Abstract
Today’s young people navigate a world that becomes simultaneously more interconnected and less capable of silencing long-standing inequities. What analytical perspectives does a sociology of youth and generations require in such a context? This paper makes two suggestions: to conceptualize generations as global rather than regionally bound (cf. Mannheim 1928) and to transgress the colonial bifurcation of academia between sociology for the so-called ‘modern’ world and area studies and anthropology for the so-called ‘developing’ world. Drawing from a large body of literature on African youth that has hitherto remained unheeded in youth studies, as well as from postcolonial theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea and Uganda, I argue that academic representations of African youth constitute a particularly insightful repertoire for investigating the methodological challenges and potentials of a global sociological perspective on youth.
Highlights
Drawing from a large body of literature on African youth that has hitherto remained unheeded in youth studies, as well as from postcolonial theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea and Uganda, I argue that academic representations of African youth constitute a insightful repertoire for investigating the methodological challenges and potentials of a global sociological perspective on youth
Youth studies scholarship is currently entering an important debate on the fact that it has routinely studied Northern or Western youth while ignoring the majority of young people living in the so-called Global South [1,2,3]
How exactly are youth studies going to address youth in the Southern parts of the globe, methodologically and theoretically? how come the discipline has ignored them in the first place? What academic literature exists to date about youth in the Global South and could it inform a more general sociological framework? This paper reflects on these questions to deepen the nascent debate in youth studies and connect it with both African Studies and postcolonial studies scholarship on youth
Summary
Youth studies scholarship is currently entering an important debate on the fact that it has routinely studied Northern or Western youth while ignoring the majority of young people living in the so-called Global South [1,2,3]. What academic literature exists to date about youth in the Global South and could it inform a more general sociological framework? The goal is to carve out the challenges and potentials of a more globally oriented sociology of youth that is both aware of the enormous diversity of what youth and generations may mean today across the globe, and reflexive of how knowledge is produced about them. The problem here is that such an idea is inapplicable to postcolonial nation states in the Global South, whose colonial borders have often forced heterogeneous populations to cohabitate and whose creation by an external colonial power contradicts per se the idea of self-contained socio-historical units. 957), the bifurcation of the social sciences becomes an obstacle to understanding global interdependence, for it has produced different academic communities specialized in different parts of the globe that hardly talk to one another. I describe these methodological challenges to exemplify the sociological diversity that a globally oriented approach to youth inevitably has to deal with
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