ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the emergence of ‘youth’ as a concern within the political and epistemological project of modernity. In particular, I show how the concept of youth has been built on assumptions about space and time that originate in the notion of development, itself a product of narratives of modernity that have been fundamental to the culture of Western societies and the intellectual development of social science. Concepts of space and time operate here as approaches to difference and change, structuring how relationships between young people are (or are not) understood. As an object of research and governance, youth comes into being through a modern epistemology that reduces space to time, and thereby that reduces difference to temporal lag. Narratives about youth written from the northern metropole are embedded within an abstract spatio-temporality related to the modern notion of progress and development. Here, young people’s cognitive abilities, personal identities and biographical transitions are normatively assessed in relation to notions of personal and social development that position youth as an inert Euclidean space, through which young people must move to become rational, self-actualising individuals. In response I suggest that space can provide a new orientation for understanding young people that breaks out of the contemporary focus on developmental time. Here, space is made productive and relational, signifying the geographies and webs of relationships through which youth is shaped and experienced. Space operates here both as a relational ontology and as a concrete empirical focus, revealing how youth is structured and experienced differently across different spaces and places.
