ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the potency of the unrealistic dreams and romantic fantasies of young people embedded in families, local environments, communities and the chimera of state capitalism. It focuses on theoretical discussion of space and change used as a foil against which some traditional psychological and social constructs fall away to be replaced by vigorous and emotional ephemera to which the political opens and adheres, at least for a moment. The book tackles citizenship and the border between North and South America, with a focus on young people's activism and civil engagement in one of San Diego's immigrant communities. Care and responsibility, as emotive constructs which reworks the spatiality of Gilles Deleuze's notion of change through becoming other through Slavoj Zizek's negation of the fantasy of the big Other as a radical ethical act.
