ABSTRACT
Global economic restructuring and other forces of ‘globalisation’ have cut a swath through the everyday environments of young people in settings as different as New York City and rural Sudan, creating rents and tears in both places that are strikingly similar. My work focuses on the nature of these cultural-ecological and political-economic changes, their implications for children and young people, and the practical responses to them by children, youth, and adults in the course of their everyday lives. I will discuss the systematic disruption of social reproduction-the ways young people do not receive the knowledge and skills necessary for the world in which they will come of age-in two sites deeply affected by economic restructuring, rural Sudan and New York City. By making connections between changes ‘on the ground’ in both sites I hope to encourage a broader, and potentially more empowered, understanding of global change and its local workings.
