Sharlene Swartz
Published: 2021
Total Pages:
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"Abstract: Ninety percent of the world's youth live in Africa, Latin America and the developing countries of Asia. Despite this, the field of Youth Studies, like many others, is dominated by the knowledge economy of the Global North. To address these geo-political inequalities of knowledge, The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies offers a contribution from Southern scholars to remake Youth Studies from its current state, that universalizes Northern perspectives, into a truly Global Youth Studies. Contributors from across various regions of the Global South, including from the Diaspora, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities, locate and define 'the Global South,' articulate the necessity of studying Southern lives to enrich, re-interpret, legitimate and offer symmetry to Youth Studies, and utilizes and innovates Southern theory to do so. Eleven concepts - personhood, intersectionality, violences, de- and post-coloniality, consciousness, precarity, fluid modernities, ontological insecurity, navigational capacities, collective agency and emancipation - are re-imagined and re-presented. The outcome is a series of everyday practices such as hustling, navigating, fixing, waiting, being on standby, silence, life-writing, that demonstrate how youth living in adversity experiment with and push back against routine and conformity, and how research may support them in these endeavors and, simultaneously, redefine the relationships between knowledge, practice and politics - what the editors term 'epistepraxis'. The handbook concludes with a nascent charter for a Global Youth Studies of benefit to the world, which no longer excludes, assumes, or elides but rather includes new possibilities for representing youth, researching amongst them, and devising policies and interventions to better serve them. Keywords: Global South, youth studies, practice, communities of practice, knowledge, theory, justice, solidarity, epistepraxis"--