Both theoretically informed and empirically rich, Youth Urban Worlds explores how urban cultures affect political action amongst youth.
- Argues that urban cultures challenge the very meaning and contours of the political process
- Includes ethnographies, delving into the perspectives and knowledges of racialized youth, urban farmers, and “voluntary risk takers,” like dumpster divers, building climbers, and student protestors
- Theorizes that aesthetics are an increasingly crucial form of political action in the contemporary urban setting and explains the impact of aesthetics on the political
- Examines the centrality of fun, warmth, aesthetics, and embodiment to these youth’s experience of being in the world
- Explains how youth are able to practically and concretely impact the political process through the performance of risky and disruptive behavior
Table of Contents
List of Figures vii
Series Editors’ Preface x
Preface xi
Introduction: Voices From Montreal 2
Space-Time-Affect: The Urban Logic of Political Action 5
Acting Aesthetically: Political Gestures, Political Acts, and Political Action 10
Youth Urban Worlds 21
The Global Urban Political Moment of the 2010s: Youthfulness in Action 26
Montreal in a World of Cities 29
A Methodological Note 31
The Organization of the Book 34
Notes 36
1 Montreal and the Urban Moment 38
Montreal’s Politico‐Sensuous Feel 41
Montreal’s Place in the Global Urban Cultures of the 1960s and 1970s 49
Changing Relations to Time 52
Changing Relations to Space 54
Conclusion 61
Notes 64
2 The Urban Political World of Racialized Youth: Moving Through and Being Moved By Saint‐Michel and Little Burgundy 69
Moving Through Saint‐Michel and Little Burgundy with an Epistemology of Blackness 75
Being Moved: Representations and Affective Aesthetic Relations 88
Racialization: Disembodied Profiling Entangled With Embodied Racist Encounters 94
Conclusion 98
Notes 101
3 The Urban Political World of Student Strikers 107
Becoming a Striker: Pregnant Moments ‘Breaking the Real’ 110
Walking the City: Space During and After the Strike 117
The Political Effects of Seduction and Provocation 123
Conclusion 133
Notes 135
4 The Urban Political World of Urban Farmers: ‘It’s Not Just Growing Food, It’s a Lot More Than That’ 143
Embodied Experiences of the Spatialities and Circulation of Food Commodities in the City 150
The Urban Logic of Action of Urban Agriculture Practices 157
Seduction and Attraction in the Garden 161
Conclusion 164
Notes 165
5 The Urban Political World of ‘Risk‐Takers’: Provocative Choreographic Power 169
The Risk‐Management Context 171
Urban Dancers and Diviners: Choreographic Power as Political Action 172
Voluntary Risk‐Takers? Fear and Youth Politics 177
Collective Edgework: Distributed Agency Through Provocation and Seduction 186
Conclusion 192
Notes 193
Conclusion 198
Forms of Aesthetic Politics Influenced by Youthfulness and Contemporary Conditions of Urbanity 201
Montreal in a World of Cities 206
Note 207
References 208
Index 220
