Assembling Adulthoods: Young People, Cartography, and the Everyday

• In Event: Constructing the Subject: Youth, Listening, Schools

Abstract

A common poststructuralist critique of traditional approaches to thinking youth is that they do little to give significant or genuine attention to both the day-to-day practices of young people and also how young people do make a life despite significant social, cultural, and political changes to their becoming-adult. This paper makes an assemblage account of the social/cultural/political/material practices of a small group of young people engaged in their final year secondary school certificate in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that taking a cartographic rendering of young people’s mobilities across a high-stakes ‘transition’ period allows for a more nuanced understanding of emerging subjectivities that does not rely on dialectic or binary understandings of identity.

Author

• Shane Duggan, The University of Melbourne