Urban Girls’ Struggles for Symbolic Recognition: Space, Affect, and Girl Imaginings

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Studying Young Girls in Diverse Learning Contexts

Abstract

This paper draws from a 20 month critical feminist ethnographic and visual ethnographic inquiry of working-class, urban female youth who are living on the margins of the post-industrial city of Vancouver, Canada. A primary objective with this research is to showcase how urban working class girls navigate their daily lives and in so doing bring value to their own experiences as a response to a wider symbolic undervaluing of ‘who’ they are seen to be in an urban context. In this paper I reveal how ‘space’ (as a socially produced and reproducible concept) functioned to both fix the girls in place and as a class imaginary leading to negative affective responses which then served to re-inscribe the girls as ‘abject.’

Author

• Stephanie Skourtes, The University of British Columbia