New ideas for Global youth studies from the South

What is it about?

In the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies, Global South authors use studies of Southern lives to balance contributions to Youth Studies that have focused on the experiences of Global North youth while calling itself "Global". The article interviews the handbook's authors who describe its content - young people's practices (such as hustling, navigating, fixing, waiting, being on standby, silence as protest, and life-writing) and the theory we can derive from these practices (personhood, intersectionality, violences, post-coloniality, consciousness, precarity, ontological insecurity, collective agency, and emancipation). The combination of practices and theory, the editors term ‘epistepraxis’ - combining knowledge, practice, and politics. This, the authors of the handbook argue, is a critical contribution from Southern scholars to Youth Studies, and is a key way in which we can move from Youth Studies (that emanates from the Global North) to a genuine Global Youth Studies.

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Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash

Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash

Why is it important?

There are three key complaints from Southern Youth Studies scholars. The first is the way in which Northern knowledge is assumed to be universal knowledge. The second is that when data from the South is extracted, it is often transported to the North for analysis and to be turned into theory using Northern lenses. The third is that Southern scholarship is frequently ghettoised, i.e., what is produced and theorised in the South remains in the South and is ignored by the North. None of these situations are tolerable. To address these complaints and transition to a Global Youth Studies, it is necessary for Southern scholars to develop their thinking and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas as equal partners. But how, exactly, do Southern youth studies scholars recreate their relationship with the North to make a global rather than parochial contribution? Southern scholars have to overcome, amongst other challenges, difficulties of confidence in producing theory, the precarity of their lives, the invisibility of much existing Southern scholarship, and the dearth of communities of practice within the South, and of egalitarian communities of practice between the North and the South. So how do we remake youth studies, from one that universalizes Northern perspectives into a truly Global Youth Studies; one that is enriched by, and welcomes the contribution of Global South scholars on their own terms? This handbook makes a contribution to answering these difficult questions.