Youth, Space, Cities: Toward the Concrete

Abstract

The expression meets a theoretical need. It is more than simply a literary or pedagogical device, or even the expression of some form of acquired knowledge; it is an elaboration, a search, a conceptual formulation. A movement of thought toward a certain concrete, and perhaps toward the concrete, assumes shape and detail. This movement, if it proves to be true, will lead to a practice, urban practice, that is finally or newly comprehended. (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 5, authors emphasis) A theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (Hall, 1996, pp. 141-142) The articles for this special issue on youth, space, cities represent a collection of scholarship that works the intersection of cultural studies, critical geography, and critical approaches to educational theorizing. In thinking of these articles together, as a collection of work while not necessarily in parallel but sharing a trajectory, one quickly sees an undergirding notion: Stuart Hall's concept of articulation. Hall (1996) notes that articulation presents a valuable term for cultural studies work because of its double meaning within the British context. To articulate does mean to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an 'articulated' lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. (p. 141) Those within critical geography (Harvey, 2001; Massey, 2005; Soja, 1996) and those who have sought to apply it to educational and curriculum theorizing (Allen, 1999; Helfenbein, 2010; Taylor & Helfenbein, 2009) have identified space as a frame that can be articulated with other elements in a way that offers illumination within inquiry in/around educative contexts. Indeed, such an articulation moves this theoretical work toward the material because working the links between the ideological, social, cultural, and the lived experience forces the scholar to discuss what is materially happening to students and teachers within schools, classrooms, and other spaces. The marriage between cultural studies of education and critical geography seems to be a natural fit due to the insistence of both to problematize the world's taken-for-grantedness allowing for deeper examination beyond the usual, tired solutions that are often presented. This is even more apparent in the discussion of neoliberal education reforms that present solutions, which mask themselves as common sense thereby making the likelihood of success seemingly inevitable. The only effective way to take on such reforms is to question the very framework upon which they rest. One such way is through articulation because it: Asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position. (Hall, 1996, p. 142) The addition of Critical Geography to this type of cultural studies analysis provides a rebalanced ontological and epistemological triad via what Soja (2010) suggests as the historical, the social, and spatial frame for the examination of ideological elements. The effectiveness of academic work within a neoliberal society that encompasses the social, the political and the economic to the extent that education is left utterly transformed in its wake, depends on its ability to not only identify the ideological elements themselves, but how they are or are not articulated within that neoliberal discourse. …