ABSTRACT
This chapter theorises the formation of youth within the global dynamics of contemporary labour. Whilst young people are generally approached as developing subjects whose successful transition into the labour market supports the economic development of their nation state, the aim here is to reveal youth as a globally heterogeneous phenomenon unfolding through the production of space and territory amidst shifts in the global organisation of production and employment. In this, the chapter describes the way that global economic flows intersect with notions of economic and personal development to produce young labouring subjectivities, and examines the way that youth reflects the production of the spaces of the global economy. The chapter interrogates metropolitan accounts of deindustrialization to consider the valorisation and devalorisation of young labouring subjectivities in a global context, showing how young labour in the global south has been critical to the formation of new territories within the global economy. Second, the chapter shows that the role of work in institutionalising the relationship between youth and adulthood is dissolving, leading in some cases to what I will suggest is the detemporalisation of youth and the irrelevance of the notion of a transition to adulthood. Third, the chapter examines the practices and subjectivities that emerge in the context of labour market precarity in a global context, describing a heterogeneous landscape of precarity and subjectivity that is an intrinsic part of the global organisation of employment for contemporary young people, and form one key aspect of the formation of youth as labouring subjects through the production of space within the global economy.
