Mobility and Young People
Brock University
May 27, 2014
Website: http://arcyp.ca
Mobility and young people: taken together, these terms produce both anxiety and possibility. On the move in the world, young people are widely perceived to be in danger or at risk. Yet young people’s mobility may also be aspirational or generative, as adventure, transformation, good fortune, and border-crossings of all kinds can effect changes in status and re-orientations of consciousness and identity. Further, the narratives circulated by and for those youth are themselves subject to revisions once they, too, have been put in motion. And the very thought of young people’s mobility puts us in the realms of affect and embodiment, of ability and impairment. Affect raises questions about the emotional landscape of the young people so moved, how young people are deployed in a variety of media to move adults, and the ways in which we map and describe our attachments to those cultural objects we find to be moving. The body in motion invites us to think of
childhood in terms of kinesthetics, choreography, and ideologies and architectures of enablement, while the very idea of mobile youth asks us to consider spatio-temporal relationships: how young people move through space and time, measuring time by space and vice versa. All of these ways of thinking about mobility in the context of youth cultures take various narrative, political, aesthetic, and conceptual forms— narratives that are, themselves, subject to movement and therefore subject to revision, reconsideration, subversion, and change. Mobility itself might be seen to generate new youth
movements—opening up ways to think about the cultures of young people and for young people to move our sense of culture.
ARCYP invites proposals for papers (or panels) that consider any and all facets of young people’s mobility/movement: Topics to be considered under the theme of “mobility and young people” may include (but are not limited to):
• Danger, Risk and Safety
• Dancing Children
• Border Crossings and Home(land) Security Systems
• Narrative Subversions and Revisions
• Movement as Performance/Choreography
• Narratives of Upward/Downward Mobility
• Transformations through Mobility/Mobilizing Transformations
• Mobile Audiences and Audiences of Mobility
• Temporalities of Youth
• Movement as Affect and Affect as “Being Moved”
• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
• Capitalism’s Children
• Immigration and Generations
• Ability and Impairment
• Kinesthetics or Kin-aesthetics
• Mapping Youth Cultures
• Circuits of Childhood
• Mobilizing Youth Polities
• Digital Movement and Mobile Communication
Following the instructions at http://accute.ca/joint-
(1) A 300- to 500-word proposal, without identifying marks;
(2) A 100-word abstract;
(3) 50-word biographical statement; and
(4) A Proposal Submissions Information Sheet.
If you are submitting a panel proposal, please include:
(1) A 700-word panel description, plus 300-word abstracts for each paper in the panel;
(2) A 150-word panel abstract;
(3) 50-word biographical statements for each member of the panel; and
(4) A Proposal Submissions Information Sheet, including contact information for all panel participants.
NOTES: You must be a current member of ARCYP or ACCUTE to submit to this session. Rejected submissions will not be moved into the general “pool” of ACCUTE submissions.