Written by Back before COVID was a thing, Signe and her colleague David Farrugia (Newcastle University, NSW) initiated an edited collection on young people’s lives beyond global cities. After much delay, it feels amazing to finally say that the book is now sent to the publisher and will be out mid-2022. We think this is an important book because it invites readers to consider what happens when we shift our focus away from urban youth as the norm in youth research, and cities as the ‘place to be’, to consider young lives elsewhere. The book suggests that by ‘thinking from the margins’, we can generate new knowledge about how contemporary young lives look. This is also a call for a reorientation of youth studies as a field that relies on a number of dichotomies that position urban youth as the vantage point. We suggest that it is time to dissolve this (often implicit) preoccupation with urban youth to allow for a diverse and heterogenous conceptualisation of what youth is and what young lives are in the Global North as well as the Global South, in cities, peripheries, and everything in between.
The book is structured around four sections that focus on education and inequalities, materiality and embodiment, mobility and belonging and lastly temporality and space, respectively. The contributors range from emerging to established scholars and represent both Global North and Global South. Together, the chapters in the book represent a multitude of views on youth, place and space that emphasise relational, embodied and embedded experiences.
The book is entitled Youth Beyond the City. Thinking from the Margins and you can find it on the Bristol University Press website here.
Girls Growing Up 