Youth Development in Critical Times: Doing Collective Pasts & Futures

1. Youth Development in Critical Times: Doing Collective Pasts & Futures Dr. Michalis Kontopodis http://mkontopodis.wordpress.com https://twitter.com/m_kontopodis https://roehampton-online.academia.edu/MichalisKontopodis

2. Austerity and global economic crisis • http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/unitedstates (with 90% of all transactions in foreign currency being in $ and 60% of global currency reserves) • http://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk

3. Youth today • Majority of global youth is: • indebted • threatened by unemployment or precarity • in the worst case: also displaced into non-places such as provisionary refugee camps or urban slums • This is not a temporary, geographically limited and exceptional condition but a long-lasting

4. Recent literature on youth in crisis • Evans, B., & Giroux, H. (2015). Disposable futures: Violence in the age of the spectacle. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press. • France, A. (2016). Understanding youth in the global economic crisis. Bristol: Policy Press. • Parreira do Amaral, M., Dale, R., & Loncle, P. (Eds.). (2015). Shaping the futures of young Europeans: Education governance in eight European countries. Oxford: Symposium Books. • Triliva, S., Varvantakis, C., & Dafermos, M. (2015). YouTube, young people, and the socioeconomic crises in Greece. Information, Communication & Society, 18(4), 407-423.

5. Questions/ objectives • How are memory & imagination linked to youth development in critical times? • How are pasts and futures enacted in schools and community settings? • Which is the role of different mediating devices (and relevant practices) in that? • How are different developments done?

6. Links to… • SYMPOSIUM IIΙ from yesterday: BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE, THE PAST AND THE FUTURE, IMAGINATION AND REMEMBERING: STUDYING MEMORY IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY ORGANISER & DISCUSSANT: IGNASIO BRESCO

7. Therefore I will… • Explore the structure of certain mediating devices that link memory and imagination to development (and the relevant practices) • Examples – case studies – enacting pasts and futures in schools & community settings – City as School + Freedom Writers + Landless Movement + HyperConnecting Schools • Analytical concepts: How differ – individualism vs. collaboration but also: • Distinguish potential from virtual development (norms vs. imagination)

8. Socio-cultural approaches to time, memory & imagination • Middleton, D., & Brown, S. (2005). The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. • Middleton, D., & Edwards, D. (Eds.). (1990). Collective Remembering. London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage. • Hüppauf, B., & Wulf, C. (Eds.). (2009). Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible. New York: Routledge. • Kontopodis, M., & Matera, V. (2010). Doing Memory, Doing Identity: Politics of the Everyday in Contemporary Global Communities (Introduction to Special Issue). Outlines: Critical Practice Studies, 12(2), 1-14. • See: https://mkontopodis.wordpress.com/timemory/

9. Crisis & development • concept of crisis in Vygotsky / post-Vygotskian research • a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger: the current economic crisis | a family in crisis • a time when a difficult or important decision must be made: a crisis point of history. • the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death. • from Greek krisis/ κρίσις‘decision,’ from κρίνειν‘decide’ • also an opportunity for NEW developments

10. Examples/ case studies from various research projects • About 10 years of ethnographic/ qualitative research projects with “disenfranchised” people in Germany, US, Brazil, for details on contexts & methodology see: • http://mkontopodis.wordpress.com • Kontopodis, M. (2012/ 2014). Neoliberalism, pedagogy and human development: Exploring time, mediation and collectivity in contemporary schools. London: Routledge. • Kontopodis, M., Magalhães, M. C., & Coracini, M. J. (Eds.). (2016). Facing poverty and marginalization: 50 years of critical research in Brazil. Bern: Peter Lang • Kontopodis, M.; Varvantakis, C. & Wulf, C. (Eds.) (2017). Global youth in digital trajectories. London: Routledge. • Currently working on a next book on Youth, Crises & Socio-Material Becoming (Routledge)

13. CV Personal Strengths:-Able to work in a team and also independent - Understanding for Work processes, - Organization, planning -Flexible, good talent of perception Hobbies:- swimming and fitness - computer preferable career: -????????????????? Place, Date: #city#, #date#

14. Writing diaries / the Freedom WritersLong Beach, 1994 – 1998 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU_BueZZNd8 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDq9o9j3-CU • https://mkontopodis.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/neolib-ped-dpment-paperback/ • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PahVp7p3XHg&index=2&list=PL9CCC890650706F6A • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9axXKI3zBgU • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz3TZH-CCS4 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=797_cGr4pwE

15. I began to think that I could teach young girls like me that they too could “be somebody”… For the first time, I realized that what people say about living in the ghetto and having brown skin doesn't have to apply to me. So when I got home, I wrote this poem:

16. They Say, I Say: They say I am brown/I say I am proud They say I only know how' to cook I say I know how to write a book So don't judge me by the way I look They say I am brown/ I say I am proud They say I'm not the future of this nation I say “Stop giving me discrimination Instead/ I'm gonna use my education to help build the human nation” Gruwell, 1999, pp. 202-204

17. Not only discourse - “doing” time & development in-here Present Past Future (development?) o u t - t h e r e mediation

18. velasquezlasmeninas

19. Another example: • Teaching in a Landless Workers’ School at a small Landless Community in Espirito Santo, Brazil: https://landlessmov2010.wordpress.com • You-Tubing about the Crisis in Greece: • https://mkontopodis.wordpress.com/hypercom/ • Counterexample: ISIS Youth & their online video productions (also transnational, collective, participatory, employing new media, activist… how to evaluate that?)

20. Provocations for discussion • There is no a-priori irreversible time – time is fabricated – different pasts and futures are possible • Doing memory and doing imagination are central here – so are the relevant mediating devices and practices in schools and community settings (socio-material approach, not just socio-cultural) • One can differentiate between “potential” and “virtual” futures (and developments) • There may also be conflicting temporalities in ONE setting – close ethnographic work/ socio-material analysis needed

21. Potential vs. virtual development • “potential” development in which an already given/ expected future is ‘realized’ (norms) • “virtual” development is ‘actualized’ when development takes a different course than what is laid out (collective memory, imagination) • much less the work of the individual, but relies on cultures of collaboration (much relevant post-Vygotskian scholarship here) • “virtual”in the sense that it enables further new relationships & qualitative change to happen (ISIS is not)

22. Virtual…. three interrelated meanings: • rather popular sense of not physically existing as such but made to appear by software e.g. virtual reality, or virtual literacies • in the sense of virtue i.e. excellence, potency, value (from Latin virtus) • in the sense of being capable of producing a certain effect (traced back to the use of the word in the 15th century) cf. Bergson/ Deleuze – an aspect of reality that is ideal, but nonetheless real. The virtual is “as if” it were real, but not so in fact – therefore conveying dreams, memories, imaginations etc.

23. Next project (in pilot phase currently, with F. Liberali, M. Dafermos, S. Triliva et.al.) • HyperConnecting Schools: https://digitmed.wordpress.com/hyperconnecting-schools/ • YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCow1jHEY3TgMb4QdrD1h_RA • Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hyper-Connecting-Schools/1433310736937280?fref=ts

24. References • Daniels, H. (2006). The 'Social' in Post-Vygotskian Theory. Theory & Psychology, 16(1), 37-49. • Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980/1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. • Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. • Latour, B. (2005). Trains of Thought: The fifth Dimension of Time and its Fabrication. In A. N. Perret-Clermont (Ed.), Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time (pp. 173-187). Göttingen: Hogrefe & Huber. • Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London and New York: Verso. • Stetsenko, A. (2008). From relational ontology to transformative activist stance on development and learning: expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 3(2), 471-491. • Triliva, S., Varvantakis, C., & Dafermos, M. (2015). YouTube, young people, and the socioeconomic crises in Greece. Information, Communication & Society, 18(4), 407-423.

25. Questions? Questions? Questions?