Dispossession, Erasure, and Young People’s Rights Event
- Time:
- 16:00 - 17:00
- Date:
- 16 November 2017
- Venue:
- Building 46 Room 2003
For more information regarding this event, please email Andrew Power at a.power@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
A Geography event
With this paper, I discuss the curtailment of minority young people’s rights in the face of transformation away from state socialism in the first instance, towards seemingly free and open neoliberal statehood in the second. The cases of Romania’s dispossessed Roma population and Slovenia’s ‘erased’ minority populations are highlighted through empirical investigations of youth precarity and deprivation. I explicitly focus on the precarious lives of youth: their situation within settings of political and economic transformation that undermine traditional social institutions of care and citizenship, and how the notion of everyday emotional citizenry can enable a reworking of the rights and subject-hood. How are young lives made or unmade as grievable and livable through dispossession and erasure? What kind of rights-based political possibilities are available for young people, and how does everyday emotional citizenship mediate these events? I suggest a possible answer to these questions through what Rosi Braidotti calls sustainable ethics.
Speaker information
Professor Stuart C. Aitken,Department of Geography, San Diego State University,Stuart Aitken is Professor of Geography and Distinguished Faculty Member (June Burnett Endowed Chair in Child and Family Geographies) and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth and Space. He is widely regarded as one of the leading figures in geographical research on children and youth, families and fatherhood. He has published extensively is these areas, including the 2016 text Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People with Springer Press, and The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (2009) with Ashgate Press. This latter text was awarded an Annual Celebrated Book Award by the American Association of Geographers’ Geographical Perspective on Women (GPOW). More recently he has been focusing on the experiences of migrant working children, and has recently published two peer-reviewed articles on this subject: Aitken, SC (2016) ‘Locked-in-Place: Young People’s Immobilities and the Slovenian Erasure’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, forthcoming; and Aitken, SC (2015) ‘Young People, Borders and Well-Being: Multi-disciplinary and International Perspectives’. Children Geographies. In press.