helenmaybewriting

[helenmaybewriting]

...We’re missing something

- ‘Separation’, W. S. Merwin

These thoughts started as a couple of tweets, and grew. They are not fully formed but I am profoundly discomforted by the ways in which the dead are (or are not) being talked about in all our leaders’ plans and public discourses about roadmaps ‘out’ of this crisis, and the (unstated) implications of their absence. So here are some rough, ill-formed thoughts for now.

“Lets face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” 

-Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, 23

I’ve been trying to work (as we all are), at home, while simultaneously checking in on friends and family, building new, smaller routines. I’ve been trying to stay away from commenting on the current context, because who has words right now? Yet I haven’t been able to get a question out of my head; its been floating around, running across the tip of my tongue, looking for an answer. Who will mourn the dead? Or, perhaps, why won’t we mourn the dead?

The death toll globally, now in the hundreds of thousands, continues to rise. Yet I am struck by the absence of mourning. On my twitter timeline I scroll past tweets announcing the deaths of family members—‘My brilliant dad died of COIVD this morning’… ‘My grandma succumbed, we couldn’t be there’… ‘Here is a photo of my mother before I was born, she’s gone and I miss her so much’… But still, this mourning, these stories are small, personal, isolated. Swallowed up in the noise of my twitter timeline. Photos circulate of middle-of-the-night army convoys in northern Italy carrying the immense volume of dead to neighbouring morgues, aerial shots of mass graves on Hart’s Island in New York, thousands of families collecting funerary urns in China. The dead are present. And yet they are not.  So, I have to ask, why are we not mourning collectively? Where is the shared grief? The commemoration of names, and lives, and stories?

Commemoration can be jingoistic, and nationalistic; it can be perverted for political ends. Yet commemoration also holds us together, pierces our self obsession, recognises something bigger is going on. 

When the towers collapsed in New York in 2001 you couldn’t escape the smiling holiday snaps of victims, hour-long specials about their lives and their deaths. When MH17 crashed, Victoria’s largest church filled with mourners. Is this crisis too large? Are we too separated? Or is it easier not to confront the reality when the future is so uncertain.

Shut in our houses the news drones about economic recovery, measuring the dead in the same graphic images, numbers soaring up in inverse to the plummet of the stock market. But there are no people in these stories. They are numbers, and the  tallying obscures the fleshy reality of what is being counted.

Reflecting on the American war story and repatriation of the dead, Kandida Purnell argues that ‘national binding in grief’ can only happen if together bodies feel an intensification of emotion (2018, 159). I don’t want to compare the dead from COVID to war dead—for many reasons, some beautifully laid out by Cynthia Enloe—but Purnell’s work on war dead demonstrates the impetus in seeing and speaking of the dead can provide towards collective commemoration and accounting.

Judith Butler notes that ‘many people think grief is privatised’ and depoliticised, but Butler argues that ‘it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’ (2004: 22). It brings attention to the ‘we’, the relational, collective constitution of our human condition.

An absence of grief, a lack of mourning, means those relational ties are not felt, they are not made present. How different might people’s behaviours be, under lockdown and as lockdowns lift, if they felt not selfish frustration at being confined to home, but if confinement was understood as a relational act of solidarity motivated by engaging in and with grieving and memorialisation of those who have died because of this virus? An act of conscious care. 

Sara Ahmed (2004) argues that stories of pain must be heard for people to be moved by others’ suffering. There is an absence of these stories in mainstream outlets, although they circulate on twitter. How might we be moved if we allowed ourselves to sit with others’ pain? What does it mean that we are so interested in getting back to the pub, to visit mum for Mothers day, to celebrate the outcome of another enormous loss of life with VE day celebrations in the UK for example, that we don’t think about the potential deaths caused by our actions?

When lockdowns lift before the curve has flattened, it is a signal that some lives matter less than others; this is invisible and unstated but present. Again, in the realm of war, Maja Zehfuss points to the particular position of soldiers “whose lives are grievable [as per Butler] and yet put at risk in order, apparently, to protect other lives” (2009: 419). Again, healthcare workers, school teachers, public transport drivers, cleaners, are not soldiers (and it speaks to the paucity of our analyses that it is in war we look for these sacrifices and not in everyday life, and I’m reflecting too, on my own vocabulary in looking for spaces to speak of grief). Yet if you call them frontline workers, the battlefield is invoked, and their risk is rendered intelligible—to protect others. On twitter, I saw someone observe that when we talk about going back to ‘normal’ we are talking about low-paid workers working to allow others to stay home, but with more comforts. The politics of this disease and its violence—as others have noted—is racialised, gendered, and classed  (and globally differentiated ). More war analogies: who are we willing to sacrifice?

I don’t want to re-appropriate Butler’s conception of ‘grievable life’ entirely out of the context/s in which she presents it (replete with the complexities of uneven global power relations, and a persistent imperial gaze), however, the idea of grievability is profoundly valuable here, because to be able to grieve a death, according to Butler, you have to be able to imagine it as a life that should have been lived, and that requires a recognition of the fundamental sociality of our lives, and our bodies.

“But if we are social beings and our survival depends upon a recognition of interdependency…then it is not as an isolated and bounded being that I survive, but as one whose boundary exposes me to others in ways that are voluntary and involuntary (sometimes at once), an exposure that is the condition of sociality and survival alike” (2010: 54).

I’m not sure I’m saying that those who have died from COVID19 are ungrievable lives, but their deaths are being rendered invisible, unmarked, except in exponential log-graphs. If they can’t be conceived of, they can’t be mourned. In whose interest is it that we do not mourn; in whose interest is it that we lose sight of the social constitution of ourselves?

In this ‘easing restrictions’ and ‘lifting stay home orders’ can be justified in terms of the economy and ‘returning to normal’, ignoring the cost at which this will come. Because some lives are more grievable than others. In places in recent weeks this differentiated value of life is explicit. News outlets and ‘journalists’ make this claim explicitly. Others justify their lockdown-violating/bending behaviour because they are not in a ‘risk’ group, implicitly and explicitly at times, arguing that those with risks and vulnerabilities are worth less, that their deaths would be acceptable if others could ‘return’ to normal life. I don’t know even where to start in trying to convince people they should care about others.

Those who have died are not the ‘glorious’ dead of a foreign war, but rather the shameful dead whose deaths highlight the failings of the political class to act quickly enough, or out of anything other than self preservation. Lack of mourning is not passive, but predicated on active choices. Deaths are hidden, obfuscated, non- or mis- counted. Ungrievable deaths are not just unmarked, but are ‘unmarkable’. They ‘disappear into the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds’ (Butler, 2004, 35). And the public discourse reifies capitalist production that values labour over lives. It doesn’t have to be like this. As Arundhati Roy described, in a much shared piece last month, the pandemic is a portal, a gateway. We can imagine a different world. But to do so we have to make visible the deliberate strategies that try and justify and minimise the deaths of loved ones, near and far.

Roxani Krystalli, in a beautiful tiny letter last year reflecting on the burning of Notre Dame, the attacks in Sri Lanka, and noticing birdsong, called for us to ‘ask questions of our empathy and its failures’. An attentiveness to absences that would serve us well in the current context where so much of the suffering is occurring behind walls and doors and bodies.

Early in the lockdowns an text-image circulated on social media (I cannot find it again as I go to type this, thanks to the ephemerality of Instagram and twitter - EDIT, I found it, thanks to brilliant friend India Allender, posted below) naming the empty streets not as something to fear but as representative of a radical act of love. It is out of love for others—for those we know, and those we do not—that we remove ourselves from public places, restrict our movements. This is the shared vulnerability, the fundamental sociality of our embodied selves, that Butler talks about.

Yet as we move in public and private discourse from ‘we’ statements to ‘I’ statements—I want to go out, I want to see my friends, I am not high risk—we lose sight of that collectivity, and the emotional resonance, as Purnell argues, required for collective commemoration, dissipates. This violent teleological drive to reopen society is predicated on a refusal to acknowledge the loss we’ve all suffered, collectively. 

Perhaps a concerted efforts to see the dead, to mourn them, is an ethical responsibility as Butler notes, and it allows a reclaiming of that collective space, a willingness to stay apart, stay home, until we can all be safe.

 - post I originally saw on Instagram as a text-only post, that has been printed and pasted to the side of a building.

[helenmaybewriting]

On Academic Precarity as Ongoing Anxiety

I’ve been given reason to think about making academic precarity visible lately. I’m applying for a big early-career grant but am outside the eligible period. I am fortunate that there is a way to seek an ‘exemption’ to the rules and ask to account for a period of time that meets certain requirements as a ‘career interruption’. For some this is children or carer responsibilities, for others it is illness. For some it is working in other sectors or not working for various reasons. For me, I am claiming a period in my life post-PhD where I worked sessionally in teaching roles at multiple universities and did not hold a research position. I need to collect and tabulate proof for this period. It must be made visible in very particular ways: a neat table that outlines the reason for career interruption, the time that can be claimed, the relevant dates. I’m asked to contain this messy, precarious, anxious time of my life in a neat grid.

The bureaucratic demands seem simple: account for it, tally it up. And don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful there is a way to recognise this interruption, disruption, abruption. However, I’ve encountered so many confused faces in trying to progress the process, as if accounting for sessional work is an aberration they’ve never come across. Sessional staff teach anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of students at Australian universities, yet my requests seemed alien to many.  

I have persisted in my accounting, feeling the anxiety of precarity rise again in my chest. Someone said to me it was nothing to be ashamed of. I replied: I’m not ashamed of it, I am exhausted by it.  

How long was the period of time from the award of my doctorate to getting an ongoing job? Already this request narrows the scope, as if precarity starts from award and not submission or before. I was already precarious when I finally wore the floppy hat. Yet here, the form asks for an accounting for this time—from award to ongoing job—in days, weeks and months. But my body remembers it as the blur of ill-defined time characterised by sounds that hiss and sigh in my memory: sessional, scramble, stress, yes and yes and yes and yes again because it is the week before semester and I don’t have enough hours to pay rent yet. Struggle, survival, collapse are words that hiss and sigh also. What is the FTE of a period that is experienced and remembered as the always-just-audible hum of the anxiety of precarity? Account for it. Give it form.

This is the period of my endless agreeability, of ‘yes I can take just the 8am and the 4pm tutorial that day’. The period of learning to be a chameleon, of ‘yes I can teach IR/development studies/anthropology of gender/sports sociology/peace studies/global governance’. The period of befriending the public transport app that helped me trace crazed patterns between universities and learning the locations of the best cafés where I could grab lunch as I swapped discipline hats and institutional languages so my students would believe my claimed authority.

This is the period of snatched time to try and write between tutorials while I could use an institution’s library access, because publication was the only way out of this but my schedule left no real time to do it. The period that included the semester with 280 essays to mark, of phone calls with incredulous university IT because I couldn’t remember which institutional password I needed to get in to this particular one of my seven email addresses, of making dinner plans with friends and asking if we could go to the cheap delicious Asian place where I could eat a whole meal rather than the nice restaurant where I’d eat an entrée as if I wasn’t actually hungry. This is the period of my always-availability accompanied by always-exhaustion; of recognising myself in articles about stress and burnout that I would read on the train between cramming in prep for the next tutorial. This is the period of my endless professional flexibility even as the stress of the precarity fixed the muscles in my shoulders in to (still) untangle-able knots.  This is the period of “non-research employment not concurrent with research employment”. Account for it. Note it down.

The neoliberal academy, that runs on this sessional labour, works in subtle and overt ways to erase it too. Sessional academics are expendable, replaceable, not ‘real’ staff, despite the institution’s dependence on their work. This year I’ve had to chase down five universities to get them to write letters outlining the periods I worked for them and confirming my work was teaching-only—confirming explicitly that they gave me no support for research during my employment. This is my ‘evidence’, codifying on various letterheads my experience of uncertain, sporadic labour. While several universities have been very helpful and quick, making this process a little smoother, others have not. Not through maliciousness, but through the grinding, churning practices of bureaucracy and the inefficiencies of systems not set up to serve people like me.

One university couldn’t find evidence of my working for them in 2013, telling me it was ‘such a long time ago’. One university only allowed me to request a HR job logged in to their intra-net, the woman on the phone for general enquiries when I called to explain the problem kept suggesting I use my current username. Several universities wrote letters detailing the 12 to 18-month period I apparently worked for them, the period in which I learned only now I remained in their system in some manner (even though my login access was cut off precisely at the end of semester). I’ve now had to supplement these letters with contracts I’ve kept to demonstrate it was only 13 weeks of hourly-work, not a year-long sessional contract. In my neat table, a list of ‘no’s fill a column titled “was the employment research related”. Account for it. Make it present.

I am not sure I will ever not feel a residual anxiety, lodged in my throat, from this time. But having to tabulate it, to fit it in to neat boxes, to repeatedly note it was “non-research related employment not concurrent with research employment”, to calculate a patchwork of start and finish dates, to accumulate evidence of the precarity, has meant I can hear that hum again and taste the stress as bitterness on my tongue. The sounds, tastes, feelings can’t be accounted for in a 200 word ‘justification statement’ in this neat document, but I try and articulate the difficulty while sounding professional and capable; further contortions.

In this process of accounting, I’ve been asked to ‘remove duplicates’ in my record because, I am told, I can’t claim the same period twice. I’ve had to again make visible the hum and bitterness, by the act of explaining once again that I wasn’t trying to claim multiple jobs as separate time periods, but rather to give a full account of my employment as requested which included working multiple jobs, simultaneously. I can feel the act of putting it in to words working to bring the blurred time in to focus in hard edges and anxious spikes in my chest. This work did overlap, but it was not duplicates; this work was a complete list of my employment, yet still barely covered my half of our living expenses. Account for it. Point it out.

That period also holds bright memories. Memories of the yeasty smell of zaatar-top pizzas from our local shops in Melbourne, and the sweet taste of carafes of wine and gossip shared with one of my dearest girlfriends; of warm rooms in winter full of boardgames and laughter, and cut grass in lazy summer afternoons sprawled with friends across a backyard. It also forged friendships across shared experiences: the Friday morning early-career writing group that was a refuge and a delight, of peers who didn’t know they were mentors but for whom I will always be grateful, and unlooked-for generosity in offering office space or other necessities when someone had slightly more security than others.

Precarity and anxiety are not totalising but they are overwhelming. I am not shamed by them, but they are exhausting.

I feel, in writing it down that I am being required to make claims for legitimacy, to assert that I belong here. Precarity and anxiety run the risk of becoming the background hum and the overlooked bitter taste. The tactics of universities trick us in to thinking we are alone with this, but although the details may vary, the story is the same for many.

In writing this, I recognise that my form and experience of precarity is its own thing; that other people’s experiences will differ. I have a supportive partner. I don’t have children. My partner, however, started doing a PhD the year I finished mine. We had moved away from my established potential-employment networks for him to take up his PhD. My precarity was made more difficult through particular health challenges, and other personal circumstances. I write here from my own experience. I write with acknowledgement of my relative privileged position of having an ongoing job now, when so many clever driven precarious peers do not. I write with anxiety and trepidation about sharing these experiences. I write in apprehension that someone will tell me my experience isn’t as bad as I feel it to have been, that other people have it worse, that this is a rite of passage for all academics, that I should get over it. My anxiety about sharing proves the point about needing to share. The invisibility of this work, and how we write it into or out of our narratives, works to indivdiualise our experiences and isolate us.

I think in accounting for my interruption, my period of “non-research related employment not concurrent with research employment”, moving from the blur to the boxes forced me to describe the reality of that period, and that has been deeply discomforting. But writing this reflection, and naming the precarity and its attendant feelings, is a way of making visible these structures. It is a way of acknowledging that my survival of that period fundamentally depended on the support of others. I don’t have magical solutions, but after this rollercoaster of paperwork and bureaucracy count me in for the barricades if anyone is up for a revolution. Until then, know that while the institutions may not care—about precarity, burnout, stress, enduring anxiety—I do, and if you have a story similar to mine know I see you and I’m so glad you’re here. Account for it. Hold it to account.

[helenmaybewriting]

Children’s distress and the images that move us

A two year old Honduran girl cries inconsolably as her mother who is seeking asylum is searched and detained by US Border agents. The image is by John Moore for Getty Images, and it is everywhere these past days.

In my work I often talk about how children are rendered apolitical yet are profoundly politicised. Why is it images of children that move us? Why--as many on twitter have noted--is the US government only releasing photos of boys in detention facilities (answer: its both gender and age that play in to these political games)? Why are the breath-catching, heartbreaking, 'viral' images of crises seemingly always of children, rarely adults, in distress? Is it because even when we've forgotten our shared humanity as adults, children look enough like 'our children' to feel something for? What does this say about who we are as people, that we need images of suffering or dead children to prompt us in to any kind of action?

As part of my broader thinking on representations of children's suffering, I've presented my ongoing work on images of dead children in crises in a range of places in the past 18 months. I've been told on four occasions that it is good that I'm doing this project 'before I have kids', often with apologies from the colleague saying it - 'I couldn't do what you're doing now with my children'. Yet I listened to the recording today that ProPublica released of separated children crying 'mama' 'papi' over and over again. Mama, mama, please. Papi papi. They cry and cry. The border agents joke at their expense. Even without a child of my own it absolutely broke my heart. It is perhaps the hardest thing I've listened to connected to this project since the video of Abdul Hamid Youssef crying while clutching his 9 month old twins killed in the gas attack in Syria last year. But this isn't a post about hierarchies of entitlement to grief, at least not really. I think its really about collective rage and collective numbness.

We should be outraged. We should be furious. We should be incandescent with rage. If there was a red line we are so far past it its not visible in the rear view mirror, and yet this image is not new or different. We have been here with the grief and the anger and then it happens again: #Humanitywashedashore with Alan Kurdi and yet this week Oxfam released a report of French border guards deliberate cutting the soles off children's shoes and turning them back into Italy . #BringThemHere with Baby Asha in Australia and yet children are still on island prisons where a 26 year old killed himself out of desperation and a guttering of hope this week. The children killed in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria were "beautiful babies" according to Trump who added his voice to international condemnation and then bombed the country further. #TheBoyInTheAmbulance with Omran Daqneesh flitted on and off our screens seemingly overnight and yet how many children have been put - alive and dead - into ambulances amongst the rubble since. #GazaBaby trended last month as 8 month old Layla Ghandour died during Nakba protests and right wing pundits dismissed it as a "dead baby strategy" by Hamas.

In fact, four years ago, amidst a surge of young people fleeing unimaginable violence in the Northern Triangle into the US there was much reporting on how the children were kept in deliberately cold facilities, known as las hieleras - the freezers. This week, plans were announced to house child detainees in a ‘tent city’ in the middle of Texan summer. They are frozen and burnt, vilified and victimised, torn from their parents, and photographed in moments of utmost agony and distress. And while these photos and video and audio stop us in our tracks, the tactic of using the bodies of children as deterrents for seeking safety continues.

We insulate ourselves and tell ourselves these are things happening somewhere else in the world, but where does 'here' stop and 'somewhere else' begin? The only thing we have is our shared humanity. And children complicate the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. If we can make others ‘them’ we can dehumanise them, separate them from our experience of being human; trap them on island hellholes, tear their children from them and put them in camps, accept bombing and starvation as solutions to war and then turn back the wretched who have managed to escape and arrive to us. The mother and her daughter in that image had already been travelling for a month they told the photographer John Moore. It was too dangerous to stay. The only thing we have is our shared humanity. My old friend Hannah Arendt talks about our shared humanness existing in the in-between of each other. Judith Butler points to the fundamental sociality of our lives - this both makes us vulnerable but also allows us to live. Our vulnerability as human, Butler says, is predicated on our ability to recognise others, and to mourn them. We are not apart from this. These children are both apolitical and profoundly politicised. We have all called for our mama or papi at some point in our lives; these children are calling for theirs' and we are not separate from the institutions and decisions that mean their mothers and fathers cannot come to them.

These images, of two year old girls hysterical with fear and confusion, and dead boys on beaches, and terrified children covered in dust and blood, are the images that will define our time. And our reaction, or lack of, to them will be part of that story.

Today, on the train home, I was trying to pay attention to a podcast but really was just thinking about the ProPublica recording. Sitting there, I watched a small boy fall over and bump his head. He started crying and his mum came over to hug him and asked him 'where does it hurt?'. Warsan Shire's haunting poem came in to my head, and although its about other kinds of violence I've not been able to stop saying it to myself since.

Later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

Ran my fingers across the whole world

And whispered

Where does it hurt?

It answered

Everywhere

Everywhere

Everywhere

[helenmaybewriting]

Apparent global ‘rise’ of young political leaders: some further thoughts

On Friday I was asked to briefly appear on Australia’s national news channel ABC News 24 to comment on the apparent rise of young leaders globally, prompted by 37-year-old Jacinda Ardern’s win in New Zealand last week. 

I had never done television before so live evening news was being thrown into the deep end, but it was a great experience to have. You can watch the full 5-minute clip just below (or link here , but as it was only 5 minutes there was (of course) much more I could say. So I wanted to include just a few quick additional thoughts here.

[Video of brief segment on ABC News 24, Friday 19 October 2017]

Attention has been drawn to younger leaders as elections around the world in the last year have lifted many ‘young’ people to leadership not only of political parties, but as leaders of their nations. There are now eight elected leaders under 40 globally, including, in addition to Ardern: in France Emmanuel Macron is 39, in Ireland Leo Varadkar is 38, while Austria’s new Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz is only 31 (there are 12 leaders under 40, but some are hereditary positions). Canada’s Justin Trudeau often gets mentioned in these conversations about young leaders, at 44 he is the second youngest prime minister in Canada’s history.

What is noticeable about this list is what is being described as ‘young’. In the global political arena, forty is youthful. This is in part due to a dominance of what gets referred to as gerontocratic rule – rule by the old: for example in Africa the average age of rulers is almost three time that of the population, while in the USA requirements to be 25 for the House and 30 for the Senate mean political representatives are inescapably older than a chunk of the population.

I think, as I noted in passing in the interview, that the election of these younger people is only one piece of the puzzle. We are in fact seeing even younger people than those currently touted as ‘young leaders’ run for, and get successfully elected to, political office. Here in Australia Wyatt Roy became the youngest person ever to be elected to an Australian parliament in 2010 at age 20. He was the youngest ministerial appointment at 25 also. In the UK Mhairi Black has not been holding back since her maiden speech until now about her views on how the government has abandoned young people; with a politics degree, she was elected at age 20 and recently re-elected. I wrote last year about youth running of office in the context of the federal election here, and in recent research (yet to be published) conducted last year in Guatemala and Colombia young people were claiming their space both as activists but also as aspiring politicians, arguing their absence exacerbated the corruption they saw in the system, corruption brought about by well established, old career politicians who had lost sight of the purpose of office. In many different places we are seeing young people actively engaged with and campaigning for political office.

[MP Mhairi Black’s maiden speech]

So why should we care about whether younger people are leading countries, or running for office? I believe it matters for two reasons, one principled and one pragmatic. The principled reason it that democracy is designed for plurality, it needs multiple positions to be heard to ensure it is best representing [pdf link] everybody; if young people are missing from the room they are missing from the democratic process. In pragmatic terms, young people have particular interests and agendas (just like everyone), and if they aren’t participating in the debates and arguing for their interests to be heard they won’t end up on the policy agenda. Research by Youth Action and the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth noted in the last election campaign younger voters prioritised issues including climate change, marriage equality, and more humane asylum-seeker policy; topics that weren’t receiving much air-time from many politicians on the campaign trail.

This isn’t to say that young people have a unified agenda. While research shows there are topics and issues that have a larger base of support in particular demographics, young people are not homogenous. In many places youth involvement in politics, whether by running, by agitating, or by turning out to vote, has pushed a more ‘progressive’ agenda. There are however young leaders working for more conservative agendas, such as Austria’s new Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who is fiercely anti immigration, and right-wing in his politics and has tapped into a fear in Austrian society to propel him to victory. In a different vein, Wyatt Roy was keen to be seen not as a young politician with a youth agenda, but as a serious political contender, despite ongoing media coverage about his age.

Whether younger people need to be occupying these leadership positions, or whether it is sufficient to have older politicians who argue for youth issues as important is an important consideration. For example, Barack Obama’s first campaign was fueled by tapping in to the youth vote, he styled himself as young and valuing the issues of concern to younger voters.  Both Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have positioned themselves as advocates for, simultaneously and connectedly, youth and progressive politics. Can Sanders, who is 76, or Corbyn, who is 68, meaningfully represent younger people? I would argue that its always good when parts of the electorate that are often marginalised are given serious attention by politicians of any age. But I believe that younger people themselves also need to be present in these positions as they bring unique perspectives and a different investment in the issues.

[Jeremy Corbyn’s effort to appeal to youth had an impact at the ballot box]

As to claims of inexperience, often levelled at these politicians – from Mhairi Black to Wyatt Roy - if their constituents believed they could do the job, and then re-elected them, they are doing their job well, and in a democracy you have to trust the voters.

Finally, its important to recognise that leaders in their 30s is not the only indicator of youth engagement. Young people are often criticised for being apathetic or uninvolved in politics. The election of some of these leaders in different parts of the world has happened because younger demographics were mobilised, were enthused, to vote. But young people have long been participating in politics, both in formal and informal ways. If we are measuring political wisdom by time spent in politics (as an opinion piece in The Australian did yesterday, with a headshake-worthy front page), or by their membership of formal political parties, then we are not capturing the full range of way young people are participating. They are on the street protesting, they are talking and organising digitally, they are advocating for causes that matter to them, and as the current Australian Youth UN Ambassador Paige Burton discovered from talking to school students around the country, even before they can vote they hold articulate and critical views of Australian politics and society. 

[Paige Burton, Australia’s 2017 UN Youth Rep has been meeting with young people for a comprehensive survey of young people’s opinions. See the project at her facebook page, linked above]

And while some research notes that young people are enthused but confused by the political process, their presence and engagement is evident over and over again. Yet the major parties here in Australia and elsewhere are not always listening to their concerns.

We should be excited that young people are being elected to political office, to lead parties, and to lead countries. They are not a homogenous group, they bring diverse insights and new opinions to the table. And they should be measured by what they do with the job, not the number of candles on their next birthday cake. That’s how to judge young leaders, by how well they lead.  

[helenmaybewriting]

The Boy is in the Ambulance. In Our Newsfeeds. Again.

Omran Daqneesh, five years old, is carried from the rubble of an air strike in Aleppo and placed on a bright orange seat in an ambulance. He is covered in dust with blood on his face. It is in my timeline, it is shared with me by people. I watch it. Because that is what I do. 

[I am not including a picture, although if you are reading this you may have already seen it. The Guardian article includes detail and the 40 second video. It is here]

(My) Emotional Politics

I’m exhausted by the endless parade of hurting children retweeted through my timeline; emaciated, broken, dead, covered in dust and blood. Dust and blood and dust and blood and let me hashtag this and share it because I feel sorrowful at the dust and blood and dust and did you see his face amidst the dust and blood and dust and

I’m furious at the call-and-repeat nature of the response to these images; that we see them, that they are made visible as symbols with no regard for the child’s right of representation, the headlines that are written that declare this image, this image, no really this time this image, must make us change our position on the war/disaster/conflict/tragedy, the performed social media outrage that slowly fades while governments and officials and so called leaders sit on their hands.

I am meant to have critical thoughts about these images. I’ve been staring at them for years. And when they are not images, I’ve been reading the stories, carefully filing the news reports, noting the date. Being a good academic. Being a good researcher. Being good.

I teared up at this video (I don’t always anymore when I see images of children injured in war, and I carefully catalogue that observation too). The boy in the ambulance—he is five year old Omran Daqneesh, in case you wanted to know (although #theboyintheambulance has more traction on twitter than his name)—is alive. This time he is alive I think to myself, and this is simultaneously better and worse than all the deaths I have catalogued. He’s alive, not dead. That is impossibly wonderful. But he’s alive, amidst that devastation, and no one should live that life. I don’t have critical thoughts or careful links tonight. Just two nebulous thoughts.

One Thought. There is always a tiny broken body in my twitter timeline. This is the intellectual (/emotional/ academic/ human/ what do these boundaries mean anyway?) world I inhabit. There is always a young hurting face in my twitter timeline. This is the community I have crafted through judicious follows and likes. But sometimes these tiny broken bodies, these young hurting faces appear in my Facebook timeline. And this is when I know that for some reason one of these images has ‘gone viral’. And I wonder, why this one? I’m sure my friends who share Aylan’s picture would care about all these other images too, their emotions are genuine, their responses heartfelt.

And so I find myself asking what makes a ‘good’ (and I cringe at that word, but mean a picture that captures attention, that makes it to my timeline, that makes it to my friends’ Facebook pages) picture of a suffering child? Do they have to be dead? I had started to think so before today, the response to Aylan Kurdi’s death points that way. Do they have to be alone and offering the potential of rescue by those in the privileged global north, as Erica Burman[$] suggested more than two decades ago? Do they have to be visibly injured, marked in some way by those forces bigger than their frail bodies? And then I realise that I am asking an aesthetic question about a child covered in blood and dust, alone in the back of an ambulance. Blood and dust and blood and dust, and is it proper to even ask these questions? Can I separate a critical analysis from my emotional response? Should I? Perhaps not. Feminist scholars discuss this need for presence; ethnographers engage with this; being human in the in-betweens with others, as my old friend Hannah Arendt tells us to, requires it of me. And have I lost sight of the questions that need asking. 

And Another. I go to write about another catastrophe about a child that’s in the news tonight, another battered young person’s face repeating through my timeline, and I feel like I’m writing words I’ve already written. My posts are palimpsests. I realise today as I go back to old blog posts that they say “11 months ago”, “2 years ago”. I am literally writing this story every 12 months. When MH17 went down and when three palestinian children were killed by an airstrike while playing on the beach, I wrote about the valuing of human life, which deaths are made visible and which are not and the implicit hierarchy of the visibilities of deaths. I wrote with links and references, trying to draw it together, as I wrote specifically and publicly about it for the first time I was trying to make intellectual sense of it:

Children often feature in global politics: as touchstones of moral purity, of futurity, of hope; but also as the damaged, violated, victims whose treatment demonstrate the amorality of a particular regime/government/group/person. Their lives are imbued with innocence, passivity; the uncomprehending victims of violent regimes and terror. They are apolitical themselves, but politicised by others. Which children, and where they appear, and when they are mourned also tells us a lot about how we are to perceive a conflict or tragedy. Rarely asked to speak, their bodies become symbols of catastrophe or cruelty.  

A year later Aylan Kurdi’s tiny still body lies on the beach, ‘goes viral’ around the world, and I tried to understand why people need to see a dead three year old to be outraged at these policies and deliberate inactions that are designed to deter and kill:

The risk of a spectacle is that it draws the eye to a particular moment and it obscures the broader scene. It requires we focus on the body of this young boy, and express our upset, our horror on our social media networks without asking why he is there as if our life and actions cannot possibly intersect with his.

And now I am here. In a place beyond the careful collation of tweets and news articles. Watching the same tired call-and-response. Watching the same well-worn outrage. Watching the same politicians--as with the previous dead or injured child-- retweet the image with their ‘sadness’ or ‘grief’ carefully noted before returning to offices to do nothing to try and change these outcomes.

The Sound of Sirens If you watch the video, the camera steps back about half way in and there is another lens-wielding man in front of us. He crouches low, in the flung-open doors of the ambulance, and takes photo after photo of the boy in the ambulance. The boy touches hand-to-head and when he lowers his hand he is visibly shocked at the blood that’s all over his palm. The video/we are at a distance, the bright light of the ambulance interior makes the little boy so pale. Covered in blood and dust and blood and dust and no one there to comfort him. Just a row of lenses documenting him for the rest of the world.

Which bodies are mourn-able? (Are able to be mourned?)

Which bodies are ripe for spectacle? (Spectacular news headlines and spectacular inaction?)

Which bodies are transmuted into symbols? (What alchemy do we need to transmute blood and dust and blood and dust to action?)

I am tired of the endless parade of tiny broken bodies, dead children, grief stricken fathers and mothers bent low in pain. I am tired of asking the same questions, a palimpsest of the questions I’ve asked before. 2014: How do you go about making sense of senseless violence, indiscriminate killing, and the politicised bodies of  young people? 2015:  These are the questions that have to keep being asked. Along with: what will change because of their deaths? Anything at all? And if not what is this mediated, publicly performed angst really for? 2016:  And if we sill can’t answer these questions, why are you hitting retweet?

[helenmaybewriting]

Enrol early, update often: why young people’s absence from the electoral roll matters

As the electoral roll closes this evening ahead of the July 2nd election, reports indicate that many young people are not enrolled to vote. In fact young people aged 18-24 account for the largest missing demographic of eligible voters in Australia. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) estimates a quarter of 18-24 year olds are not enrolled, nearly 350,000. One in two 18 year olds are not registered, and one in four 19 year olds.

Social media today is full of enrol-to-vote memes, and the thorough sharing of a Buzzfeed article on why it is important to enrol to vote with the lede: “enrol early, update often”. While there is always a flurry of attention on youth enrolment leading up to an election, this activity feels more purposeful, more deliberate.

More than a mere statistical curiosity, or opportunity for snide think pieces about how lazy or engaged so-called Gen-Y is, the absence of 18-24 year olds from the electoral roll is significant for three reasons: firstly, it tells us something about how and why young people engage in politics;  secondly, this election is being fought on topics that will profoundly affect young people; and finally, the presence of young people’s votes in certain electorates may change the result of the election if they were enrolled and voted formally.

Short version: our democracy is lessened, and less representative, if young people are missing from election politics. But its more complicated than that, of course. 

Disengaged or Dissatisfied With a never-ending stream of opinion pieces about the apathy of Gen-Y, it would be easy to think that youth today is disengaged, self-interested and uniformed. Yet studies have indicated that youth engage differently in politics than previous generations; often mobilising around issues rather than establishing and maintaining party loyalty. A study in 2014 by the Museum of Australian Democracy and the University of Canberra found that young people were not disengaged but rather dissatisfied with the current state of politics and democracy in Australia and willing to be involved in change.

The Bust the Budget marches in response to the Coalition’s 2014 budget powerfully demonstrated that young people are not disengaged in political decision making that affects their lives. In fact, a high school student provoked media controversy after the Melbourne Lord Mayor announced such behaviour (protesting in her school uniform against cuts to higher education) was “inappropriate”. Yet perhaps it is broader societal attitudes towards youth that are inappropriate. I argued in 2014 that these silencing tactics explicitly exclude youth from political debate yet challenge simplistic characterisations of youth as disengaged.

Last week Phillippa Collin and Lucas Walsh argued that short-term enrolment campaigns close to elections, rather than broader recognition of youth engagement beyond elections, misrepresented the problem of young people’s supposed disengagement. If young people find meaning in protest, in organising around issues rather than parties, in mobilising through social media, perhaps the more apt question is why is enrolling to vote not given the same importance by young people and what can be done to change that?

Election Issues are Youth Issues Since the Coalition’s ‘Jobs and Growth’ budget slogan was left ringing in our ears as we launched into the election season, the issues on the campaign trail have been of central concern to young Australians. Katie Acheson, the chairperson of the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition (AYAC), argues that the 2016 election can be won and lost on youth issues, and both major parties have been slow to recognise this.  Two key concerns relate to employment and housing.

Jobs matter. The Foundation for Young Australian’s (FYA) recent report revealed that young people need training and support for a changing job landscape. With more young people either working part time or underemployed according to ABS statistics, political posturing about employment opportunities is of key concern for young people. The FYA have released an election platform arguing innovation and economic change needs to foreground the needs of young Australians. While the Coalition is talking about innovation, and Labor is Putting People First, neither party is making serious moves towards addressing employment concerns of young people.  

Home ownership is playing a pivotal role so far this election campaign, with heated debates about housing affordability and expectations for the future. With a growing sense amongst Gen Y that they will never be able to afford their own home, comments like Turnbull’s suggestion to ask parents for help prompted sarcastic social media posts with young people sharing responses from parents to them asking for money for a house. While the incredulous responses from parents were amusing, the incident highlights that young people are aware of the situation and unimpressed by politicians who appear so out of touch with most people’s lived reality.

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute’s recent report on intergenerational transfers notes that parents who lend children even $5000 increase their children’s ability to enter the housing market by 14%, however, the report also notes that such intergenerational transfers also increases inequality, and thus not addressing the underlying issue. With home ownership rates amongst under 30s dramatically declining over recent years, the ability to enter the housing market is of crucial concern to young people this election. And yet neither major party is speaking to the issue.

These, of course, aren’t the only issues. Amongst many other concerns, The Australian Youth Climate Coalition have been campaigning to enrol young people to argue for the importance of action on climate change, a global phenomenon whose worst effects will be felt on coming generations (and which rated not a mention from either party in the budget and budget reply speeches).  

The issues up for debate (and those that are being sidelined) are youth issues as much as any other age group. Young people have a significant stake in the outcome of the election and the policies that the winning party will implement over the next three years.

The Power to Sway an Election

Finally, young people have the power to change the outcome of the election.  Y Vote, a non-partisan youth organisation aimed at increased enrolments and participation of young people, have argued that “wasted votes”—comprised of those not enrolled, those who don’t show up, and those who vote informally—by young people could affect the outcome of the election in 10 electorates if they were instead valid votes. The number of ‘wasted votes’ in these elections is greater than the margin of victory in the 2013 election.  The Guardian reports that these electorates include Barton, Dobell, McEwan, Paramatta, Indi, and Fairfax. These electorates are diverse: geographically, demographically, and politically. The diversity of concerns within these electorates is evidence of the diversity of issues facing Australia, and the importance of the youth vote whether in rural Queensland, central Sydney or the outskirts of Melbourne.

Beyond their power in specific electorates, young people make up approximately 30% of voters. This is a percentage significant enough to impact the election. We are not talking about a marginal demographic, and yet in political rhetoric and action they are often treated like one. No wonder they chose to engage via other methods. 

Young people do engage, whether by protesting, participating on social media, or formally participating through youth advocacy organisations and movements. Ultimately, if a significant portion of a certain demographic group is absent from the electoral process then their voices and concerns are missing, and our collective democracy suffers for it. That’s why the push to enrol young voters matters.

[helenmaybewriting]

(Young) Death as Spectacle

The tiny body of a Syrian refugee, washed up on the beach like so much flotsam soaks my timeline, the horror and outraged responses lap at the edges of my brain. I can’t clear my head, metaphorically unblock my ears full of the full throated shouts and sea water from the tears of those on social media. 

And yet here is the crash and rumble of the waves, the inextricable pull of the tide that whispers and roars that this is nothing, nothing compared to the suffering and death visited upon so many others so near via thirty second nightly news updates, yet separated by oceans and political currents and the fear of the water that washed this little boy up bringing thousand and thousands more to crash on our shores, to crawl up the sand, to beg our humanity.

To extend the metaphor, I find my thoughts eddying, swirling, waterlogged. So here they are in drips and drabs.

[there are no images of children in this post, but there are in some of the links that are included]

Spectacle

My work is to find words to explain or ‘approach’  these events. I’ve spent years reading narratives, listening to stories, methodically saving the pictures that populate the internet when the children within global catastrophe are made visible. But I find myself less and less able to articulate the frustration and pain and anger of these situations. 

The death of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi (who was photographed), and his 5 year old brother on a Turkish beach once again forces us to face what we are doing when we share images of dead children. Which children? What do they look like in the image we share? Why are we sharing it? and on...

A friend on twitter wrote

Those who lose their lives seeking safety should not become a spectacle—reproduced, meme-d, tweeted, printed—without their consent. But more than this we shouldn’t need their bodies to be outraged at the politics of cruelty that leaders globally pedal. And more than that it is the And more than that it is the youngest, most marginal(ised), most unable to be present as human because they are denied full agency, that evoke this outrage. The International Migration Organisation noted in April that the total deaths in the Mediterranean (not the only place refugees and migrants die in their search for a better life) may top 30,000 this year. Thirty. Thousand.  Yet dead men do not make headlines. It is the implicit innocence, the vulnerability, the blamelessness of a child that draws our attention and horror.

The risk of a spectacle is that it draws the eye to a particular moment and it obscures the broader scene. It requires we focus on the body of this young boy, and express our upset, our horror on our social media networks without asking why he is there as if our life and actions cannot possibly intersect with his. 

Yet, to take the Guardian as an example, on the same page as the headline “Shocking images of drowned Syrian boy show tragic plight of refugees” is

 “Tony Abbott says decision on joining air strikes in Syria will be made 'next week'” , 

and a few months ago was “Budget cuts to foreign aid put Australia on track for least generous spend ever”. 

It is not impossible to hold these knowledges in our head at the same time. Yet, this is what we see: The “plight” of the refugees is “tragic”—passive, a thing that has happened. There is no connection to the concurrent news article that Australia is going to once again bomb the Middle East, and has again cut the money we provide to nations that are suffering war and conflict (many of which we’re complicit in). Somehow we fail to hold these knowledges together. The dead boy becomes a depoliticised spectacle.

 The Contradiction

His abject, cradled body a tragedy; here again is a dead child. The essentialised, pure nature of childhood sanctifies him, depoliticises his tiny body as the newspapers report on the colour of his clothing. And at the same time his body is the most essentialised, politicised object: this is the clarion call to action, how can we not act when faced with such a thing?, Rarely asked to speak (or made visible only when they can no longer speak themselves), their bodies become symbols of catastrophe or cruelty.

Beach Bodies

This is not the first child’s body the media has splashed across our screens, not the first ungainly spread-limbed young death that has inundated social media feeds, not the first innocent politicised amid catastrophe and handwringing.

Last year four Palestinian children were killed on the beach by Israeli missiles. Next to a hotel populated by journalists reporting on the war, the moment of transformation from life-to-death was capture, and appeared as a triptych in my timeline: alive. dust. dead.

At the time I wrote about the media response to their death. My response to their death. What does it mean to be able to mourn a body?

I linked an article and quoted its text, which I’m reproducing here, because the question remains pertinent

In an exceptional piece on the implicit valuing of lives on our screens and the 'unceremonious’ display of 'deceased brown bodies’ of children Tanya Steele reflects on how children are depicted. In response to the horrific deaths of the Palestinian children she asks: 

“As someone who grew up on the beach, who had her beach as a playground, there is no greater joy than to be a child running free on the beach. Not a care in the world. No fear. It is the bliss of childhood. For death to visit those children, in that moment, shatters me. It just shatters me. I want to give their deaths the attention they deserve. I just don’t know if seeing their lifeless bodies, in the moment where they deserve the most dignity, was respectful.”

…“Do we show the deceased? How much do we need to see? Is there another way to show the deceased in Chicago? Perhaps through animation or graphs. Are the images of Brown bodies lying dead on the streets having an impact on us? Having an impact on how we value or devalue Brown life? Just as Americans are not allowed to see the corpses of fallen Soldiers, shouldn’t all dead be afforded the same respect? 

The regale of Brown dead bodies is so common that I’m sure most of us take it for granted. 

There are body parts and bodies scattered in the field where Malaysian Flight MH17 exploded. We do not see those bodies, why is that? I assume it’s because it’s horrifying and we should respect the privacy of the deceased. Do we only respect the value of a life if it’s of a certain class? Do children on the beach in Gaza, do the Immigrant children seeking safety on our Borders, and children on the streets of Chicago, have a lesser life value?”

How do we “give their deaths the attention they deserve” without reproducing a hierarchy in which it is acceptable to print the images of dead brown children, in a way we’d never do to our own.

Earlier today in trying to process these questions I wrote on Facebook:

I'm struggling today with finding words to articulate the urgent, desperate need for action on this issue against the sadness and frustration that it is the bodies of small brown boys from a land far away that we parade across our media in a way we would never do to those who look 'like us'. Surely this is the crux of the problem; that they are 'like us' and deserve our help and pity, while being 'other' enough that their deaths can be appropriated and reposted on social media--somehow emblematic but not human (enough).

How do we respect and hold the lives (and deaths) of these children as individually important and valuable while articulating rage and compassion and mobilising for change and an appropriate response from our leaders?

 Shock and the “Sanctity” of Social Media

In the eddies of my thoughts today has been the complexity of the un-warned appearance of this child in my social media timeline. For those in part of Europe their print-newspapers chose to use these images for their front pages, so this question has larger relevancy: should I be able to chose to not see this image?

Friends and strangers on facebook and twitter have posted their dismay at seeing this image, demanding their friends stop posting it, because it is horrifying or they can’t now get it out of their head. I don’t know how to respond to this because I too am sometimes overwhelmed by these images of suffering and death, particularly when they are children.

But by demanding these images shouldn’t circulate are we firstly reproducing a problematic process by which we sanctify ‘children’ in the abstract and through our actions render them absent from considerations of global events?; and if this is the case do we risk ‘sanitising’ the narratives of these conflicts, crises, and tragedies? If the bodies of grown men and women do not prompt outrage even when there may be 30,000 of them by year’s end, is it necessary to remind ourselves that there are children here too? 

Secondly, do we move the moment of horror from the young boy’s death to a narcissistic plea? “I shouldn’t have to see this”. Do we Other these people, most in need, by drawing the curtains around our own experience that doesn’t include small brown bodies on the seaside? The spectacle brings focus to the viewer where we all can gather around and agree its terrible that we are forced to see this one innocent death, and what is the world coming to? and self-righteously agree this is terrible, and then return to scrolling our world of celebrity gossip and memes and family news.

For some, these images are triggering and emotionally crushing and I strongly believe people should be able to choose how and when to see these. I object strongly to embedding the image in tweets where the preview removes the choice. Equally to front page images of 3 year olds face down in the sand. Shock and spectacle (to return to that point) are cheap theatrics that have no respect for the loss of life. At the same time, how do we move to a place that these deaths have meaning in our collective consciousness without needing the deaths of children accosting us in our timelines.  

 Rock pools that are Plunge pools in disguise

I’ve run out of words. I am drained and tired but the ceaseless procession of the small deaths mediatised and flashed around the world, which prompt much vocal outrage and no structural change. The CEO of Save the Children said “This child’s plight should concentrate minds and force the EU to come together and agree to a plan to tackle the refugee crisis.”. This child’s plight. This small, lifeless human facedown in the sand. Whose lives do we value? Which children do we see? How do we see them and what does that tell us about the lives we value? 

Last year, in relation to the Gazan children (and those on MH17, and trying to migrate to the US),  I wrote:

Implicit (and occasionally explicit) in these images of children is a valuing of life. What is a child worth? What kind of child? Which bodies are visible? How are they rendered visible: in the ungainly awkward spread-limbed death on the beach, or in memorialised snapshots from a previous holiday? Do we see their death or just their now-lost lives? Who mourns them? How are they evoked by journalists, by politicians, by NGOs, by our friends or colleagues on social media? 

These are the questions that have to keep being asked. Along with: what will change because of their deaths? Anything at all? And if not what is this mediated, publicly performed angst really for?

[helenmaybewriting]

"Jihadi Jake": Some Thoughts on Media, Moral Panic and Youth Radicalisation

The sensationalist media coverage of the “unmasking”of a young man from Melbourne as a member of ISIS exemplifies the hysteria around ISIS, illustrates several problematic framings of young people in thisdiscourse, and does nothing to address the underlying issues that do exist around radicalization.

In the last couple of days “Jihadi Jake” (and mustn’tnews outlets be thrilled his name started with a ‘J’) has been revealed to be, not a young British man (the so-called “white jihadi”, but let us leave that can of worms for another time[i]), but a Melbourne teenager.

Media reports on the identity and activities of Jake exemplify the tension between readings of ‘good child’ and ‘deviant youth’, also underpinned by a good dollop of ‘us and them’ fear-mongering.  

How to Understand Jake: Lessons from the Headlines

If we take the opening sentences of the Courier Mail’s (front page [image below]) coverage of the story, we see several of the tropes that are relied on in telling these stories:

“He was a loner who did well at school and grew up in your typical suburban Australian family. But the teenager…became withdrawn and turned to Islam after struggling with the death of his mother in 2012…he was preyed upon by extremists while grieving for his mother.”

A good student from a ‘good family’ (we should critically reflect what a ‘typical suburban Australian family’ is in this narrative also) suffers a terrible loss that allows him to become vulnerable to the evil messages of extremists (who are located outside of Australia, beyond our ‘good’ society)—it reads like the plot of a Disney movie, only without the redemptive ending.

 Elsewhere media coverage emphasizes the youthfulness and diligence of Jake: The Daily Mail calls him “baby-faced” and notes he was “good at maths”, the Herald Sun reports neighbours describe him as “shy” and “confused”, while the Sydney Morning Herald notes he is “actually a gifted Aussie school dropout” (emphasis added), and The Age describes him as “actually a skinny, baby-faced boy” (emphasis added).  

 The use of ‘actually’ in several of these stories is telling: Jake’s real identity is this youthful, intelligent, Australian, which is impossible to reconcile with his current position as an ISIS recruit.

 The only way to reconcile this seemingly puzzling, ‘impossible’ position is to emphasise how he has been “preyed upon” by extremists, how his conversion to Islam was seen negatively by his “non-Muslim family” who “is worried sick about him”.

Jake sits uncomfortably between the dominant narratives of ‘child’—innocent, studious, a victim, and a ‘youth’—loner, potentially dangerous and delinquent. These narratives operate powerfully in popular discourse, particularly as a device to understand how ‘good’ boys ‘go bad’. There is another motivation and outcome of the framing of stories such as Jake’s in this way: children and youth are meant to be a-political, passive recipients of culture and socialisation. The state and its institutions, along with family/guardians are recognised as moral and social authorities. Young men in particular are seen as potentially dangerous, and thus in need of corralling, controlling, and containing. Thus Jake represents a failing of society in some way—he has transgressed expected behaviours.

 In this way, the moral panic engendered by this reporting reflects deep societal angst about changing practices of young people, and the concern that childhood is not a place for innocence and protected growth; but instead children are exposed to violence, have ‘lost’ their innocence, and are now potentially capable of violence[ii].

Pathologising Radicalisation/ Justifying Securitising Rhetoric 

This capacity for violence in young people must either be pathologised (“this person is sick or mentally unstable”, as we see in reporting of many of the school shootings in the US), or must have been influenced by an external, hostile force (as we see exemplarily in the Courier Mail excerpt above). These narratives also excuse or dismiss an account that seeks to interrogate the society or culture the young person is from. A consideration of structures and language of marginalisation, of demonization of particular groups, of violent rhetoric by the figureheads of the state as contributing factors is dismissed.  

 Furthermore, Jake becomes a poster boy for the government’s efforts to heighten security practices, and promote a politics of fear. It is not that there are not real risks posed by ISIS and by other radical groups around the world, however, just as with the politics of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia, a particular group is identified as posing risk to ‘ordinary’ (‘typical Suburban Australian’, to evoke the Courier Mail’s above description) families[iii].  

Former Immigration Minister (now Minister for Social Services), Scott Morrison, speaking on Sky News about Jake, said “It’s very hard to make assumptions on who’s going to fall prey to the death cult” and the government needed every available tool to stop people joining ISIS. Here the threat is dispersed, made omnipresent, and the solution presented by the government is ‘more tools’, further laws in the name of national security are passed (without reflection on their effectiveness)—from the so-called ‘foreign fighters bill (2014)’, to metadata retention laws.

Simultaneously, and to the same effect, the government identifies ‘Muslim leaders’ as needing to do more, and to “mean it” when they speak about Islam as a religion of peace. Australian Muslim leaders were understandably enraged by these comments and highlighted the underfunding of support services, linking of small grants to counter-terrorism funds (rather than holistic community-engagement programs), and the consequences of government leaders scapegoating particular sections of the community. While Jake’s individual case highlights the ‘us and them’ nature of understanding who joins ISIS, the broader political response reinforces an ‘us and them’ attitude within Australian society; dog-whistle tactics and provocative politics.

Final Thoughts

Jake has been labelled by the media as  “Terror Teen”, because he successfully made it to Syria and joined ISIS—a deviant, dangerous youth, worthy of comment because he violates the expected behaviour of ‘good’ ‘Australian’ ‘boys’[iv]. This week we’ve also seen two teenagers (aged 16 and 17), stopped by Australian Customs and Border Protection from travelling to the Middle East (with assumed intent to join ISIS). The coverage of this has focused on their “return to their parents”, with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton saying “What we have here are two teenagers who have been intercepted on their way to a potentially very dangerous situation…As a result of this interception, a Sydney family remains together” —a neat encapsulation of the return to protection provided via the state and parents of the potential-victimhood of these two young people[v].

 The question this raises is how do the categories of youth-hood and jihadi intersect in our media representations, political discourse, and popular imaginary, and what (sometimes racist, age-ist, and problematic) assumptions are they relying on?

[i] Actually, let’s not leave it for another time. The use of the qualifier “white” in front of “jihadi” indicates that it is an aberration worth noting, while implicitly normalising “jihadi” as an identity for non-white people (in a similar linguistic way as adding ‘child’ to terms like ‘soldier’ or ‘bride’ imply an aberrant state from those who normally are soldiers or brides).

 [ii] Stuart Aitken unpacks this moral panic in an excellent piece in Antipode [$$] “Schoolyard Shootings: Racism, Sexism, and Moral Panics over Teen Violence” 33:4 (593-600).

 [iii] For a concise reading of this process in relation to Asylum Seekers, see Richard Devetak’s [$$] “In Fear of Refugees: the politics of Border Protection in Australia’” The International Journal of Human Rights 2004. 8(1):101-109.

 [iv] Worth noting that coverage today of Jake has started using “man”, rather than ‘teen’ or ‘schoolboy’. Anecdotal, but interesting.

 [v]  The phenomenon of girls and young women travelling to join ISIS has received quite a bit of attention from the media as well; much focusing on the conditions experienced by women under ISIS, and the innocence/ignorance of the young women who are travelling. An interesting, provocative piece in The Guardian last week complicates this discussion by arguing that young women travel for complex and varied reasons, just like young men.