Globalizing the Streets: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment

by Fabiola Salek, David C. Brotherton , Ph.D.

Overview

Not since the 1960s have the activities of resistance among lower- and working-class youth caused such anxiety in the international community. Yet today the dispossessed are responding to the challenges of globalization and its methods of social control. The contributors to this volume examine the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth, their clashes with law enforcement and criminal codes, their fight for social, political, and cultural capital, and their efforts to achieve recognition and empowerment. Essays adopt the vantage point of those whose struggle for social solidarity, self-respect, and survival in criminalized or marginalized spaces. In doing so, they contextualize and humanize the seemingly senseless actions of these youths, who make visible the class contradictions, social exclusion, and rituals of psychological humiliation that permeate their everyday lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231128230
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michael Flynn is associate director of the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and associate professor of psychology at York College, The City University of New York. He is the coeditor of Genocide, War, and Human Survival and Trauma and Self, and he is the editor of The Second Nuclear Age: Political and Psychocultural Perspectives.David C. Brotherton is professor and chair of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. He is a coauthor of The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang and a coeditor of Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives and Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today.
Michael Flynn, PhD, is associate director of the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York, and an assistant professor of Psychology at York College and CUNY. He is the co-editor (with Charles B. Strozier) of "Genocide, War and Human Survival," "Trauma and Self," and "The Year 2000: Essays on the End." He is the editor of "The Second Nuclear Age: Political and Psychocultural Perspectives." His research interests include the psychological and political economy of urban violence; the psychological effects of living in a nuclearized world; literary, autobiographical, and psychohistorical approaches to the self and trauma; and the public and media role of the psychologist. David Brotherton, PhD, is the Chair of the Sociology Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Dr. Brotherton has been researching youth subcultures for more than a dozen years and co-founded the Street Organization Project in 1997. For the last few years he has been organizing annual international academic/practitioner/community conferences on street youth and is currently focusing on youth gangs and delinquency. He is the co-editor of Gangs and Society, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (both from Columbia), and the upcoming Keeping Out the Other (Columbia).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part 1 Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance
1. Youth Experiences of Surveillance: A Cross-National Analysis, by Martin Ruck, Anita Harris, Michelle Fine, and Nick Freudenberg
2. From the Outside Looking In: Young People's Perceptions of Risk and Danger in an East London Borough, by Simon Hallsworth and Janet Ransom
Part 2 Street Youth, Homelessness, and Displacement
3. Living Free: Nomadic Traveling Among Homeless Street Youth, by Marni Finkelstein, Richard Curtis, and Barry Spunt
4. Street Youth in New York City and São Paulo: Deconstructing the Striking Differences, Global Similarities, and Local Specificities, by Benedito Rodrigues dos Santos
5. Searching for Home: Russian Street Youth and the Criminal Community, by Svetlana Stephenson
Part 3 Gangs and Street Cultures in the Globalized City
6. Social Control and Street Gangs in Los Angeles, by James Diego Vigil
7. Youth Subcultures, Resistance, and the Street Organization in Late Modern New York, by David C. Brotherton
8. Children of the Land, Fruit of the Ghetto, by Ana Daza, David C. Brotherton, Gipsy Escobar, and Michael Flynn
9. Victimization, Resistance, and Violence: Exploring the Links Between Girls in Gangs, by Dana M. Nurge and Michael Shively
Part 4 Youth, Violence, and Subcultures of Whiteness

10. Ethnic Envy: How Teens Construct Whiteness in Globalized America, by Randy Blazak
11. An Extreme Response to Globalization: The Case of Racist Skinhead Youth, by Pete Simi and Barbara Brents
12. Columbine: The School Shooting as a Postmodern Phenomenon, by Ralph W. Larkin
13. Burning Issues: Fire, Carnival, and Crime, by Mike Presdee
14. 'Cause Fightin' Is Just Fightin': Caucasian Youth, Violence, and Social Exclusion in a Globalized Age, by Michael Flynn
Part 5 Innovative Interventions and Youth in Crises
15. Integrating Interventions: Outreach and Research Among Street Youth in the Rockies, by Jean Scandlyn, Suzanne Discenza, and James Van Leeuwen
16. Youth Force in the South Bronx, by Barry Checkoway, Lisa Figueroa, and Katie Richards-Schuster
17. Motivating and Supporting Activist Youth: A View from Nonformal Settings, by Leonisa Ardizzone
Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Kai Erikson

Globalizing the Streets makes the compelling case that marginalized young people all over the world are being drawn to the culture of the streets. The volume shows that these youths are searching for identity, meaning, fellowship, security, a measure of excitement and joy, and a way of coping with a global social order that seems no longer to have a place for them. A very important and powerful work.

— Kai Erikson, William R Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University

Tom Hayden

This extremely timely work offers an approach to the youth crisis based on the rich, largely untapped potential of those in the margins wherever they may be found. In doing so, the authors firmly reject the usual pathologizing frames of reference within which our kids are most often located. A great book for students of resistance and activists alike.

— Tom Hayden, former California state senator and author of Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence

Jock Young

This is the book on youth we have all been waiting for: international in its orbit and interdisciplinary in its research, it combines feisty theory with grass roots ethnography backed up by creative politics. It places today's youth firmly in a transnational perspective roundly debunking and dismissing stereotypes in a world of continuous moral panics about young people and the demonization of street gangs in particular. If you have any interest or concern about what is going on in the streets of our big cities, in the real world outside of the tabloid press, read this book.

— Jock Young, University of Kent, author of The Vertigo of Late Modernity

Michael Flynn, PhD, is associate director of the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York, and an assistant professor of Psychology at York College and CUNY. He is the co-editor (with Charles B. Strozier) of "Genocide, War and Human Survival," "Trauma and Self," and "The Year 2000: Essays on the End." He is the editor of "The Second Nuclear Age: Political and Psychocultural Perspectives." His research interests include the psychological and political economy of urban violence; the psychological effects of living in a nuclearized world; literary, autobiographical, and psychohistorical approaches to the self and trauma; and the public and media role of the psychologist. David Brotherton, PhD, is the Chair of the Sociology Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Dr. Brotherton has been researching youth subcultures for more than a dozen years and co-founded the Street Organization Project in 1997. For the last few years he has been organizing annual international academic/practitioner/community conferences on street youth and is currently focusing on youth gangs and delinquency. He is the co-editor of Gangs and Society, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (both from Columbia), and the upcoming Keeping Out the Other (Columbia).