Abstract
Taking up the ‘uneasy sibling relationship’ between ‘youth citizen and youth activist’, Citizen Youth: Culture Activism, and Agency in a Neoliberal Era begins with a distinction between permissible citizenship roles (‘good citizen’) in contrast to those which are disqualified and disvalued (‘bad activist’). Kennelly thus sets out to define ‘the symbolic edges of a container that encapsulates a certain kind of contemporary youth citizenship’ (pp. 3–4). In so doing, the author sketches a brief but cogent history of the discursive construction of youth citizenship in Canada, with a particular focus on the exclusions and differential valuations of practices and identities implied by contemporary liberal notions of ‘active citizenship’ (euphemistically, ‘activism’) as individualized charitable work, undertaken on behalf of others by members of the middle classes, comfortably consistent with parameters laid out by the capitalist state. Such constructions, Kennelly suggests, are typical of rooted institutional habit in citizenship education. In exploring the dynamics of antiglobalization, antipoverty, anticolonialism and antiwar youth engagement which seeks to push beyond such containment, Citizen Youth subsequently highlights intrinsic tensions in these latter contexts as it draws on ethnographic detail garnered through interviews, focus-groups and in situ observation with youth activists in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal to depict the participants’ experience of adherence to such oppositional commitments.
Perhaps most indispensable in this account is the author’s extrapolation of a critique of youth activist subculture(s) that highlights the potential for the perpetuation of entwined class and ‘race’ harms, uncomfortably consonant with the limitations of the ‘active citizenship’ model. Responding to the perennial sociological problem of locating a site of agency amidst the sedimentation of social relations, rules and resources, Kennelly proposes to conceptualize a ‘relational modality of agency’. ‘Relationality’ in this case designates ‘the centrality of interpersonal relationships’ (p. 166) rather than the operations of structured oppositions (i.e. in discourse). Citizen Youth is thus concerned to articulate the conditions and implied provisos of ‘invitation’, acceptance and personal comfort within ‘radical’ activist groups.
In addition to a recurrent theme stressing the ‘guilt and anxiety’ (p. 107) and emphasis on personal choice associated with the emotional makeup of the self-perfecting neoliberal subject (cf. Nikolas Rose), the problematic of (sub)cultural capital is at the forefront of Kennelly’s critique. The goals of projects aimed at the furtherance of social justice objectives are ‘undermined and complicated’ by a situation in which entry and ease in activist settings is in part contingent upon ‘fit’ vis-a-vis a particular subcultural identity located within a field possessed of its own unique doxa, and ‘only attainable by a limited few’ (p. 108). Such identities, the author suggests, often play out in a kind of ‘working-class/middle-class performance’, what Kennelly terms ‘performing grunge’. Whatever the merits of the terminological choice, this amounts to an expression of symbolic authority: … whereby one must demonstrate a certain kind of ‘working-class comportment’ (through taking low-income jobs, wearing used clothing, and living in cheap housing, for example), but do so from within a middle-class frame (be highly educated, be cognizant of relevant theorists, and be articulate about one’s political ideologies). (p. 136)
The prospect, then, of ‘misalignment between habitus and field’ (p. 122), demonstrated through the testimony of research participants of working-class and immigrant backgrounds, stands out alongside the potentially exclusive consequences of affinity-based, informally constituted networks.
The argument provides, as Kennelly intends, an informative heuristic with which to approach contemporary youth activism. The slim volume is richly illustrative – the author’s predilection for substantial block quotes from research participants a welcome choice – though leaving the reader keen for further elaborated accounts of key terms and thematic foci (‘performing grunge’, for example). I was struck by Kennelly’s largely successful articulation of a situation intuitively grasped (and at times more explicitly tussled with) by others familiar with the activist subcultures she describes, and while I would have been pleased to encounter explicit engagement with the considerable literature immanently produced (i.e. in social movement media), the already extensive scope of the work readily excuses this absence. Nor is what is on offer by any means an unsympathetic critique. As the author suggests in an endnote, chiding the Canadian pop-theoretical critics Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (authors of The Rebel Sell) for their obtuse rebuke of ‘counter-culture rebels’, the pervasive resilience of class, ‘race’ and the structuring influence of contemporary (neo)liberalisms in forming individual tastes, preferences and subjectivities calls for a perceptive sociological endeavour rather than moralism or realpolitik (pp. 165–6).
Citizen Youth stands out not only for the pertinence of the analysis and the effective presentation of ethnographic data, but for the concision and accessibility of an account that works its way across issues of concern to contemporary scholars of social movements, citizenship and education and to many others, like the research participants themselves, directly implicated in the important work of conscientization and organizing in the name of social justice.