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Navigating Youth Developmental Crises in Critical Times

This talk delves into the impact of current economic crises on youth development, exploring the intersections of memory, imagination, and socio-cultural influences. Examples from diverse settings highlight the enactment of pasts and futures. Analytical concepts distinguish between potential and virtual development. Youth challenges in urban slums and the role of mediating devices are discussed, along with insights from developmental psychology and recent literature on crisis-stricken youth. The presentation questions how memory and imagination shape development and examines the broader context of developmental crises within societal crises.

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Navigating Youth Developmental Crises in Critical Times

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  1. Experiencing Developmental Crises in Critical Times: From Realising Potential Futures to Actualising Virtual Possibilities?” Dr. Michalis Kontopodis http://mkontopodis.wordpress.com https://twitter.com/m_kontopodis

  2. Overview of my talk • Brief reference to current economical situation & how the broader crisis transforms youth – need for further theory building • Explore how memory and imagination link to development • Socio-cultural/ socio-material approach to memory & imagination • Examples – case studies – enacting pasts and futures in schools & community settings – City as School + Freedom Writers + Landless Movement + HyperConnecting Schools • Analytical concepts: How mediating devices differ – individualism vs. collaboration but also: • Distinguish potential from virtual development (norms vs imagination)

  3. Austerity and global economic crisis • Mike Davis (2006) – “Planet of Slums”: • more than one billion people live in urban slums • explosively unstable & unequal urban world • In London: http://www.londonspovertyprofile.org.uk • Recent financial crisis in China & Brazil • 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

  4. Youth in this world • 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

  5. Our theories on adolescence? • Rapid growth • Interaction of physical, psychological & environmental factors • Neurological changes during puberty (change in the axons & the number of synapses) • Cognitive development (state of formal operations) • Gender / Identity Development

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. Central questions • How are memory & imagination linked to development? • How are pasts and futures enacted in schools and community settings? • Which is the role of different mediating devices in that? • How are different developments done? …as to explore developmental crises in a broader context of crisis…

  9. 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/

  10. There is no a-priori irreversible time – time is fabricated In a world made of intermediaries […] there is a time separated from space, an immutable frame to measure displacement and, by definition, no process. In a world made of mediations […] there are a lot oftimes and places (Latour, 2005, p. 178).

  11. 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. • www.peterlang.com/?pcgs • Kontopodis, M., Magalhães, M. C., & Coracini, M. J. (Eds.). (2016). Facing poverty and marginalization: 50 years of critical research in Brazil. Bern: Peter Lang [chapter by Elizabeth] • 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)

  12. 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#

  13. 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

  14. 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:

  15. 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

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

  17. velasquezlasmeninas

  18. Questions?

  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. Next project (in pilot phase currently) • 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

  21. 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

  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. 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 (cf. school wall displays - Daniels, Vygotsky & Pedagogy, pp. 160-174) • “virtual”in the sense that it enables further new relationships & qualitative change to happen (ISIS is not)

  24. Hopefully relevant for… • Research Councils UK Digital Economy Theme (Global Challenges Research Fund)  • UNESCO (Knowledge Societies for Peace and Sustainable Development/ advisory board: Prof. Christoph Wulf, Free University Berlin & Vice President of UNESCO in Germany) • European Centre for Global Interdependence and Solidarity • Global Education Network Europe (http://www.gene.eu) • Media industry such as: http://www.schooltube.com

  25. 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.

  26. Questions? Questions? Questions?

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