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Julian Sefton-Green

October 17th, 2024

YouthSites: An intersection of neoliberalism, community arts and alternative education

0 comments | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Julian Sefton-Green

October 17th, 2024

YouthSites: An intersection of neoliberalism, community arts and alternative education

0 comments | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Julian Sefton-Green, a professor of new media education at Deakin University, Melbourne writes on what happened when neo-liberalism met community arts and alternative education: and how it created new spaces for youth and creativity in our cities.

As has been often noted, youth have occupied a curious space in both public discussion and cultural and social policy over the last 50 years. In the large cities of the global North especially, they have been the objects of concern and intervention from the moral panics of the 1950 onwards, through anxieties over racialized policing to a focus on lack of opportunity, alienation from civil society and now attention on well-being and hopelessness. These large generational movements have frequently been explored in terms of the commodification and exploitation of youth cultures in fashion, media, music and the arts, along with an interest in crime, housing, employment, and racial diversity. The generalised critique of “neoliberalism” has often been used to explain unequal stratification in labour markets, housing stock, family make up, racial diversity and of course the changing role of the welfare state over this period as it has retrenched and contracted.

A new study I have co-authored with colleagues from Canada – Youthsites: histories of creativity, care and learning in the city – examines the curious and rather under-researched case of funded out-of-school youth focused organisations frequently offering arts-based, cultural and media-focused activities and training that have flourished amidst this generalised story of decline and contraction. We called these organisations “youth sites” to emphasise the provision of specialised places to serve the interests of young people and to act as a kind of home in frequently hostile urban environments where youth are usually seen as objects of fear and danger. In our study youth broadly describes young people aged 14-25.

We tried to excavate the story of these organisations in London, Toronto and Vancouver between 1995 and 2015, offering a kind of “political economy” of what amounts to a sector. We found an internationally comparative common kind of institutional norm in respect of a shared vision to serve youth, a common approach to alternative pedagogy, a commitment to youth cultures as the basis for curriculum activities and an insecure mode of funding, evaluation and social purpose.

An anatomy of a YouthSite

We tell many stories in the book of organisations and individuals such as that of Adonis Huggins, who – as an early hire at the Regent Park Focus Media Arts Centre in 1990 – worked in the rundown neighbourhood of Regent Park, an inner-city area of Toronto, Canada, with dense public housing and sporadic public concerns around young people’s vulnerability to drugs, alcohol, and youth violence. A young 14-year-old boy, Benji Haywood, had been found dead in Lake Ontario and the city’s response was to set up Focus community programs to offer young people structured and organized forms of participation. Huggins himself came from a background in community theatre.

Right from the very beginning in the early 1990s, Huggins articulated a clear set of principles for engaging young people using culture with the belief that civic participation needed to be driven by young people themselves: that the content should come from them and their peer cultures. He focused on video and encouraged young people to make socially engaged documentary investigations about matters of interest to them in their community.

Nearly 30 years later, the same vision, the same focus, and the same set of practices animate the work of Regent Park Focus. Although the numbers of young people who attend each year are not incredibly high—around 200 young people between the ages of 14 and 29 attended in 2015, for example—the young people themselves make a substantial commitment to the creative and civic opportunities offered by Regent Park. The organization has a commitment to supporting and developing young people to become members of staff who work as mentors, filmmakers, and tutors alongside other artists who are employed on short-term grants.

Community arts

Building on the community arts and community media movements of the 1970s and 1980s which were often well-resourced by city authorities as well as core state funding for youth clubs, and frequently led by dynamic socially committed entrepreneurial women, these organisations have scrabbled for continuity and sustained funding. They have constantly sought to offer a range of social, artistic and educational services to young people. We tell a story of the way that these older forms of civil-society organisations were shaped by a mixture of enterprise and contract that consistently offered more than the sum of their parts – offering welfare support, social care, and a gateway to a host of other services.

The organisations themselves frequently came out of a commitment to a very specific cultural form – graffiti, African centric dance, music videos, South Asian dance, club cultures, documentary video etc – bringing together cutting-edge talent and frequently pushing the boundaries of contemporary art forms. The skills and ingenuity of practitioners often went hand in hand with a commitment to serve the communities from which they emerged. This led to the creation of projects that might have started over the school summer holidays gradually growing into these common institutional forms often serving quite large numbers of young people over a year, some of which survived over our three decades.

Post-welfare neo-liberalism

Charting the rise and fall of these organisations (even if some of them were affiliated with more established arts venues or part of broader citywide social policies) revealed an extraordinary commitment and enterprise by a cadre of leaders who seemed to work tirelessly to support their youth. There is no one single administrative “department” responsible for this “sector” and we argue that it came into existence through exploiting the entrepreneurial opportunities of a commission-driven funding process whatever the inconsistencies and contradictions in these regimes.

The study also pointed to a kind of infrastructure in relationship to cultural and creative labour. Whilst forms of youth culture have incredible significance in driving the wider economy, they occupy a strained relationship between the representation of socially marginalised lives and the commodification of that social inequality. Yet as these organisations provided different kinds of teaching and learning they also offered a very wide range of entry points into employment and just as importantly used artists and media workers from an underemployed workforce as teachers to earn money and work with their communities.

Towards places of care

Large-scale studies of the interruption of the reproduction of poverty frequently point to the role of art and media spaces and identity projects as being experiences that appear to have significant statistical correlations with young people being able to change the trajectories of their lives. These organisations provide the structural opportunity to do so. On the one hand, they point to a future of sticking plaster solutions, inconsistent and inadequate redress for the effects of poverty and discrimination. On the other hand, they are a testament to the commitment and hard work of communities and individuals. Above all, they indicate our need for a richer and more elaborated version of many kinds of institutions and organisations best fitted to serve urban youth in the future.

This post represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured image: Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

About the author

Julian Sefton-Green

Julian Sefton-Green is a professor of new media education at Deakin University, Melbourne and a visiting professor in the department of media and communication at the LSE.

Posted In: Media Culture and Identities

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