Rebecca Raby

What is Resistance

This paper reviews the concept of resistance, contrasting modernist and postmodernist positions in terms of what resistance is, its relationship to power and agency, how it is identified, where it comes from in the lives of young people, and what it achieves. Foremost attention is given to subcultural and Foucauldian positions, to argue that while resistance remains a relevant and useful concept, there are significant underlying differences between such positions on it, differences that fundamentally affect how the concept is deployed.

‘There's no racism at my school, it's just joking around’: ramifications for anti‐racist education

Racialization is a social process inscribed with power relations that tend to centre whiteness. This article draws on comments made about race and racism collected through interviews with 12 teenage girls, living in or near the Toronto area, on the broader topic of adolescence. Within these interviews, the young women were asked how adolescence might be experienced differently on the basis of cultural background and race. They were also asked if they believed there to be any racism in their schools. Three patterns emerged in their responses: they denied and downplayed racism in their schools; narrowly defined racism, privileging definitions of racism as individualized and violent over institutional and systematic; and conceptualized racism in a way that centred whiteness. This article presents the observations of these young women, reflects on the motivations behind them and discusses ramifications for anti‐racist education.Racialization is a social process inscribed with power relations that tend to centre whiteness. This article draws on comments made about race and racism collected through interviews with 12 teenage girls, living in or near the Toronto area, on the broader topic of adolescence. Within these interviews, the young women were asked how adolescence might be experienced differently on the basis of cultural background and race. They were also asked if they believed there to be any racism in their schools. Three patterns emerged in their responses: they denied and downplayed racism in their schools; narrowly defined racism, privileging definitions of racism as individualized and violent over institutional and systematic; and conceptualized racism in a way that centred whiteness. This article presents the observations of these young women, reflects on the motivations behind them and discusses ramifications for anti‐racist education.

Girls Run the World? Caught between Sexism and Postfeminism in School

How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls’ experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This analysis takes place in relation to two celebratory postfeminist narratives: Girl Power, where girls are told they can do, be, and have anything they want, and Successful Girls, where girls are told they are surpassing boys in schools and workplaces. We argue that these postfeminist narratives have made naming sexism in schools difficult for girls because they are now seen to “have it all.” Utilizing Foucault’s (1978) law of the tactical polyvalence of discourse, this article analyzes girls’ contradictory engagement with postfeminism in order to both show its importance in girls’ lives, and its instability as a narrative that can adequately explain gender injustice.

A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence

Drawing on material from 30 interviews with Toronto-area teenage girls and their grandmothers, the present paper reviews five discourses of adolescence: storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumption. I explore how these discourses are invested, deployed and experienced in relation to each other and as they span academic texts, popular discourses, and interviews. I contend that these discourses make up a powerful discursive framework in which activity undertaken by adolescents can be swept up into these discourses, and consequently dismissed. At the same time, tensions or contradictions within and between these discourses, and within the entire category of adolescence as a stage, can in fact undermine the weight of these discourses as truth statements. I end the paper with some reflections on how each discourse constructs potential for agency, and/or resistance among teenagers.

Children's participation as neo-liberal governance?

Childrens participation initiatives have been increasingly introduced within various institutional jurisdictions around the world, partly in response to Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Such initiatives have been critically evaluated from a number of different angles. This article engages with an avenue of critique which argues that childrens participatory initiatives resonate with a neoliberal economic and political context that prioritises middle class, western individualism and ultimately fosters childrens deeper subjugation through self-governance. Respecting these as legitimate concerns, this article draws on two counter-positions to argue that while childrens participation can certainly be conceptualised and practised in ways that reflect neo-liberal, individualised self-governance, it does not necessarily do so. To make this argument I engage, on the one hand, with Foucaults work on the care of the self, and on the other, with more collective approaches to participation.

‘Oh, she’s so smart’: girls’ complex engagements with post/feminist narratives of academic success

This article explores how six teenage girls talk about being smart in the wake of celebratory discourses touting gender equality in education and beyond. Set against the neo-liberal backdrop of ‘What about the boys?’ and ‘girl power’, it is assumed that smart girls today ‘have it all’ and, therefore, no longer require feminist interventions in the school. Issuing a challenge to these post-feminist assumptions, we highlight complex narratives of girls’ academic success, including post-feminist narratives of individualisation and the ‘supergirl’, alongside feminist narratives of gender inequality in the school and the broader social world. We conclude by highlighting the impossible terms within which post-feminism frames girls, and the dangers that this pervasive discourse poses to girls’ educations.

Slippery as Fish... but Already Caught? Secondary Students' Engagement with School Rules.

Drawing on nine focus groups with secondary students in southern Ontario, we investigated secondary students’ perceptions of, and experiences with, school codes of conduct and their application. While generally supporting the ‘big’ rules such as no weapons, students engaged more critically with minor ones. We drew on Foucault’s governmentality studies to discuss students’ successful compliance. We evaluated students’ contestation of the rules, rule ‐ breaking as potential resistance, and rule breaking as a manifestation of students’ desire. Although students challenge school rules, they are “already caught” within the dominant language that frames the rules and their top ‐ down application, with little sense of themselves as potent political actors. Key words : discipline, citizenship, resistance, secondary education D’apres neuf groupes de disccusion d’etudiants au niveau secondaire du sud de l’Ontario, nous avons enquete leurs points de vue et leurs experiences au sujet des reglements de leurs ecoles et leurs methodes d’application. Generalement, les etudiants sont en faveur des ‘grands’ reglements, tel que armes interdites, mais ils sont plus critiques envers les moins importants. D’apres les etudes de gouvernementalite de Foucault, nous discutons comment les etudiants reussissent a se conformer. Nous avons evalue la contestation des reglements par les etudiants, l’evasion des reglements comme resistance potentielle, et l’evasion des reglements comme manifestation des desirs des etudiants. Meme si les etudiants resistent les reglements, ils sont “deja pris” a l’interieur d’un language dominant qui encadre les reglements et leur application par les haut ‐ places. Ainsi, ils ont l’impression d’etre impuissants comme acteurs politiques. Mots cles: discipline, citoyennete, resistance, education secondaire

Public Selves, Inequality, and Interruptions: The Creation of Meaning in Focus Groups with Teens

Focus groups have received substantial attention over the past few decades, particularly as they are considered to provide rich, interactive data, yet only occasionally do researchers discuss the process of conducting focus groups with young people. This paper contributes to wider debates on focus groups through engagement with three interrelated topics, each with unique reflection on focus groups with teenagers: the advantages of focus group interactions, particularly in relation to hierarchies of age and the research relationship, how focus groups shape self-representation and “truth-telling,” and, finally, the challenge of “unruly” data. The author addresses these topics through drawing on several sources of data: 18 focus groups with secondary students on the topic of school rules, exit questionnaires collected from focus group participants, and in-depth interviews with the primary investigator and three research assistants.

From concept to data: sleuthing social change-oriented youth voices on YouTube

ABSTRACT The idea of youth voice has become commonplace in youth studies and advocacy, although its meaning is more often assumed than explicitly defined and critically analyzed. This article engages with the concept of youth voice through a discussion of how we designed and implemented a pilot study on social change-oriented videos produced and circulated by Canadian teens on YouTube. We discuss the challenges and issues we encountered while attempting to constitute our research sample of youth-produced videos. In our sleuthing process, we grappled with the limitations of online search engines for our research purposes, and as a result developed a purposeful, tactical and adaptive approach. Throughout this process, we found that technical and practical issues evoked ethical concerns regarding youth voice as well, which thus required constant decision-making. As we report on how we dealt with these issues, we contribute to ongoing discussions and debates on youth voice occurring at the intersection of critical youth studies, social media, and online research ethics.

‘I don't want to stereotype… but it's true’: Maintaining whiteness at the centre through the `smart Asian’ stereotype in high school

Abstract The ‘smart Asian’ stereotype, part of the model minority discourse, depicts Asian students as studious and academically successful. We draw on critical race theory, with a focus on critical whiteness studies and the concepts of democratic and cultural racism, to examine the racialising effects of this seemingly positive stereotype. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over 60 self-identified smart, teenagers from schools in the Southern Ontario, we identified three themes which together illustrate how the ‘smart Asian’ stereotype reflects and reproduces a hegemonic white center. First, a number of our participants deployed, and then trivialised the ‘smart Asian’ stereotype as ‘just joking’. Second, through discussing this stereotype, white participants often excluded students with Asian backgrounds from conceptualisations of what it means to be Canadian and to fit in. Finally, this stereotype was experienced ambivalently by Asian-identified students who found it brought academic rewards, but at the expense of exclusion.