What makes the concept of youth, and capitalizing on the ideological malleability of youth so tantalizing to the neoliberal framework? We must first examine the projected results of a neoliberal framework and then unpack the fundamental beliefs about why youth is valuable within this paradigm. When looking at the potential consequences of describing the widening definition of youth in terms of definitions like useful, productive, and harnessing of their capital potential, we need to understand how this impacts the field of CYC.
Financial institutions, governments, and corporations have recently started making efforts to invest in youth governance initiatives. “Youth have become a new and ‘major beneficiary’ of local, national, and international NGO programming, as aid and development organizations have ‘shifted policy-orientation from the ‘rural,’ ‘women,’ or ‘household,’ to ‘youth’ as the new developmental target and hope for the future” (van Dijk, de Bruijn, Cardoso, & Butter, 2011, pp. 1-2. As cited in Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015, p. 12). While on the surface the rise of youth enablement appears to be positive and altruistic, the organizations who are backing the empowerment of youth movement are suspect in their intentions. For example, large multi-national corporations who create youth councils and boards must have their aims examined, especially since they are motivated by capital gains to their bottom lines. Governments and banks are also supporting a vast array of youth empowerment but governmentality and its ramifications are also suspect. If youth are to be empowered by government, the philosophical ideology they espouse sheds light on the reason for creating youth initiatives. A right leaning conservative government, for example, may want to encourage paradigms that start with the traditional perspective of the family. Setting youth to the task of creating a think-tank to strategize ways to reinforce the concept of the nuclear family further entrenches a particular set of beliefs and potential future voters who will continue to underpin this ideology. The consequences are that families that don’t characterize one father, one mother, and children, will be further marginalized and subjected to a colonial and conservative point of view.
“Youth as a social category has expanded vertically, in terms of the chronological age range it is popularly understood to cover, and horizontally, in terms of the range of groups of people it encompasses” (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015, p. 14). Where youth once inhabited the boundaries of ages 13 to 18, the lines have recently become less definitive. Girls are starting to have their periods at younger ages and adults have chosen to create new categories that include ‘pre-teen’ and ‘tween.’ This chronologically expands the classification of youth to a much younger age, beginning the concept of youth as young as 9 years old. On the other side of the age spectrum, more youth are living at home to go to University and even to start their careers. This broadens the category upward in age as adults hesitate to consider people as adults when they are concurrently working an ‘adult’ job and remain dependents. The category of youth is also expanding horizontally as new groups are being introduced to access funding that is earmarked for youth. This movement is also “characterized by funding pressures on higher education” (Kelly & Kamp, 2015, p. 9).
Are the terms ‘useful’, ‘productive’, and ‘potential’ (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015, p. 16) helpful for describing youth? Well it depends on who is using them. The implications of these terms from a neoliberal perspective denote the social value of the youth category for fulfilling an economic mandate and promoting fiscal austerity. Reclaiming these terms from an economic orientation is the first beneficial step in recreating the concept of youth power. With ambiguity of terms there is also a shift in power and loss of identity. As the category widens, identity succumbs to vagueness and uncertainty. As definitive terms emerge like youth as assets or resources to be developed (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015, p. 20), there is a shift in power away from youth to those creating the language surrounding youth, namely governments and corporations.
Nonetheless there is hope, and consequent implications on the field of CYC. “Young people, in so many ways, occupy the wild zones in modernity’s imagination. They are ungoverned and ungovernable. Their unruly bodies, minds and souls threaten always to escape the ordering process and legislative activities that characterize modernity’s attempts to exterminate ambivalence” (Bauman, 1990. As cited in Kelly & Kamp, 2015, p. 12). There is not definitive answers, only implications of approaches that will shape the outcome. For youth, what hangs in the balance is the definition of their future and consequent emerging philosophies about how to engage in the world around them. For youth workers, the goal is to introduce youth to the forces that would shape their paradigms and begin to work out how they would like to respond and how those responses shed light on what worldview they ascribe to.
References
Kelly, P. and Kamp, A. (2015) 21st Century Hinterlands. In: A Critical
Youth Studies for the 21st Century. Pp. 1-14.
Sukarieh, M. and Tannock, S. (2015) Chapter 1 – The Neoliberal
Embrace of Youth. In: Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the
Global Economy. Taylor & Francis. Pp. 12-32.