School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemThe youth of Panama: everyday negotiations of neoliberal development in an urban context( 2018)This thesis provides an ethnographic analysis of how young lower middle-class urban Panamanians navigate and negotiate neoliberal macro-economic transformations that have accelerated since the 1990s, from increasingly precarious and marginalised positions in society. Unlike much of Latin America which has gained global interest through the turn to centre-left and leftist governments in recent years, Panama has consistently adopted market-oriented policies following structural adjustments programs. Particularly under the administration of former right-wing president, Ricardo Martinelli, the nation has capitalised on its geographic position as a global and regional hub to market itself to the global community through economic goals that seek to attract flows of international capital and foreign investment. It has subsequently focused its attention on developing Panama as an ideal site for luxury tourism, residential migration, and for multinational corporation regional headquarters, leading it to often be described as the most cosmopolitan metropolis in Central America. In spite of this, Panama remains greatly overlooked by anthropologists as a site of study for urban neoliberal development. From within the deepening of Panama’s global market integration, young Panamanians have found themselves navigating the intricacies of everyday urban life within structural conditions that increasingly favour the interests of the international and national elite. Their experiences in this thesis thus emerge as precarious, as known certainties of everyday activities like travelling to and from work, utilising or simply having linguistic or racial autonomy, or transitioning from education into stable waged-labour, are slowly eroded in favour of free market ethics of competition, austerity, and self-responsibilisation. This thesis seeks to capture the more surprising and unexpected ways in which market-oriented policies take shape in the Panamanian context. It pays heed to many unintended consequences of these market-led reforms such as traffic congestion and growing racial divides, and it posits that young Panamanians in this study emerge as important prisms through which various neoliberally-related social ills in Panama City become apparent. At the same time, it elucidates how young Panamanians quietly resist neoliberalism from subject positions in society. It posits that Panamanian youth uphold and create particular values and cultural practices such as interdependence and togetherness, that work against the needs of the Panamanian state.
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ItemReconfiguring racism: youthful dynamics of conflict and conviviality in a culturally diverse, working-class high school( 2017)Youth, diversity and disadvantage are rendered a dangerous mix in contemporary Australia, with concern focused in particular on youth living in Australia’s most multicultural and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this milieu, young people, and schools as ‘micropublics’, are often scrutinised as indicators of the health of multicultural societies with schools targeted as sites of intervention. Yet in the shadow of such moral panic, how does racialisation and racism actually feature in the lives of young people as they negotiate culturally diverse shared spaces? Do young people’s practices call for antiracist intervention or is there evidence of transformative ways of living with difference, which unsettles and advances current understandings of racism and conviviality in young lives? Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explores these questions in the context of peer sociality at Greendale High in Melbourne – a school located in the heartland of current social anxieties about youth, multiculturalism and divisive population growth. While racism and conflict within a social cohesion rubric are positioned as anathema to successful multicultural living, research at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture increasingly shows that both conviviality and conflict can co-exist relatively easily within culturally diverse youth spaces. This literature further posits that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. In this thesis I argue that this racism-conviviality binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within a multicultural peer culture. Through tracing when, where and how racialisation emerged in schoolyard conversations, social spaces, friendship dynamics and classroom discussions, this thesis illuminates how expressions of everyday racism and conviviality can be enmeshed in complex, relational, sophisticated and uneven ways. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between practices of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. Evolving from sustained ethnographic attention to Greendale student life, the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ compels engaged scrutiny of the concepts of – and relationships between – ‘racism’, ‘conviviality’ and ‘conflict’ for understanding youth sociality. In doing so, I call attention to the limitations of current youth multiculture research, which commonly assumes a racism-conviviality binary a priori. If we are to work against racism, scholars and educators require more flexible and expansive conceptual tools that engage seriously with youth perspectives and young people’s situated rules of play in high school sociality.