Marginalised Youth, Street Cultures and Mediation

What makes mediation with young people in conditions of vulnerability successful? What are the underlying pitfalls and dilemmas with respect to young people’s agency and their structural conditions? What can we learn cross-culturally from diverse experiences, such as a hip hop project as a mediation tool against violence in Medellín (Feixa et al. 2022), or youth agriculture cooperatives as an alternative for Palestinian Authority neoliberal economic policies, and colonization in Palestine (Musleh, 2019), the empowered role of biological and fictitious mothers in Morocco (Touhtou 2021) or the creation of support networks for unaccompanied foreign minors led by racialized young people in Barcelona (Soler-i-Martí, Ballesté, and Feixa 2021)? Interventions focusing on mediation with young people in vulnerable conditions, including youth street groups, particularly from minority origin, have proliferated in the past decades. Nevertheless, critical reflections coming from youth studies have apparently lagged behind. This session aims to bridge this gap, and contribute to a debate on the evolution, scopes and limits of mediation processes targeting youth groups in a wide range of geographical, sociocultural and political contexts, embedded in present neoliberal capitalism and its varied forms of youth governance (Feixa, Leccardi and Ninal 2016, Muncie and Hughes 2002). The session is open to theory-driven, but empirically grounded contributions from a broad diversity of scholars from a wide range of geographic settings (both Global South and North), with the ultimate goal of positioning the central issue into mainstream academic debates of youth studies.