A Global Generation? Youth Studies in a Postcolonial World

Joschka Philipps
Additional contact information
Joschka Philipps: Centre for African Studies Basel, Rheinsprung 21, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

Societies, 2018, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-18

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.

Keywords: youth; generation; sociology; epistemology; postcolonial studies; Guinea; Uganda; Africa; globalization; Mannheim; Karl (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/1/14/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/1/14/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:8:y:2018:i:1:p:14-:d:133701

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().