Cautionary Notes on Resistance

• In Event: Youth Resistance Across Neoliberal Contexts

Abstract

This concluding paper will offer a critical analysis of key literature to date on “resistance.” As I will show, the question of “resistance” has oriented the field of critical ethnography for several generations now. Indeed, the reproduction-resistance binary has animated much of the most important, critical work in educational studies over the last thirty years. Yet, this reproduction-resistance binary has perhaps calcified in recent years. Such work often searches for elusive moments of “authenticity” and “resistance” in time, pulling them out, celebrating them, exporting them to understand other sets of people in other social circumstances.

I note here two social scientific studies that have crystallized this focus on authenticity, voice, and resistance—William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (1943) and Paul Willis’s aforementioned Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977). These texts seamlessly weave together observations, quotes, and commentary in portraying and championing youth who resist the imperatives of dominant culture. Comparatively little work, however, has treated resistance as a fluid and dynamic construct. Specifically, comparatively little work has addressed the consequences youth face for enacting these modes of resistance over time—so-called “longitudinal” studies.

There is a small but growing body of such “longitudinal” work. I recall here one such important “follow up” study of the white working-classes—Lois Weis’s Class Reunion (2005). A follow-up to an earlier study (Working Class Without Work), this book carefully explored the consequences for different modes of white working-class identity over time. While such follow-ups are rare, they allow us several affordances. They discourage us from conscripting our participants into larger narratives of “heroic” or “underdog” resistance. But they also force us to see how social systems evolve over time. The affectively charged narratives of resistance—and they have remained charged over time—should not outstrip our understanding of how key dynamics and forces have evolved over time. In other words, we need to keep our empirical material in dialogue with larger bodies of theoretical work. They need to inform the ways we construct our theories about how the world works—whether Marxist, feminist, or other theories. “

I offer a parallel caution here. In particular, work on “resistance” tends to locate their truth-value in the “authentic” experiences of marginalized. Yet, to mark them as more “authentic” is to perhaps valorize them in irresponsible ways. This is particularly dangerous for those of us who do not have to live with the consequences of such decisions in the long term. For example, the lived experience of under-employment, over time, can work to level the ways resistance to school is sometimes valorized. While songs and social scientific texts of resistance remain powerful, we must never forget that the “imagining” at the heart of this project comes with important responsibilities.

I will provide remarks on each of the papers, with an emphasis on drawing connections across texts, and noting compelling differences in interpretation, application, and implications across neoliberal contexts.

Author

• Gregory James Dimitriadis, University at Buffalo - SUNY