of urban youth worlds in Montreal, balancing the representation of voices and perspectives from within and across them. This is why, in the following chapters, we meet youths from different neighbourhoods, variously racialized and privileged, and learn from the distributed agency of various human and non‐human actors.
We individually, or with students, engaged in various ethnographic observations using diverse methods ranging from the use of mobile, multimedia tools (video, GPS, biometric) and participatory research to more classical interviews and anthropological immersion. Our ethnographic approach has sought to engage with these actors as ‘epistemic partners’ (Holmes and Marcus 2008), recognizing that, in an age of complex interactions and interconnectedness, ‘members of a community no longer see themselves as stewards of a specific worldview that is rooted in a fixed territory, but as agents capable of upholding and modifying the residual forms of their cultural identity as it interacts with forces from remote and unknown parts of the world’ (Papastergiadis 2014, p. 21).
Our ethnographic approach involves, through this process, a posture of aesthetic sensitivity that cultivates open‐mindedness and receptivity, meaning, in part, that we observe with all bodily senses and cultivate engagement in the urban youth worlds we experience. This posture involves using reflexive empathic imagination to make sense of others’ experience of the world – or, when we are not able to engage physically in their experiences, using emotional intelligence to learn from emotional cues and consider what we can sense, what touches us but we cannot immediately name or recognize. In such cases, time is needed to let feelings and sensations ‘sink’ or ‘settle’ in, to create dialogues for generating meaning.
As we became more engaged in these worlds through generative webs of relationships and the co‐constitution of fields of aesthetic perception (where ‘sensations and affect co‐mingle’; see Ioanes 2017), a theory of aesthetic relations came to make sense as a way of illuminating in contrastive and complementary ways the political process that we are witnessing being transformed. The ethnographies therein exemplify dimensions and modes of acting politically through aesthetics, rather than verifying the argument we make. While we focus particularly on seduction and attraction as modes of aesthetic political relations, we do not favour cognitive or noncognitive approaches to aesthetics of urban environments and everyday life, nor do we gesture towards an overarching unifying notion of aesthetic experience and aesthetic practice. We rather let the ethnographies express the various dimensions and ways of acting politically, aesthetically, that we noticed and came to better understand in interaction and dialogue with research participants and colleagues.
In this regard, we have chosen to write through ethnographic material because we see ethnographic description as an act of translation. In their critical work on ‘writing culture’, Clifford and Marcus (1986) break from the ethnographical tradition of the Chicago School that aimed to represent lived experience ‘as it really is’. Instead, they see ethnography as a writing practice involving polyvocality, dialogue, and intertextuality. The ethnographer, they argue, creates affective fictions of the world they describe. This is what we wanted to achieve by writing these ethnographic chapters collectively. We, Julie‐Anne and Joëlle, occupy distinct positionalities in each chapter, depending on the youth world we are entering and on the methods and organization of the research projects. We conceived this book as a sounding board for modalities of political action and expression which do not make the headlines in public debates or academic texts, but which nonetheless transform the global urban worlds in which we live, affecting us by changing our political subjectivities at infra‐empirical and precognitive levels.
Introducing each ethnography is a drawing of a situation described therein. We conceive these images as entry points into the youth urban world analysed in the chapters using artistic rather than scientific language. These situations were illustrated by Lukas Beeckman based on his reading of the chapters, providing a different aesthetic sensibility by which for the reader to feel these youth urban worlds. Furthermore, a footnote at the beginning of each chapter briefly explains the type of ethnographic material used. Consistently in all these ethnographies, we presented ourselves as researchers from the VESPA. Julie‐Anne is Full Professor and thus occupies a different social position than Joëlle, who was a Master’s student at the time of research and writing. It is somewhat awkward to write ethnographic descriptions in the third person, but we did not really see how to do otherwise. If, for instance, Joëlle is the ethnographer in a chapter, she writes speaking of herself in the third person so that the reader can identify who is actually physically with the young people they encounter in the book. As this is a piece of collaborative writing between the two of us, Julie‐Anne has intervened in the chapters Joëlle initially wrote, and vice and versa. In other words, we wanted to avoid individually signing chapters and to freely intervene and connect our ethnographic materials. This process was enriched by reading research reports and articles produced with other students and research professionals who have come to work and study at the VESPA.
The Organization of the Book
Chapter 1 offers an overview of the historical urban context in Montreal since the 1960s. We strive to first provide a larger and more detailed rendering of Montreal’s urban feel by discussing some of the elements that are reciprocally affecting politics and urban youth worlds lived in this city. We then discuss Montreal’s place in the global urban political moment of the 1960s and 1970s and highlight how, at one end of a historical protest cycle, this moment reveals changing relations to time, space, and alternative rationalities that contribute to the affirmation of an urban logic of action alongside a nationalist state‐centred logic of action.
In Chapter 2, we enter into the urban political world of racialized youth in the neighbourhoods of Little Burgundy and Saint‐Michel. We explore how an individual becomes a political subject through daily encounters and situations of negotiation with the state (represented in this chapter through the figures of police officer, school teacher, and social worker). In the context of public debates around street gangs, racial profiling, and radicalization, we argue that analysing these youth worlds as ‘anti‐social’ or ‘at‐risk’ blinds us to what is being constructed on a daily basis. It shows that racialized youth are politically active beyond debates and representations. The ‘universe of operation’ that characterizes their neighbourhoods requires that we adopt what Simone calls an epistemology of Blackness. With material such as accounts of their daily movements in the city, collective cartographies of their neighbourhood, song lyrics and poems written by the youths themselves, and video vignettes they co‐produced with us, the chapter illustrates how racialized youths act through movement, seduction, and distributed agency.
In Chapter 3, we explore the emotional and spatialized experience of youths who participated in the 2012 student strikes. While this ethnography focuses on a more explicitly political event, we do not analyse it using the traditional sociological tools that focus on power relations, strategies, and organization. Instead, we work with emotional mapping, life narratives, biometric data, and video showing how transforming conceptions of time, space, and rationality in the contemporary urban era produce new forms of political action. Through an analysis of students’ urban trajectories and their emotionally charged places, we reflect on the effective reach of different modalities of power. Important figures such as the red square and Anarchopanda allow us to reflect on distributed agency and the negation of leadership. The sound of pots and pans and the vibration of ecstatic screaming under the Berri tunnel are used to show how these aesthetic experiences have changed the students as much as the streets of Montreal.
Chapter 4 draws us into the urban political world of beginning and aspiring urban farmers on the terrain of City Farm School, an urban agriculture training programme operating from within marginal and interstitial spaces at Concordia University. Through this ethnography, we follow urban farmers to explore how embodied experiences of the spatialities
