Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene: : Peter Kraftl: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene

Description

This collection, which is a companion volume to Young People and Stories for the Anthropocene (Kelly et al., 2022), aims to find, to explore, and to co-produce ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) that are disruptive of orthodoxies in childhood and youth studies, and productive of new ways of thinking, and of being and becoming, in the circumstances that we (young and old) find ourselves in. Circumstances that have, problematically, been identified as the Anthropocene, and which have been characterised as being situated at the convergence of the climate crisis, the 6th mass extinction, and the ongoing crises of global capitalism as ‘earth system’ (Braidotti 2019, Moore 2015).

The collection emerges, in part, and among other things, around three key challenges. First, how can childhood and youth studies tell stories about the less obviously-bounded, obviously-crafted, obviously-engineered material stuff that humans create and that circulates – stuff like plastics, chemicals, and the scattered remnants of past industrial endeavour. Second, the need to experiment with diverse modes of representation: with differently-mediated technologies and modes of telling that, from digital film platforms to children’s non-fiction writing, expand our lexicon in terms of how it might become possible to narrate young people in/and the Anthropocene. Third, the need to articulate different ‘tools’ for working with young people in the Anthropocene. ‘Tools’ and ‘technologies’, understood in this manner, are modes of becoming-attuned to, and of making, new configurations of human and non-human, new and pressing threats that weigh upon young people in visceral, affective ways, and new modes of speculating about and becoming-responsible for futures – human and more-than-human. In this sense, the contributions to the collection, from scholars from the Anglo and non-Anglosphere, are framed by an urgency to develop and deploy innovative, critical and disruptive theoretical and methodological tools and technologies to identify and explore the material, temporal and conceptual challenges for children and young people, and those who research in childhood and youth studies, at this convergence.

Part 1
Plastics, Soils, Water, Weather and Waste: The Materialities of Childhoods in the Anthropocene
Chapter 1: Plastic childhoods (and more): visceralities, vortices, vectors, virtualities Peter Kraftl
Chapter 2: Resilience as more-than-human Mindy Blaise, Jo Pollitt, Jane Merewether, and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Chapter 3: Soil as Kin: Unearthing Old Ways Aviva Reed
Chapter 4: Living in the Anthropocene Adrianne Bacelar de Castro and Sarah Hennessy
Part 2
Temporalities and Spaces: Young People's Anthropocenes
Chapter 5: Blasted Places: Smog, Steel and Stigma in a Post-industrial Town Anoop Nayak
Chapter 6: The net of heaven is vast, vast…': Rethinking a philosophy for youth work in the Anthropocene Kerry Montero
Chapter 7: The Anthropocene and the two-faced responsibility of young people in the European welfare regimes Kari Paakkunainen, Juhani Saari, and Juri Mykkanen
Chapter 8: Young People and the Anthropocene: Futures, Past and Present? Peter Kelly
Part 3
Knowing and Naming Young People a

Product details

Published	26 Sep 2022
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	206
ISBN	9781538153635
Imprint	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations	11 b/w photos; 6 tables;
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Youth Studies has developed a robust body of knowledge on young people’s trajectories as they struggle to make a life in increasingly precarious social, political and economic circumstances. What we have called youth transitions are usually considered though the simplified binary of agency and structure. This wide ranging and ambitious collection invites Youth Studies researchers to trouble these types of binaries as they cannot account for a world where current business as usual practices are selling out the very future of the current generation of young people and those not yet born, right in front of our eyes. By bringing the concept of Anthropocene to the centre of youth research, this collection makes an important intervention to establish more-than-human and ecological phenomena as vital objects of study in considering the everyday lives of young people, the means to which they strategise towards their ambitions and aspirations, and how the future itself is a deeply affective absent-presence that we need to urgently fight for so young people actually have one.

Steven Threadgold, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle
This book Young people and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene edited by Peter Kraftl, Peter Kelly, Diego Carbajo Padilla, Anoop Nayak, Seth Brown, and Rosalyn Black takes the reader on a deeply fascinating journey to disrupt our troublesome relationship with the planet. From the onset humans, in relation with other entities on the planet, are implicated in the dreaming, making, and doing of the Anthropocene, its naming and its activation. Disrupting the comfort of sustainability as a plausible way to proceed the authors compel the reader to think the unthinkable, to propose the impossible. This draws us into a speculative ethics and the uncomfortable ongoingness of child, youth and technology as tangled stuff circulating within earthly rotations. Considering a reconfiguring, a gestural hacking of troubling times this book and its diverse perspectives from a gathering of eclectic scholars contests and brings into question, what is a life in the Anthropocene? And how could diverse bodies narrate other stories for children and young people that matter?

Karen Malone, Professor, Swinburne University of Technology