Fiona Blaikie has assembled and edited an excellent international collection. The book highlights how youth navigate tensions between marginalities, lived realities, and the demands of school, work and family; how they 'story' their everyday lives, including through place-, meme-, and video-making; and their experiences of profound exclusions around race, gender and sexuality. This book feels fresh and urgent as Blaikie has ensured that diverse young people's viewpoints and experiences figure prominently, discussed through cutting-edge critical and new materialist theorizing. The prominence of arts-based methodologies is also exciting; the art is innovative, moving, instructive and often enmeshed in the entire fabric of a chapter. I love this collection and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in current youth studies.
- Rebecca Raby, Brock University, Canada
This collection has multiple dimensions. It contributes to debates about the geopolitics of knowledge-production by attending closely to the importance of contexts around the world. It engages with the gendered interest in subjectivities and meaning-making by introducing non-human elements and the theoretical encouragements of postmaterialism to add further complexity and angle to our understanding. It invites readers to use new concepts such as worlding to expand their appreciation of the narratives that people develop to explain themselves. It expands a lexicon of gender and of ways of seeing and looking and asks us to embrace senses, celebrating as it does, creativity, difference, light and colour.
- Robert Morrell, University of Cape Town, South Africa
This wisely edited volume brings together a distinguished, visionary and international group of scholars engaging with some of the most significant and pressing social and cultural questions of our time. The contributors to this volume boldly orient readers to environments and expressive forms shaping people's everyday lives within a global context. I am confident that this collection of essays will inform current and future thinking by those concerned with the creation, interrogation and dissemination of expressive culture.
Doug Blandy, University of Oregon, USA
Fiona Blaikie's edited anthology takes us into contemporary youth cultures through humanistic research across international contexts. These research narratives embody the voices of young people who speak about nuanced sites of engagement and belonging on their own terms from emic true-to-life perspectives. Simultaneously, these chapters also create new spaces for research and researchers, pioneering sites of reflexivity and representation which engender respect and communion rather than othering. Blaikie's keen insights and choices in the curation of these poignant accounts reveal young adult perspectives of authentic being, providing entry into participant worlds heretofore unexplored.
- Christine Staikidis, University of Northern Illinois, USA
Visual and Cultural Identity Constructs of Global Youth is an anthology of the world worlding, such as youth (re)enacting with/in social media sites, schools for boys in Canada and young women in India navigating how to dress in the male-dominated engineering classrooms or girls redressing themselves in U.S. juvenile arbitration-all blending the material/physicality of embodied affect and the semiotics (sign systems of language and images) of being in and of the world. Visual and Cultural Identity Constructs of Global Youth explores what matters today to youth and young adults in the process of fostering new ontological dispositions of being and belonging in the world that counter the current socio-political agendas of hate, bullying, sexism, racism, and religious persecution. The stories matter because they attend to specific experience, place, encounters, and active engagement with the materiality of context inseparable from semiotic constructs. The anthology is a must-read primer on non-representational new materialism theory to consider how the world is affecting youth and how youth are affecting the world, and to generate speculative fabulations of possible ethical futures.
- Karen Keifer-Boyd, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Dr. Blaikie is to be congratulated for bringing together such a thoughtful collection of diverse voices, revealing the complexities and nuances of youth life and learning in a global context. Surprisingly, little research has been done pertaining to the communities of youth given attention in this book. Dr. Blaikie and her colleagues bring marginalized youth to the center of the discussion, which could push such research forward in important ways. The collection has some absolute gems, like O'Donoghue's and Ringrose's investigations of masculinities, Ivashkevich's chapter on adjudicated girls, and McLaughlin-Alcock's look at artists in Jordan among others. After conducting decades of youth research inside schools and out, this collection caused me to think about potential new projects, which is my criterion for the best thing a book can do for a researcher.
- Kerry Freedman, Northern Illinois University, USA
This wonderful collection of international and inter-disciplinary chapters offer youth researchers new ways of doing situated, ethical, political and response-able research on mediated youth cultures. From re-storying belonging via poetic inquiry with refugee youth to addressing the embodied traumas of idealised classed and racialised femininity through digital media making with young women in a first-time offender programme, each chapter moves and transports the reader to engage with some complex micro-assemblages of youth culture across diverse spaces and places. Collectively the chapters also powerfully illustrate the necessity and challenge of weaving critical post-theories with art-ful methodologies that make the more-than of how research praxis can build to in-form more equitable worldings of a youth justice to come. This is a volume to learn from, become-with and make matter.
- EJ Renold, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
