Globalizing the Streets: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment

Not since the 1960s have the activities of resistance among lower- and working-class youth caused such anxiety in the international community. Yet today the dispossessed are responding to the challenges of globalization and its methods of social control. The contributors to this volume examine the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth, their clashes with law enforcement and criminal codes, their fight for social, political, and cultural capital, and their efforts to achieve recognition and empowerment. Essays adopt the vantage point of those whose struggle for social solidarity, self-respect, and survival in criminalized or marginalized spaces. In doing so, they contextualize and humanize the seemingly senseless actions of these youths, who make visible the class contradictions, social exclusion, and rituals of psychological humiliation that permeate their everyday lives.

Michael Flynn, PhD, is associate director of the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York, and an assistant professor of Psychology at York College and CUNY. He is the co-editor (with Charles B. Strozier) of "Genocide, War and Human Survival," "Trauma and Self," and "The Year 2000: Essays on the End." He is the editor of "The Second Nuclear Age: Political and Psychocultural Perspectives." His research interests include the psychological and political economy of urban violence; the psychological effects of living in a nuclearized world; literary, autobiographical, and psychohistorical approaches to the self and trauma; and the public and media role of the psychologist. David Brotherton, PhD, is the Chair of the Sociology Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Dr. Brotherton has been researching youth subcultures for more than a dozen years and co-founded the Street Organization Project in 1997. For the last few years he has been organizing annual international academic/practitioner/community conferences on street youth and is currently focusing on youth gangs and delinquency. He is the co-editor of Gangs and Society, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (both from Columbia), and the upcoming Keeping Out the Other (Columbia).