rethinking youth violence and healing
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Rethinking youth violence and healingMartha Kuwee Kumsaa, Kelly Ngb, Adrienne Chambonc, SarahMaiterd & Miu Chung Yane
a Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University, Kitchener,Canadab SUCCESS, Vancouver, Canadac Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canadad School of Social Work, York University, Toronto, Canadae School of Social Work, University of British Colombia, Vancouver,CanadaPublished online: 31 Jan 2013.
To cite this article: Martha Kuwee Kumsa, Kelly Ng, Adrienne Chambon, Sarah Maiter & Miu ChungYan (2013) Rethinking youth violence and healing, Journal of Youth Studies, 16:7, 847-863, DOI:10.1080/13676261.2013.763919
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.763919
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Rethinking youth violence and healing
Martha Kuwee Kumsaa*, Kelly Ngb, Adrienne Chambonc,
Sarah Maiterd and Miu Chung Yane
aFaculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University, Kitchener, Canada; bSUCCESS,Vancouver, Canada; cFaculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; dSchool
of Social Work, York University, Toronto, Canada; eSchool of Social Work, University ofBritish Colombia, Vancouver, Canada
(Received 13 August 2012; final version received 3 January 2013)
In a world where violence and healing are posited as oppositional, critical youthstudies, youth work practitioners, and human rights and social justice activistsoften locate themselves on the healing side of the divide, shedding light on thesuffering and alleviating the pain of the violence. However, current theoreticaldevelopments prompt us to critically engage this oppositional binary constructedbetween violence and healing. We have come to a crossroads where we can nolonger innocently position ourselves on the side of healing because we are deeplyimplicated in the violence as well. In this paper, we draw on our research on thehealing practices of racialized minority youth in Canada to think through theprevailing dichotomy of violence and healing. We use a poignant case scenario ofan ordinary encounter in an ordinary place to explore the complexities of thespace between youth violence and healing and make visible their inseparablyrelational and interactional nature. We draw on both foundational and emergentconceptualizations of encounters, emotions, spaces and places, as well as subjectsand subjectivities to rethink and theorize youth violence and healing.
Keywords: youth violence; youth healing; tacit violence; social harm; socialhealing
Introduction
Youth violence has become a burning issue thrust into the forefront of intellectual
inquiry in the contemporary context of heightened globalization and discourses of
risk and uncertainties (Kelly 2000, 2003). Youth violence is depicted in the literature
predominantly as the brute physical and emotional violence youth do to each other.
It is often associated with violent crime in the media, which is then used to unleash
the discourses of ‘public order’ and ‘citizen safety’ to criminalize youth and expand
the spaces of policing and law enforcement (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004). Critical
studies show how this construction of youth violence obscures the broader cultural
and structural violence as well as state and corporate crimes (Galtung 1969, 1990,
Barak 1991, 2003, Schissel and Brooks 2002). Some interrogate the very notion of
crime and propose the concept of social harm instead (Hillyard et al. 2004, Hillyard
and Tombs 2007). Notions of broader cultural and structural violence have also been
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Journal of Youth Studies, 2013
Vol. 16, No. 7, 847�863, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.763919
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conceptualized in terms of structural distress and social suffering (Bourdieu et al.
1999, Das et al. 2001).
In this study, we build on these emergent perspectives to critically engage the
dominant construction of the violence youth do and highlight broader forms of
invisible violence and social suffering and the social harm done to youth. Escalating
to unprecedented levels in the last few decades due to the rapid changes in global andlocal relations, youth violence has become the everyday reality of many youth around
the world (Marcus 2005, Snider and Lee 2007, Legge 2008). It has rocked major
Western cities like Chicago, London, Paris, and Toronto, though it has not spared
small towns either. However, in the context of heightened migration and racializa-
tion, youth violence disproportionately affects low-income, immigrant and racialized
minority youths (Goldson and Munice 2006, McMurtry and Curling 2008, James
et al. 2010).
While many studies assert that youth violence has become the everyday reality of
youth around the world, however, very few of them make visible the inseparable link
between youth violence and the broader processes of globalization and racialization.
Oftentimes global violence and local violence are conceptualized separately as if they
had no connection. Moreover, while youth violence has been studied to oblivion,
youth healing has remained invisible, for the most part, because the meaning of
healing is limited to the areas of spiritual healing and healing from psychological
and physical injuries. Research that addresses this gap in the literature is hard tocome by. In this paper, we build on a study that critically engages anthropological,
psychological and sociological notions of healing and proposes an emergent
approach on the sociality of healing (Westoby 2009). Also, healing is often viewed
as antithesis of violence in broader bodies of the literature and in public discourse.
This leaves a gap in knowledge, obscuring the inseparable and intricate relational
processes of youth violence and healing. It also conceals the relational processes of
Self and Other, underpinning the inseparable twins of violence and healing.
A critical rethinking of these crucial concepts is long overdue in youth studies.
However, while the literature is replete with topics like delinquent youth, youth
violence, youth risk activities, youth transition, youth criminal gangs, and youth
marginalization, the rethinking and theorizing of youth violence and youth healing
remains a wide gap. We intend to address this by critically examining the complex
in-between spaces of violence and healing. Indeed, we are heartened by a fascinating
recent conversation in the Journal of Youth Studies � a conversation rekindling the
old agency/structure debate and fostering a critical examination of the complexities
between youth agency and structural constraints. This passionate debate, most notablyamong Roberts (2010, 2012), Threadgold (2011), and Woodman (2009, 2010), is stirred
by Urlich Beck’s proposition of the increasing individualization of youth in the context
of the rapidly changing global world and risk societies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
2009). Roberts takes Beck’s proposition to task, Woodman defends it, and Threadgold
takes a middle ground.
Despite their differing emphases, however, in all three positions, we see an
attempt to engage the complexities of the in-between spaces left open by the binary
constructions of youth agency and structural constraints. Indeed, these debates echo
broader debates in contemporary social theories around the binary constructions of
cosmopolitanism/nationalism and globalization/localization. All three positions
also make visible the deepening inequities in the lives of many youth despite the
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opportunities opened up by globalization and, in this, they all agree with Beck.
In this paper, we add to this conversation by inserting the topic of youth violence and
healing and picking up the thread of symbolic violence from where Cooper (2012)
leaves off. We critically engage broader debates in social theory to shed light on how
youth actually engage the complexities between these dualisms in their experiences of
everyday living. We use a poignant ordinary encounter to ground our conceptual
ventures. Dividing the paper into two parts, in the first part, we provide a brief
background of our research and present the case scenario. In the second part, we
draw on broader social theories to think through the concepts of youth violence
and healing.
Youth violence and healing
Research background
This paper stems from a participatory research exploring the issues of Self
and Other in the healing practices of racialized minority youth in Canada. The
study was conducted in three of English Canada’s major immigration cities:
Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, and Vancouver. It was set against the background of
the so-called escalating youth violence where any mention of youth was
automatically associated with violence. In our wrestling with the notions of
violence and healing, we wanted to shift the focus away from the deafening
loudness of youth violence and explore the healing practices of youth. We wanted
to tap into the creative human possibilities of what youth actually do in the face of
violence in order to survive harm and repair their sense of well-being (Hillyard and
Tombs 2007, Westoby 2009). We wanted to glean what we can learn from their
practices of healing. We also wanted to dig deeper into the underlying issues of Self
and Other. To get to these deeper layers and inform our research both conceptually
and methodologically, we critically engaged various reflexive approaches (Bourdieu
et al. 1999, Bourdieu 2001, Pillow 2003, Davies et al. 2004, Westoby 2009).
This participatory study brought together four universities, five community
agencies, and racialized minority youths in five study sites located in the three
cities. The participants were male and female youths aged between 16 and 24 and
they were from a cross-section of class and ethnic backgrounds. In the first phase of
the study, consistent with principles of involving youth in participatory research
(Alfonso et al. 2008, Fine 2009, Rodriguez and Brown 2009), we formed Research
Advisory Groups (RAGs) and facilitated a series of workshops in the summer
and fall of 2009 to map out the conceptual and methodological contours of our
study. Together with workshop participants, including youth and service providers
working with youth, we developed reflexive strategies where we tried out our data
generation tools and trod the paths ourselves before subjecting the participants to
them. In the second phase of the study, we invited racialized minority youths and
generated more data through small group and dyadic conversations, activities, and
evocative prompts.
In this paper, we focus on the conceptual wrestling in the first phase of our
study where the RAGs attempted to create a shared understanding of our key
concepts � violence and healing. So, what is youth violence and what is youth
healing? Can the violent response of youth to prior violence be considered a healing
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practice? Is healing the antithesis of violence? Is it a consequence of violence or
can we reimagine the two as simultaneous and inseparable processes? And,
what does all this mean for youth studies? These crucial questions are either
obscured or left unaddressed in the literature on youth violence. In our workshops,
therefore, we sought personal meanings of violence and healing to make sense of
the abstract concepts. We started by asking: What comes to mind when we hear the
word violence? The overwhelming response indicated that violence was under-
stood in its brutal physicality. Examples included violence against women, rape,
bullying, stabbing, beating, fist fights, school shootings, street shootings, gang
wars, terrorist attacks, and the big wars with bombs and fighter jets. When asked if
racism, poverty, or discrimination came to mind, most reverted back to the
physicality of violence. Summing up what most participants expressed, a workshop
participant said:
Sandy: Where I am confused is the use of the term violence [for racism]. When I think ofviolence, I think of physical acts, with an offender and a victim.
Unlike the physicality of violence, workshop participants moved far beyond their
physical and material realities in making sense of healing. Reflecting on their
personal experiences, they generated multiple layers of meaning ranging from
personal to community healing. For the most part, they viewed healing as a
developmental and holistic process of putting back together the pieces shattered
by violence. As some participants expressed:
Dan: I have always thought that healing is a pattern that we establish as we grow . . . fromchildhood, you got a home, and persistent ways of dealing with different sourcesof stress . . .and many, many creative ways of dealing with it.
Bella: I think healing is emotional because it’s not like applying a bandage to a wound.It is more like somebody using words, images that symbolize your being . . . . It is easierto cause damage than to repair and put it back together . . .putting the pieces togetherrequires a whole lot more; it involves a whole community . . .and it takes time to heal.
Mona: If somebody hit you and you got a cut . . . it is healed immediately. But the long-term healing . . . ties to emotional and spiritual healing, and that goes much deeper, andit takes time.
Despite such breadth and depth, however, the general understanding was that
healing is a process set in motion in response to violence. And participants raised
some concerns: if everything youth do in response to violence, including gun
violence and doing drugs, is dubbed healing practices, are we not encouraging
violence in the name of healing? With respect to violence also, some participants
expressed the concern that we may be neutralizing and trivializing the real physical
violence by naming every littlest thing as violence. They asked if we were dissolving
violence and making it disappear and if we were diluting it into something benign
and neutral. When we name everything, we name nothing in particular and we lose
our target. So what is this thing called real violence and real healing? In the
remainder of this paper, we tap into Galtung’s (1990) notion of cultural violence
and argue that the extraordinary and brutal forms of physical violence happen only
in the contexts where the subtle and invisible forms of ordinary violence have
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already paved the way. We contend that subtle and blatant, ordinary and
extraordinary forms of violence are inseparably related. We dispute the very
assumption that healing is the response to violence and argue that healing and
violence are simultaneous relational processes intimately bound up with relational
processes of Self and Other.
To develop these arguments, we use a poignant encounter that a member of
RAG shared in one of our workshops in the first phase of our study. In choosing
this particular encounter, we are making a radical shift away from the ways in
which case scenarios of youth violence are normally chosen. We chose it to help us
think through several layers of youth violence and healing. First, the conventional
way of thinking locates youth violence within the individual youth or within the
category of youth, thus decontextualizing, individualizing, and essentializing youth
violence. This encounter places youth violence back within its micro- and macro-
contexts. It helps us reimagine youth violence as a relational process not inherent in
youth but happening within relationships, within and between families, peer
groups, communities, and cultures. Second, youth violence is often thought of as a
local event isolated from broader global processes. This encounter helps us
reimagine youth violence as a spatial process, happening within and between
spaces � localities, institutions, nations, and countries. Third, when youth violence
is mentioned, what often comes to mind is the brutal physicality of teen gun
violence, school shootings, and bullying. This encounter helps us understand the
quiet and subtle forms of violence inherent in everyday life and ordinary places.
Fourth, normally, youth violence and healing are viewed as antithesis of each other.
This encounter posits them as simultaneous relational processes. Finally, when
youth violence is thought of in generic terms, it homogenizes the varying
experiences of youth and obscures their varying realities. This encounter focuses
on and highlights the peculiar forces that tear apart racialized minority youth in
Western countries. In this encounter, we use pseudonyms for people and places to
protect anonymity.
Encounters in a restaurant
Paul was wrestling with the meaning of violence as much as any of us in the
workshop who sat in a circle, making sense and sharing our personal understandings
of violence and healing. Our aim was to tease out a more nuanced meaning of each
concept. Some participants went beyond physical violence and told stories of mental,
emotional, social, and spiritual forms of racialized violence. This was when Paul
aired his concern about how we might be losing the essence of violence while we
thought we were trying hard to find it. He particularly wanted to distinguish between
subjective feelings and objective quantifiable and observable forms of violence for
the purposes of practice:
Let’s say I am still struggling with what violence is all about because, I should say, it isvery subjective, depending on how you position yourself . . . so these are violence, giventhe feelings you have. I am still a very pragmatic person and I think violence should havesome sort of criteria. Otherwise, we would turn everything into violence, so I am stillstruggling with that very, very much.
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Further into the discussion, as stories evoked other stories, Paul shared a story about
his encounter in a restaurant:
I just want to add one more thing. I don’t know whether you term it violence becauseyou mentioned a number of examples. There was a time when I was with my wife andmy daughter and that was just last year when we went to Bluebell, a place which is verywhite dominant and then we were eating at Subway, I think. We were sitting there eatingand I was talking to my wife. And then when I was eating, I mean we are so used toopening our mouths and eating like that. My daughter felt very, very embarrassedbecause someone at the next table was watching us and laughing. And my daughter wasso angry, she went over there confronting them: ‘‘Is that very funny?’’ We were veryembarrassed. It’s very bad. And then on our way home everyone was silent and then wetalked about it and my daughter said, ‘‘it is not appropriate to eat and talk at the sametime and then show your teeth and mouth and opening wide or whatever.’’ We are soused to that we did not notice that at all. I mean, do you term this violence at all? Who isviolent towards whom? I don’t know.
Paul’s questions help a great deal in complicating our notions of violence and
healing. Let us take a closer look at the people in this story. Paul is a middle-aged
man from an ‘Asian’ country. He migrated to ‘Canada’ with his family 21 years ago
when his daughter, Lisa, was just a year old. After living in ‘Canada’ for over
20 years, Paul is still used to his cultural way of eating which seems inappropriate inthe ‘Canadian’ context. Lisa felt ‘very, very embarrassed’ when she saw that
‘someone at the next table was watching . . . and laughing’. She is caught in a bind
where she does not want her father to be made fun of and yet she is embarrassed by
him. Such embarrassing experiences often escalate into a rift between youth and their
migrant families, which often results in the involvement of youth workers. When
youth express their struggles with their families, more often than not, mainstream
youth care workers see it as intergenerational conflict primarily due to a clash of
cultures. Sometimes youth distance themselves from their families to live like othermainstream youth, and sometimes youth workers rescue them from what they see as
oppressive parents who do not know what it means to live in the West (Westoby
2009). Yet such narrow interpretations miss the deeper meanings of the violence
that youth deal with on an everyday basis and their practices of healing at the
mundane level.
Theoretical linkages
To move beyond the arguments of culture clash and intergenerational conflict and
explore the deeper meanings of the violence and healing in this scenario, we draw on
the concepts of encounters (Goffman 1956, Ahmed 2000), emotions (Goffman 1956,
Ahmed 2004, Probyn 2005, Elliott and Lemert 2006, Ngai 2007, Wall 2010�2011),spaces and places (Sassen 2001, 2007, Razack 2005, Harvey 2006), subjects and
subjectivities (Foucault 1979, Ahmed 2000, 2004, Bourdieu 2001), and public
degradation (Garfinkel 1956).
Encounters
Encounters are the coming together of people in face-to-face social interactions
(Goffman 1956). Ahmed (2000) reworks this and theorizes encounters as the
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meetings of subjectivities. Her notion of subjectivity suggests a fluid and multiple
sense of Self constituted through discourses and within unequal relations of power.
This contrasts with the liberal humanist subject, a cohesive, stable, and essential
individual. While the essentialist subject looks inside for self-knowledge, the ongoing
socially constituted subjectivities look outside for self-knowledge within relation-
ships. Encounters, then, surprise subjectivities because they call into play other
forgotten encounters from other times and other places. By so doing, encounters blurthe boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the individual and the
collective, the particular and the general, the global and the local. Indeed they
trouble the boundaries between Self and Other. All these layers of encounters are
played out in this particular encounter between ‘someone at the next table’ and
Paul’s family. Paul was eating and talking with his wife when an instant of laughter
unsettled the goings on. Paul was not sure if this encounter was violence. Well, is it?
Lisa was ‘very, very embarrassed’ but why? What is the big deal if someone laughs?
How does someone’s laughter constitute violence and how does Lisa’s response
constitute healing? Or does it?
The notion of subjects posits Paul and this ‘someone at the next table’ as
bounded individuals who did not know each other; they are just strangers meeting
in an eatery. However, as Ahmed (2000, 2004) would argue, this meeting is not
a meeting of complete strangers; it is an encounter between individuals who already
knew and recognized each other as strangers, within relations of power and not from
an essential knowledge of the subject. This encounter reopens and calls into playother forgotten histories and prior racialized encounters between ‘Asians’ and
‘Whites’. Signals encoded in bodies and acts have been circulated. Asymmetrical
relations of power have been established through prior encounters, and the encoded
signals have enabled this someone, who has never set eyes on Paul, to laugh at his
way of eating. As Galtung (1990) would argue, tacit cultural violence has led to direct
violence. This suggests that this particular encounter is already predetermined by
prior histories of violent encounters. Paradoxically, however, this encounter is also
novel in its own particularity. In its own innovation, it subverts fixity and continuity,
thus refusing and disrupting the over-determination of prior history and societal
structures. Paul and this someone are neither mere individuals nor strangers. Tension
is rife between the particular (this encounter) and the general (broader encounters),
between the ordinary (eatery encounters, laughter) and the extraordinary (racialized
violence, colonial wars, genocide), between the individual (Paul, a someone) and the
collective (‘Asians’, ‘Whites’, Others), here and there (the local � Subway Restaurant,
Bluebell, and the global � ‘Asia’, ‘Canada’, the world), and between the now of
2008 and the then of all the years ‘Asians’ and ‘Whites’ have been in touch both in
‘Canada’ and in ‘Asia’ and in all the spaces in between.To further complicate the matter, there are multiple intimately related encounters
nested within this particular encounter. We identify at least four: the encounter
between Paul’s family and someone who laughs at them; the encounter between Lisa
and someone who laughs at her father; the encounter between Lisa and Paul; and the
encounter between Lisa’s ‘Asian’ Self and her ‘Canadian’ Self. Such mapping out of
the layers makes visible the underpinning issues of Self and Other in these encounters
and the unequal webs of power relations in which they are immersed. Indeed,
what makes this a violent encounter is the asymmetry in the relations of power
(Foucault 1979, Bourdieu et al. 1999, Ahmed 2000, Bourdieu 2001). Symbolic
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violence is inherent in the power to determine what is appropriate and what is
laughable. It is deeply rooted in and interwoven with the violence that establishes the
material relations of power in the first place (Westoby 2009, Cooper 2012). Indeed
this subtle violence in this ordinary encounter at an ordinary public eatery is
informed by and informs back the broader extraordinary violent encounters through
which the pecking order of global relations of power is established.
Inseparably twined with these encounters of violence, we also see simultaneous
encounters of healing. These encounters are immersed in nested hierarchies of
oppression and unequal relations of power. However, power is not just oppressive or
coercive; it is also productive and creative (Foucault 1979). Power produces subject
positions and subjectivities in the intricate encounters of violence and healing.
As others argue, what is symbolic and cultural is deeply rooted in and inseparable
from its material basis (Galtung 1990, Bourdieu 2001, Cooper 2012). Indeed, in
this encounter symbolic healing is intimately twined with symbolic violence, and
it is inseparably twined with physical, material, political, emotional, cultural, and
spiritual healing simultaneously. Symbolic healing is inherent in Lisa’s agency to
speak back to the laughing person and to her father. Emergent theorizing suggests an
intimate link between such relationality of violence and people’s strategies of healing
and their ongoing process of constructing Self (Adelson 2000, Das et al. 2001, James
et al. 2010, Warner 2012).The literature is replete with diverse depictions of healing. Emphasizing the need
for a holistic consideration of healing, Westoby (2009) examines the varying
depictions of healing from across multiple disciplinary boundaries and proposes
the notion of social healing in the context of trauma and refugee experiences. Within
the broader context of trauma, healing is conceptualized as relational (Herman 1997)
and as self-healing (Mollica 2006). Healing is also conceptualized as justice in
the anticolonial struggles of indigenous peoples (Warry 2000, McCaslin 2005), as
creating unity and wholeness in individual and community life in the context of war
and conflict (Danesh 2008), as rite of passage and the performance of Self in the
context of domestic violence (Wozniak 2009, Wozniak and Allen 2012), as making
the blues music in the context of racial violence (Gussow 2006), as restorative justice
in the criminalization of youth (Shah 2012), and as healing wounded relationships
in the context of youth violence (Oscos- Sanchez and Lesser 2007). Youth have
also theorized their own healing from youth violence as repairing their wounded
souls where individual healing is inseparably twined with community healing. ReAct
(2011, p. 29) highlights this with a quote:
No matter how broken, how lost we are, we can be found. Our wounded souls are neverbeyond repair. (bell hooks, n.d. highlight in original)
These studies tease out the complex meanings of violence and healing in people’s
everyday encounters. They reveal that the blatant and subtle forms of violence are
inseparably twined with the blatant and subtle strategies by which people subvert and
appropriate violence to facilitate their own healing. In these theorizations, we see the
relational processes by which people mend and repair the injuries of everyday social
relations as inseparably interwoven with people’s ongoing construction and
reconstruction of self and identity. Moreover, we see that these ongoing everyday
encounters of violence and healing in the here and now hail the extraordinary
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encounters of violence and healing in the there and then of space and time. As others
also argue, current events are repetitions transporting the past into the present
temporally and spatially. However, these are repetitions that never reproduce the past
but produce new places and new subjectivities in the process (Ahmed 2000, 2004,
Das 2007, 2008, Hunt 2008).
Emotions
This global pecking order and its unequal relations of power are put in place
and held together through the circulation of deep emotions (Ahmed 2004, Probyn
2005, Ngai 2007, Wall 2010�2011). As Ahmed argues, ‘in such affective economies,
emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities � or bodily space
with social space � through the very intensity of their attachments’ (2004, p. 119
italics in original). Bodies touch each other through variety of emotions where the
touch may be gentle and caressing or a touch of violence as in hate, shame and
embarrassment. In this encounter, ‘someone at the next table’ laughs and Lisa feels
‘very, very embarrassed’. What is more ordinary than a simple laughter? Indeed,
laughter can be an expression of joy or amusement but this particular laughter is
not. This laughter is thrown at this table as a unit and Lisa experiences it as a
violent touch on her body. This someone is not laughing with her but laughing
at hers (at what is personally hers � her father). This laughter pains Lisa because
it does things; it moves bodies spatially and temporally. It refuses Lisa the imagined
‘Canadian’ space and puts her back in her place as ‘Asian’. It Others and makes
Lisa a body out of place (Ahmed 2000), a body that does not belong in the
‘Canadian’ national space.
Lisa grew up in Canada and considers herself ‘Canadian’, albeit a hyphenated
one as Asian�Canadian. In the space of this encounter, she suddenly notices her
father’s way of eating through the lens of this laughter and she feels very
embarrassed. Paul has always eaten that way but has never known it as anything
but normal: ‘we are so used to opening our mouths and eating like that . . . we did
not notice that at all’. The invisible norm was now disrupted and made visible by
the laughter of this someone at the next table. The surprise of this encounter jolts
Lisa into the realization that her two faces are facing each other. She feels the
racializing violent touch of her ‘Canadian’ Self on her ‘Asian’ Self. By way of
resolving her internal conflict to soothe the wound, she confronts her ‘Canadian’
Self by asking ‘is that very funny?’ but her response seems harsher on her ‘Asian’
Self, perhaps because it offers a safer target to download the racializing violence
with minimal risk. She tells her father that ‘it is not appropriate to eat and talk
at the same time and then show your teeth and mouth and opening wide or
whatever’. The broader collective encounter between the ‘Canadian’ Self and the
‘Asian’ Self is now an internal individual encounter for Lisa. It is important to
note here that where Lisa feels safe and what risks she could take at what place
and with whom is all a function of constructing healing � a function deeply
related to place-making, as Sampson and Gifford (2010) would argue. It is to
this intimate interrelation of healing and place-making that we turn in the
next section.
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Spaces and places
Encounters between the ‘Asian’ Self and the ‘Canadian’ Self happen in spaces and
places where homogenizing global processes of migration move all kinds of people
across all kinds of borders and fragmenting local processes slot them into many
categories, including racializing ones. This particular ‘Asian�Canadian’ encounter
happens in the context of heightened globalization where time and space are
compressed and often transposed, where here becomes there and then. But who is
‘Asian’ and who is ‘Canadian’? It is time to trouble the ease with which we write
about the sweeping generalities of ‘Canadians’ and ‘Asians’. Indeed it is time to
trouble the ease with which we inscribe ‘Canadian’ space and ‘Asian’ space. There is
no universal ‘Asian’ or ‘Canadian’. Neither Lisa nor Paul represents all of ‘Asia’; nor
does this ‘someone at the next table’ represent all of ‘Canada’. Asianness and
Canadianness are subjectivities that individuals weave into their sense of Self in ways
that are unique to them. Likewise, place is not a given. A place becomes a place
through processes of differentiation in relation to other places and in the tension
between particular places and general space. Self and Other are represented and
played out differently in different kinds of interactions and in different places.
Indeed, they are constituted through spatial and temporal processes of differentia-
tion (Ahmed 2000). As Sampson and Gifford (2010) argue, youth make different
places for different activities. More importantly for our purpose, Sampson and
Gifford (2010) find that the place-making processes of youth are intimately
intertwined with their sense of healing and well-being. We need to highlight these
particularities without obscuring the powerful generalities.
Lisa and Paul and this ‘someone at the next table’ are brought together in
a Subway Restaurant in a medium-sized Canadian town of Bluebell through
globalizing processes that move people across national and local borders. However,
globalization is very context sensitive; it does not create uniform spaces but different
places with unique characteristics (Harvey 2006) and differential impacts on different
places (Peck 2002). As Sassen (2001, 2007) argues, the globalized world is primarily
a network of large metropolitan areas whose economies and demographics have been
largely shaped by transnational movements of goods and people. More peripheral
locations operate under different regimes, and are either shaped to a lesser degree by
such rapid transformations, or they are impacted more indirectly. Yet localities are
not passive recipients of global processes but active agents bending the global and
making it their own (Cooke 1990, Escobar 2001, Kroff 2003).
This means that the cultural understandings, expectations, types of communication
and reference points would be greatly divergent between Bluebell and metropolitan
centres of Canada such as Toronto or Vancouver with populations of about 2.5 million
and approximately 600,000, respectively. By comparison, Bluebell is a medium-sized
town with a population of about 80,000 located in the interior of Canada. As Paul
states, Bluebell is ‘a place which is very white dominant’ as compared to the diversity
and high percentage of foreign-born population in Toronto and Vancouver. Interest-
ingly, Bluebell boasts of a significant tourism activity although it is not part of the
foreign tourist circuit. For Paul’s family to take an outing in Bluebell seems to be a
normalizing move, a typical touristic activity that Canadians conduct. While the
history of Bluebell includes the violence of settler relations with local Aboriginal
peoples on the one hand, it is out of the way of ‘true foreigners’ on the other. As such,
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Bluebell is a preserve of some kind whose attraction for ‘familiar’ tourists lies in its
reputation for maintaining or performing a ‘traditional’ way of life. This emphasis is
at odds with the diversity that characterizes Toronto and Vancouver. Yet Toronto
and Vancouver are not diverse in the same way as their diversities have uniquecharacteristics of their own even as they wield strong commonalities with other global
cities like London, Paris, and Chicago. Although Bluebell, Toronto, and Vancouver
are local sites in Canada, they diverge greatly in their orientation and openness to
globalization. Therefore, it is not just in the context of global�local encounters but also
through local�local divergence that the expressions of racialized and cultural violence
against migrant families come into play (di Tomasso 2012). It is the ‘traditional’ way
of life in Bluebell that legitimates the rejection of ‘others’ who do not share this way of
life, and whose presence obliterates it.What is also striking about this encounter is the type of restaurant in which it
took place. The ‘Subway’ where the family chose to eat is a chain restaurant, a type
of setting that is familiar to many Canadians. It is not Bluebell-specific. In that sense,
choosing to eat there suggests a choice of a ‘neutral’ place, certainly not a locally
marked site. As a popular chain, Subway does not suggest a particular kind of
etiquette about elegant dining; nor does it cater to high-income brackets since the
food is primarily sandwiches. Yet, even in a place as ‘popular’ as a Subway, one
can be made to feel as a ‘foreigner’, an ‘alien’, inappropriate in one’s behaviours andmore largely, in one’s way of being and relating to the setting and the set of
expectations that go with it. This reintroduces the issue of class, which is often
lacking in discussions of globalization, replete with inclusion/exclusion but not
class. Yet forms of eating are perceived in class terms as well as cultural and
racialized stereotypes. While the wealthy, poor, and immigrants have different sites of
encounters and, assuming that this ‘someone at the next table’ shares class with
Paul, class may interweave with other forms of exclusion, but it is clearly present.
Thus, a Subway Restaurant is not automatically a site of global diversity as each ofthe chain’s outlets takes on a cultural tenor of its own in each local site. Yet,
powerful continuities of broader xenophobic, class-based, racializing, and cultur-
alizing violence are manifest within the particularity and uniqueness of this
Bluebell Subway.
Subjects and subjectivities
The multiple tentacles of the violence in these encounters touch all members ofthe family and Paul says: ‘we were very embarrassed. It’s very bad’. Embarrassment
has a social function (Goffman 1956). Indeed, emotions play a key role in the
relational processes of Self and Other, the dividing practices through which subjects
and subjectivities are constituted (Foucault 1979). Emotions are equally highlighted
in the public shaming and public degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel 1956). On the
surface, the term ‘inappropriate’ does not seem to suggest violence. However, it is
a prescriptive term that suggests the morality of behaviours. It intimates something
about the character of the person who would dare take up an inappropriatebehaviour and is by consequence to be shamed into retracting it, apologizing for it,
and modifying one’s embodied relations with others. This encounter harkens to the
‘public degradation ceremony’ that Garfinkel (1956) described. It functions in a
public space in the presence of others and requires that presence to have a forceful
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effect of moral indignation directed at the deviant behaviour. This explains the deep
sense of ‘embarrassment’ that Paul expressed. This ritual entails recruiting the
audience (other patrons in the restaurant) to respond in kind. In this light, it is
a violent social act that incites public reprobation at the level of interpersonal and
intergroup interactions in social spaces. The humiliation that results is a collectively
shaped emotional response to an aggressive symbolic act that simultaneously
indicates and reinforces intergroup boundaries. Yet, it is important to note thesimultaneous performances of healing that are also woven into these acts of violence,
including Paul’s quiet but subversive indignation and Lisa’s angry confrontation.
Violent relations of power are held together and defended through intense
emotions not only in interpersonal and intergroup relations but also in inter-
community and inter-national relations. Emotions like anger, love, hate, shame,
and guilt circulate to protect the boundaries of individual bodies, bodies of local
communities, and national bodies � the body politic. Emotionally charged rhetoric
of nationalism and patriotism are deployed to defend nations and their boundaries
(Ahmed 2004, Wall 2010�2011). As Ahmed argues, however, these emotions do not
simply reside within or without the bodies of individuals, and communities as
essentialized liberal notions of subjects prescribe. Nor do emotions simply make
subjects and subjectivities visible. Indeed, those very subjects and subjectivities are
created through the circulation of emotions.
In this encounter, emotions work to align the patrons of the Bluebell Subwayagainst Paul’s ‘inappropriate’ behaviour at the same time as they align generic
‘Canadians’ against generic ‘Asians’. Nations and communities gel together and
become ‘we’ entities by deploying strong national and communal sentiments. The
‘someone at the next table’ may deny this violence, arguing that it is merely an
expression of a norm, even perhaps a wish to educate. On the contrary, Lisa felt it
as silencing. Indeed her expression of outrage is a form of pushing back, refusing
the normative acquiescence to the action and its consequences. As McCaslin (2005)
and ReAct (2011) would argue, Lisa’s performance instantiates healing as resistance
to injustice and youth healing as a practice of justice. Lisa’s outrage instantiating a
performance of healing means that it is an instant in a whole continuity of healing
performances. This means that healing is not an accomplished fact but an ongoing
process, a journey. Lisa works at it, aims at it, longs for it � ever approaching it
but never arriving.
The national subject is constituted through processes of differentiation in a
delicate interplay of proximity and distance (Ahmed 2004). As Razack argues,
‘Canada is a settler society with a history of genocide and colonization. Spatialtheory helps us to understand how Aboriginal, black, and other populations have
been spatially ordered and contained, and illustrates how colonization is always
a spatial project’. (2005, p. 89). In this light, the ‘someone at the next table’ is
laughing to send the message that ‘we don’t do that here’, thus distancing Lisa from
the proximity of the ‘Canadian’ subject. The inassimilable Other has come too close
to the Self and needs to be purged from this space (Ahmed 2000). When Lisa
confronts and asks him ‘is that very funny?’ she is contesting the we and symbolically
reinserting her Self right back into the space of the here. When she tells her father
that his way of eating is not appropriate, she is symbolically distancing her Self from
him as well. Through differentiating in the delicate proximity and distance of these
encounters, Lisa is actively constructing and reconstructing her unique subjectivity
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as different both from the ‘Asian’ Self of her father and from the ‘Canadian’ Self of
the one who laughs at her father. Perhaps it is the uniqueness of such encounters
between youth agency and structural constrains through which youth construct their
unique subjectivities that Urlich Beck theorized as increasing individualization ofyouth (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009). Drawing on Beck’s theorizing and the
passionate conversation it initiated among Roberts (2010, 2012), Threadgold (2011),
and Woodman (2009, 2010), we argue that Lisa is a unique one-and-only individual
as Lisa, but she is also simultaneously constrained by nationalist discursive practices
that construct her as a generic Asian.
If, as we have argued, healing is an active constructing and reconstructing of self
to mend injurious social relations, then Lisa is actively performing a practice of
healing as an ongoing process of constituting self.Lisa’s angry response may be interpreted as destructive and dysfunctional.
Far from a healing performance, it would likely be seen as threatening and
dangerous. Imagine an angry youth with a gun � and fill in the blanks which result
in the shooting of so many. However, pushing down the anger is not a healing
practice either, although some youth sometimes use it as a coping strategy when
downloading is too risky and outlet options are too limited. Policing and containing
the anger of violated youths is a strategy of maintaining violent status quo where
youth are targeted for regulation as violent and dangerous in an incredible reversal(Kelly 2000, 2003). As Ahmed observes, ‘the exposure of violence becomes the origin
of violence . . . we are angry about racism, about forms of violence and power that are
hidden under the signs of civility and love’ (2009, p. 49). Indeed ReAct (2011) advises
youth that they have the right to be angry about the violence they experience, and
feminists urge women to claim and validate their anger (Frye 1983, Ahmed 2009).
More importantly for our purpose, Lisa’s anger is an emotion that circulates through
the delicately woven space of proximity and distance within which she soothes the
embarrassment and reconstructs her Asian�Canadian Self. Her anger simulta-neously makes visible the violence of the laughter and facilitates her performance of
healing the inflicted wound. It is important to note here that healing is not a response
to violence as violence and healing are simultaneous relational processes of Self and
Other produced and reproduced by the same boundary of inclusion/exclusion drawn
around Canadianness.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that violence and healing are relational processes,
at once creating and contesting the inclusion/exclusion boundaries of Self and Other.
We have taken a particular encounter and discussed a particular form of youth
violence and healing but youth violence and healing happen in many forms. Many
racialized minority youths in migrant families in the West are torn apart by violent
forces of migration and racialization. They deal with violence in many ways and take
many paths to healing. Some seek healing through fighting back and doing violence
to purge the violence accumulated in their wounded souls. Others walk away fromviolence carrying the anger within and exploding at another time. Still others push it
down and refocus the anger towards basketball or substance use to soothe the
wounds or numb the pain. Can we call these performances of healing? Don’t we need
to untangle youth strategies that heal from those that do not? But who defines what
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is healing and what is not? We are back where we started, once again asking the
questions we were pondering in our workshops. Although we have addressed some of
the struggles in our theorizing, we have also come up with more questions.
So can we call these responses strategies of youth healing? Yes, if we see healing
as a response to violence because what youth do to soothe the wounds of prior
violence is a healing response. Yes, if we consider the blurring of the boundarybetween violence and healing because there is healing in violence and violence in
healing. Yes, if we view violence and healing as a dualism where personal and social
transformation happens through the struggle of opposites because for every act of
violence there is a response of healing. This brings back broader social theories into
the discussion, questioning whether the struggle of opposites is truly transformative.
This also asks whether anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive theories defend
oppressive status quo more than they challenge it. Playing the same game and
adhering to the same rules of the game, though in opposition, such approaches
cannot change the system. No, these youth strategies are not healing if we look at
violence and healing as simultaneous relational processes. If healing aims at mending
injurious social relations, then these strategies are not healing because they either
turn the violence outward towards Others (revenge fighting) or turn it inward
towards Self (substance use), or postpone it (swallowing it now, exploding later), or
divert it (basketball). They do not aim at mending the social relations, and this
defeats the very purpose of healing.So what does all this mean for critical youth studies and for youth work
practitioners, educators, researchers, policy-makers, and activists? We conclude by
briefly touching on salient implications of our discussion. By untangling youth
violence from the brute physicality of its extraordinary forms and positioning it
within ordinary life experiences of youth, we are inviting people to work with youth
violence as an ordinary relational process within our reach. It is not something
extraordinary requiring extraordinary measures. By probing the inseparability of
violence and healing, we are opening up space for creative possibilities of personal
and social change. If violence and healing are inseparable, we can create fecund
spaces of healing even within spaces seen as virulent youth violence. By framing
violence and healing in this particular way, we are offering alternative conceptualiza-
tion for youth studies to critically engage and for practitioners, researchers, policy-
makers, and activists to tease out in their work. What might this look like when
fleshed out in practice? What might people see differently through this lens?
People who work with schoolyard bullying or youth violence in local commu-
nities in cities like Chicago, London, Paris, Toronto, or Vancouver might be mindfulof how youth produce new violence in their own unique ways at the same time as they
copy what they see around them and reproduce the global bullying and violence
among countries. They might seek healing at all levels, from local to global.
Policymakers might be mindful of how the soft knives and guns of their policies
maim and kill multitudes of youth. They might seek the healing possibilities inherent
in processes of policy-making. Educators and researchers might be mindful of
how their scholarship produces epistemic violence (Marker 2003) and seek creative
possibilities of what we call epistemic healing. They might be mindful that their
scholarship wounds as much as it heals and take their ethical and epistemic
responsibility more seriously. Activists looking for the origin of youth violence in
outside structures of injustice and inequity might look into their practices and
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examine their own implication in these structures and seek new possibilities of
liberation. Youth practitioners might be mindful of the violence in their inter-
personal relationships and seek the inherent healing within those very relationships.
In short, we might be mindful that delinking violence from healing is delinking
the accountability of Self for the violence done to Others. We might own up to our
ethical responsibility and imagine how we can create a different world.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada (SSHRCC) for the generous grant to support the research on which this paper isbased. We would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of the Journal of Youth Studiesfor their insightful critique and meticulous attention.
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