ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the project of the book, which is to explore the possibilities opened up by a spatial approach to youth. The chapter explores the spatialities of contemporary youth research, showing that theoretical development takes place primarily through a focus on young people in the metropolitan centres of the global north, and marginalises the experiences of those living in places thereby rendered ‘elsewhere’. This focus on a particular place also supports the long-standing assumption of youth as a fundamentally temporal phenomenon to the exclusion of both spatial epistemologies and the production of space in a global context. Space and place is therefore a problem for youth research. Contemporary young people’s lives are situated within transnational networks of capital and culture that transgress the taken for granted territorial boundaries reflected in the landscape of the field as it stands. In this context, the project of this book is to relocate youth as a spatial phenomenon and connect youth research to the dynamics of contemporary globalisation as they shape young people’s lives in a global context. This is an interdisciplinary project which suggests new theoretical agendas in the study of work, culture, and citizenship as they pertain to young people, and opens youth research up to the experiences of young people from outside the traditional focal points of the field.
