Introduction to Special Section Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth

Abstract

Introduction to Special Section Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth Naomi Hamer (bio) and Stuart R. Poyntz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On October 20–22, 2016, the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) hosted the inaugural international conference, Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth (Youngsters 2016) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. The first conference of its kind in North America, Youngsters 2016 was created to explore the intersections between childhood and youth studies as interdisciplinary fields of scholarship and community engagement. Drawing together internationally renowned researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, with child- and youth-engaged artists, community groups, and students, Youngsters 2016 offered new sightlines from which to see connections and establish future directions for our [End Page 14] work. The conference’s three keynote speakers—Steven Bruhm, the Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English at Western University; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor and Chair of Modern Media and Culture at Brown University; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Indigenous author, artist, scholar, activist, and member of the Alderville First Nation—set the tone for the interdisciplinary nature of the conference. Building on these distinguished keynotes, the conference also planned a special round table on “Youngsters and the Arts,” featuring Vancouver-based artists, and one on writing and publishing in children’s and youth studies, with Jeunesse lead editor Dr. Heather Snell and founding editor Dr. Mavis Reimer as panellists. The research paper sessions, including “Queer Youth Cultures,” “Writing Indigeneity,” “Rights and Resistance,” and “Mental Wellness,” were designed not only to address significant contemporary research topics in the field but also to encourage dialogue across disciplines, methodological approaches, and international contexts, and to challenge the boundaries among practitioners, artists, and scholars. The Special Section of Jeunesse that follows is a celebration of this event with a sample from the range of presented work. As past and current Presidents of the ARCYP, as well as conference coordinators, we believe that there are multiple pressing issues that support the need for an event like Youngsters 2016. To begin with, a prevailing sense of crisis and fundamental change in the lives of young people is present across a range of communities and identities today. We can mark these prevailing intensities through a host of concerns and tensions that indicate a general broadening of risk taking and risk bearing as properties of young lives (Appadurai). Risk and precarity have, of course, long been associated with what it means to be young. In the West, as the notion of youth culture emerged in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, for instance, to be young seemed tied to notions of transition and flux, to experiences of change that were thought to shape the development of youthful imaginations, identities, and sexualities. The very boundaries between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, are increasingly uncertain and treated with suspicion by many. Moreover, historical and contemporary popular cultures, legal discourses, and educational policies around youth and childhood tend to be rooted in ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, physical mobility, and socio-economic class that privilege generalized assumptions about the experiences of young people across diverse identities, cultural backgrounds, and geographies. The project of unpacking and challenging assumptions, absences, and histories is an integral part of current work across disciplines in the field of childhood and youth studies. Meanwhile, what it means to be a child—to play, to learn, and to imagine—is being recast by the new and profound conditions of mediation, surveillance, participation, and commodification that characterize the contemporary moment. Amid these pressing issues, to date there has been no umbrella academic organization or regular [End Page 15] conference to bring together scholars working in childhood and youth studies, particularly those focused on the cultures of young people. If surprising, this is in part a function of how recent the development of the field of childhood studies is. The year 1991 is often thought to mark the consolidation and beginning of childhood studies as a distinct field of inquiry. In that year, Brooklyn College at City University of New...