Violence and Youth Studies in the 21st Century

Abstract

In 2014 Giroux’s contributed a chapter to the collection Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century considering ‘Resisting Youth and the Crushing State Violence of Neoliberalism’. Giroux’s passionate and evocative rhetoric powerfully communicates the destructive and violating systemic forces that permeate the contemporary experience of youth. However, Giroux makes this argument without explicitly drawing on the work of other violence scholars, including those outlined in the previous chapter. Providing a systematic framework for understanding youth violence is not Giroux’s intent and, as such, this is absent in his chapter. The absence of a framework is a gap in the field in the understanding of young people’s experiences and the connection between youth and contemporary systems of objective violence. Moreover, there is a gap in the understanding of how young people are resisting and enacting subjective and objective performativities of violence. This chapter fills part of this gap focusing primarily on developing a framework for conceptualising young people’s resistance and enactment of subjective and objective violence.