Presentation: Youth, aesthetics, and politics: a research agenda for the challenges of the 21st century

Abstract

Youth cultures and their aesthetic interventions are important for understanding young people as political subjects. Encouraged by digital devices, they promote economic and symbolic exchanges that challenge state control and subalternity imposed on them, especially when it comes to disadvantaged and racialized youth. In a century of uncertainty, the aesthetic and political interventions of young people are crucial for examining the profound changes we are experiencing regarding sociabilities, identities, affections, consumption, social inequalities,the climate crisis and pandemic, resistance, and artistic-activist mobilizations. This article addresses these themes from the perspective of the social sciences, particularly anthropology, in dialog with the ethnographic research of this dossier’s authors. It is introductory article, aiming to highlight trends and hypotheses regarding the transformations in youth ways of doing things, in a period where the hyper-aesthetics of everyday life and the expansion of digital technologies have reintroduced the language of politics back into other symbolic domains, affecting young people’s imaginaries, visibility, and agency. While art and aesthetics have generated new ways of doing politics, it is equally important to consider the processes of domination and control over the means that enable the production and circulation of youth creativity. Additionally, we enphasize the contributions of the six articles gathered here, whose rich ethnographic analyses problematize the triad of youth, aesthetics, and politics from the perspective of subjectivities and lived experiences.