Youth e(scapes) : Introduction. In: Navigating youth, generating adulthood

Source: Navigating youth, generating adulthood: social becoming in an african context / Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas, Henrik E. Vigh (eds) Nordiska Afrikainstitutet

Since the early 1970s many African youths have aspired to come of age in often volatile and precarious circumstances and have had to shape their lives and strategies accordingly in their attempt to generate meaningful lives for themselves. One of the primary goals of this book is to present a handful of detailed ethnographic descriptions of these 'youthscapes' in order to further our knowledge of the social possibilities, experiences and fantasies of youth in Africa. Building on extensive fieldwork with children and youth in Africa all the contributions to the book demonstrate how the extended case method is able to illustrate and analyse both young people's daily life and dreams as well as the social, economic and political environments they are set in. However, although in vogue, the pictures that the metaphor of'scapes' conveys - as a solid surface of enactment - do not always fit the often volatile or fluid political structurations, communities and societies within which we are researching youth on the African continent. The bracketed 'E' in the title of this introductory chapter thus hints at the second primary focus of the book, namely the way that young people move and shape the social environments in which their lives are set. It refers to the way young people in Africa reconfigure 'geographies of exclusion and inclusion' (De Boeck and Honwana 2005:1), the way they seek to escape confining structures and navigate economic, social and political turmoil (Vigh 2003; 2006).