Summary Of Youth Engage The City And Global Culture

The article “Youth Engage the City and Global Culture” written by Rhoda H. Halpern and Suzanne Scheld, focuses on roles that youth play in shaping late global capitalism (2007, 169 While stating that “youth take on responsibilities beyond their material”, (Halpern and Scheld 2007, p.175) it is never discussed in detail exactly what these responsibilities are, or how they differ from American to Senegalese youth, the subject the article claims to be studying. Therefore, this article seems to pose more questions than it answers. This is not to say the article does not go into any detail whatsoever, just not enough to make a case for their thesis. I would venture to argue that instead of the role that children and youth play within global capitalism, it focuses primarily on the role of a child’s autonomy and the fact that they are able to engage with the world in a similar way as adults

They state that in neighbourhoods composed of low-income families of colour, colourful murals line the alleyways. “Murals are not dependent on huge sums of money” (Sieber and Corderio and Ferro 2012, p. 264), the article states, “they are products of collective, grassroots action” (Sieber and Corderio and Ferro 2012, p. 266). The murals are a product of a business, stemming from the agency of youth creating their own cultural and economic structures outside the contemporary system. They often “address social critique” or are “assertions of ethnic pride” (Sieber and Corderio and Ferro 2012, p. 266), proving that the youth are impacted by and in turn, impact greatly the world around them. Similar to the subject in “She’s Mad Real” (LaBennett, 2011), the youth in these communities are creating their own culture in a world that does not provide them with