries of Olympic legacies, despite promises made by organizing committees. In contrast, findings indicate that homeless young people are further marginalized by the Olympics, providing support for previous research that aligns mega-events with neoliberal outcomes.

Special Issue Introduction: Youth, Cultural Politics, and New Social Spaces in an Era of Globalization

Many commentators agree that there is something fundamentally unsettling about the new world order in which we now find ourselves (Harvey 1990; Giddens 1991; Giddens and Pierson 1998; Bauman 2000). Not only are we in the midst of an epoch marked by global changes occurring at an unprecedented velocity but also these changes are happening across all realms—politics, economics, culture, science, and technology—and aspects of everyday life. We are not the first to note that the extraordinary rapidity of global social change has meant that contemporary societies are now beset by uncertainty, unpredictability, increasing degrees of risk, and anxiety (Beck 1992; Lash et al. 1996; Franklin 1998; Giddens 2000). Such a context, almost euphemistically captured under the rubric ‘‘globalization,’’ has been addressed by scholars working across sociology, cultural studies, youth studies, and social sciences and the humanities more broadly. Indeed, a prevailing theme of the past decade of scholarship has been the attempt to come to terms with what it means to live in globalizing times, and to identify both what constitutes globalization and what makes it unique (e.g., Chomsky 1999; Held et al. 1999; Bello 2000; Jameson 2000). No longer is it a question of whether globalization is having an impact The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 31:255–269, 2009 Copyright # Jacqueline Kennelly, Stuart Poyntz, and Paul Ugor ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714410903132824

Symbolic violence and the Olympic Games: low-income youth, social legacy commitments, and urban exclusion in Olympic host cities

ABSTRACT Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline.