Yearning to Labor: Youth, Unemployment, and Social Destiny in Urban France

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight.

Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of y...