Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions

Chapter 4: Marginal Spaces, Disparate Places: Educational and Youth Practices in a Globalizing World

chapter 4 76 on Western models and introduced around the world through missionary and colonial practices has signified and defined what it means to be modern. Education with its promise of cultural capital and its instrumental links to the formal economy compels people to migrate within and between nations in hopes of finding increased access to, and a better quality of, education. With so much invested in education—at the individual, community, national, and international levels—failure or perceived failure in the school system is a critical site for investigating what it means to be marginal in a globalizing world. There are currently more than one billion youth between the ages of 15 and 24 years and more than 85% of them live in “developing” nations that are negotiating a changing global order in which economic restructuring, government disinvestment in social measures, intense global competition, high rates of unemployment , and economic recession are adversely affecting their everyday lives and aspirations (Lloyd et al., 2005). Vanuatu, like many of these formerly colonized nations, has inherited and continued to maintain a system of education that excludes many and erodes local knowledge and epistemologies (Niroa, 2004). Pacific Island educator and poet Konai Thaman (2007, p. 12) insists that “[w]e need a new way of seeing and talking about education and globalization,” which challenges the “hegemonic discourses” that are embedded in both of these powerful processes. This chapter draws on my experiences with young people in the urban settlement of Blacksands and my work with the Vanuatu Young People’s Project at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. This project provides young people with basic tools to conduct research with their peers and the opportunity to present their viewsaboutthesituationofyouththroughvariousmedia.Theprojecthasundertaken two major research projects with youth in Port Vila. I also draw upon my research in an afterschool project for young people in a low-income urban area in Borough, Prince Edward Island. In both places, education and, more specifically, failure at school emerged as a key concern among young people who struggled in the classroom and in finding satisfactory work. In both places, I began to recognize the similar ways in which youth are problematized and the low-income urban areas they inhabit are pathologized. There are, of course, profound differences that informed youth experiences in the urban settlement of Blacksands near Port Vila, Vanuatu, and Borough, the low-income housing project on the outskirts of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. At the same time, there are remarkable resonances in the experiences of these young people who inhabited marginal urban spaces in Vanuatu and Prince Edward Island but who, at the same time, articulated, accommodated, and resisted their dilemmas in complex ways. By looking at these disparate places, I hope to trouble the easy reliance on the categories of North and South, traditional and modern, Marginal Spaces, Disparate Places 77 and centre and margin. The educational experiences of youth in marginalized places are productive sites to think through difference and the historical and contemporary connections and disconnections among people who are invariably separated by the spatial and political legacies of “worlding” encompassed in the hierarchy of first and third worlds or developed and developing worlds (Spivak, 1985). Gupta and Ferguson (1997, p. 8) have argued that if one begins with “the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected instead of naturally disconnected then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation, but one of rethinking difference through connection.” Exploring the spatial practices of young people from the widely disparate places of Blacksands and Borough within a single frame of “growing up global” reveals connections as well as differences (Katz, 2004). Katz (2004, p. 156) argues that young people in various places throughout the world, “suffer, endure, cope with, and are tantalized by the efforts of capitalist-driven globalization in startling similar, albeit predictably different ways.” By focusing on these two different and specific marginalized urban places where young people have struggled with school and work, I offer ethnographic insights of the particular (Abu-Lughod, 1991) in order to avoid the generalizations that undermine the heterogeneity and complexity of the lives of young people. Uneven development that is evident within nations and between nations, colonial legacies, and global process produce “common effects in local disparate settings” (Katz, 2004, p. 159). Spatial metaphors abound in discussions of education and, more generally , in knowledge production. Haraway’s (1988) idea of...