Gigs, Hustles and Hope: Using Precarity and Capitals for Global Youth Studies

The concepts of precarity and capitals help to engage with how youth make a living globally, widening the youth studies gaze to circumstances in diverse contexts. Precarity takes on diverse forms that are relative across time and space. It is a relational concept, illuminating contextually dependent uncertainty and vulnerability. Precarity illuminates the situation of youth in comparison to previous generations and vis-a-vis contemporary peers globally. Capital refers to the production of value systemically through capitalism and in the social/cultural sense, leveraged through status, sets of resources and networked, historically contingent relationships.

I describe recent changes to global capitalism, before showing how they have affected young people’s livelihoods, with both similarities and differences between the global north and south. Alterations to forms and locations of capitalist production, advances in ICT and shifting global monetary practices have disrupted the viability of universal employment with social protection, producing a range of precarities in the global north and south, where urbanisation and industrialisation have played out differently. In the global north, where industrialisation happened earlier, the current millennial generation is the first to be materially worse off than their parents. While they are better educated than their forebears, their asset base, employment rates and earning power have diminished. Limited industrialisation with attendant opportunities for wage work did happen in parts of the global south, but has not materialised en masse, with the vast majority of youth in the global south (and therefore globally) making a living in the informal sector.

Using the example of work/livelihoods/income generation I argue that a global youth studies primarily needs to broaden its gaze to interpret circumstances for youth globally, while we simultaneously broaden our conceptual repertoire to include ideas developed in the global south.