The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation aims to broaden the scope of civil protest theorization to include youth and children who seem to be missing from most research on the topic. Aitken’s interest in activism performed by children and youth stems especially from their ability to surprise and disrupt the established social order, which has been only to a certain extent incorporated into their forming identity. Such activism is performed in material and geographic environments that are not only sites and contexts of social and individual activity, but are also meaningfully active components in the process of emotional expressiveness. “If spaces are thought of as events and events encourage change, then complex relations bring spaces and people together to become other and, perhaps, create hope” (1). This project is based on an amalgam of thematic conceptualization anchored in several ethnographic fieldwork periods in different places around the globe. Aitken refers to many ethnographers and social thinkers throughout the book. The most recurring among them are Agamben, Deleuze, Grosz, Guattari, and Žižek. He also engages in debates with classic scholars of childhood including Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and Piaget. Much of his political criticism is related to neo-liberal systems of resource allocation within society. His alliance with feminist theoreticians derives from the fact that within the globalized modernist project women and children have been mostly excluded from affecting powerful positions due to their “irrationality” (71-2). Aitken connects youth activism and social transformation to concepts of desire, affordance, ethnopoetics, figured worlds, effective ecologies, and bio-politics. His quest to understand how marginalized young people express and protest their emotional, civil, and spatial confinement takes him back to his extensive and diverse fieldwork experiences.
The book works through examples of ethnographic studies from various projects since the 1990s. The children and youth whose stories the book conveys are deprived of some socially expected basic need. He discusses paralyzed children of a homeless youth project in San Diego, children with disabilities stemming from cerebral palsy, dispossessed rural villagers in China, schoolyard experiences of minorities in Washington and elsewhere, underprivileged public school system students in Chile, illegal Mexican immigrants in San Diego, and the Izbrisani (erased) ethnic minority in Slovenia. In Aitken’s view, the evidence presented strengthens his argument, because if even the people that society views as its weakest members can exert agency, or in Aitken’s preferred term, radical ethical acts (43), then so can more advantageous youth. However, his examples might be interpreted otherwise, that youth in general are less interested in protest unless they are in a dire social condition that demands their active involvement in creating a sense of wellbeing for themselves. Focusing on such informants, and joining them together along the expected feature of disable-ness narrows the scope of the theoretical concepts that the book strives to prove.
Several innovative methodologies and interpretations are used in this work. Aitken lets the children in San Diego photograph their environments and create collages of their perception of life; browses Google maps of their homes with the villagers in China; and reviews the role of social media in the Chilean protests. An outstanding quality of the book is the manner of incorporating creative expression of the informants in the scholarly prose. Aitken re-contextualizes the words uttered by the children and the photographs that they took as poetic. He writes the words in short lines instead of prose, although most of his informants did not pronounce their thoughts in a manner that they considered as poems. The division of the prose into short lines seems to be done by Aitken himself in order to emphasize the poetic qualities of these texts. He discusses the photographs as artistic images rather than mere documentations of the children’s perspectives on life. The reader might reflect on the researcher’s involvement in this rendering of the informants’ words and photographs. Would the children involved in this process accept the interpretation of the author? Reflexivity is not lacking in the book, but is less pronounced in relation to the author’s choice of line breaks and photograph interpretation.
The book could also use better editing that would eliminate typos and several unnecessary repetitions. But these are minor shortcomings.
This book is an enthusiastic treatise on the roles and abilities of young people in evoking hope in hopeless conditions of emotional suffering resulting from social and cultural marginalization. The eclectic array of fieldwork accounts collected over more than twenty years serves well the stated goal of this research account, to demonstrate how “young people are central to global spatial-economic restructuring and cultural transformation” (170).
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[Review length: 759 words • Review posted on January 12, 2016]