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Young People Getting By: Contextualizing Everyday Practices of Agency among Moroccan Youth
Abstract
Following 2011 uprisings, states, media, and international organizations discourses on youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have intensified in two binary directions; one as a group that presents a threat to the security and fabric of the state, potential denizens of unemployment, delinquency or extremism. The other, as a group that constitutes an untapped potential, the hope for addressing the ills and flaws of their societies. This in turn, on the one hand, depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances, on the other hand, it glorifies their abilities to contest their life circumstances without taking into account the complex contexts they confront. While the structural realities are surely real and sometimes paralyzing, youth deploy several tactics, strategies and subversive accommodations to get by. This paper explores whether, and how young men and women in Morocco exercise their agency in their everyday lives. The data draws on the findings from a field study focusing on the agential potentials and challenges of young individuals from an underprivileged neighborhood of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca as they describe their everyday paths to becoming. Focusing on the differences of their expressions of agency across various spaces in accordance with their socio-economic and cultural contexts, this paper analyzes the strategies and tactics they deploy to that end. Through discussing the notion of getting by, this paper challenges the mainstream conceptions of youth agency as "empowerment," resistance and freedom, and instead suggests that the aspirations of youth, as well as their everyday struggles, needs to be contextualized based on the material conditions in which they are living in, through their voices.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None