Hope Is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia

Series Editors’ Preface

Series Editors’ Preface G lobal social and economic changes are transforming the lives of children and youth. in many parts of the world, the decline of state welfare systems since the 1980s has undermined young people’s efforts to obtain social goods associated with “adulthood,” such as a stable job, valuable skills, and secure housing. At the same time, economic collapse and the restructuring of labor markets have often forced children and youth to assume responsibility for social reproduction. ironically, converging socioeconomic crises are occurring at a time when, via the international media, young people are increasingly exposed to images of successful adulthood based on education and professional employment. young people are not passive in the face of these changes; they are centrally involved in a range of disparate, and sometimes complexly linked, forms of social and political action. Writing nearly eighty years ago, Karl mannheim (1972) famously argued that the members of each generation experience a “fresh contact” with their social and natural environment. He emphasized young people’s capacity to rethink the institutional structures that they inherit from previous generations. But even mannheim would be perplexed by the intensity of young people’s contemporary assertions, from striking new efforts to fashion youth cultures, to novel types of entrepreneurship, to innovative political mobilization of various hues, of which the recent protests in north Africa and the middle east are only the most obvious. perhaps one of the inevitable consequences of this curious combination of young people’s subordination and assertion is that people in their teens and twenties have become mythologized in the media. We are now accustomed to reading of young people as heroes and zeroes, innocent and guilty, the problem and the panacea. x Series Editors’ Preface the Global Youth book series offers a venue for scholars charting the experiences and practices of young people entangled in these global changes. We bring together work that examines youth and aspects of globalization within sociology, anthropology, development studies, geography, and educational studies . We are especially keen to encourage work on youth in areas of the world that are often excluded from mainstream discussions of young people, such as latin America, Africa, Asia, and eastern europe, but we also aim to include studies from Western europe and north America, as well as books that bridge the global north and global south. the series, which focuses on those between the ages of (roughly) ten and thirty, is also concerned with studies of the different ways people and institutions discuss “youth” as a concept. Books in the series may take the form of novel syntheses of existing research or accounts of innovative substantive research. they may consist of outstanding singlecountry studies or offer comparative perspectives. What will unite books in the series is their commitment to sharp, critical, highly informed analysis that moves forward not only academic and policy makers’ thinking but also public understanding of youth. As is surely fitting, we expect many of the books to be written by early- and mid-career scholars. Daniel mains’s wonderful anthropology of ethiopian youth provides a superb start for the series. mains focuses on the predicament and practices of jobless young people in urban ethiopia, where youth unemployment runs at 50 percent. Building on long-term ethnography, mains describes young people’s experiences of economic malaise, teasing out how youth in contemporary ethiopia perceive time and space. He also provides a detailed account of the complex ways in which different young people navigate this uncertain environment—for example, by developing new social networks, joining nongovernmental organizations, or migrating. We are left with a vivid picture of young people’s resourcefulness, one that resolutely refuses to fall into the trap of eulogizing or infantilizing the book’s subjects. it is an extraordinary achievement and a testament to the continuing importance of ethnography for an understanding of globalization. mains’s study will soon become a landmark in its field. We hope that all the books in the series do the same. Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson Oxford February 2011 ...