A Global Generation? Youth Studies in a Postcolonial World

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Philipps, Joschka:
A Global Generation? Youth Studies in a Postcolonial World.
In: Societies. Bd. 8 (2018) Heft 1 . - 14.
ISSN 2075-4698
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8010014

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Abstract

Today’s young people navigate a world that becomes simultaneously more interconnected and less capable of silencing long-standing inequities. What analytical perspectives does a sociology of youth and generations require in such a context? This paper makes two suggestions: to conceptualize generations as global rather than regionally bound (cf. Mannheim 1928) and to transgress the colonial bifurcation of academia between sociology for the so-called ‘modern’ world and area studies and anthropology for the so-called ‘developing’ world. Drawing from a large body of literature on African youth that has hitherto remained unheeded in youth studies, as well as from postcolonial theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea and Uganda, I argue that academic representations of African youth constitute a particularly insightful repertoire for investigating the methodological challenges and potentials of a global sociological perspective on youth.