Youth geographies of urban estrangement in the Canadian city: risk management,race relations and the ‘sacrificial stranger’

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto. We analyze a cross-national subsample of 60 disadvantaged youths’ perceptions of urban social conflict and changing race relations in their city and school. We raise the larger question of how and why economically disadvantaged young people might embody particular understandings of safety, race, the other and security in different spatial registers of the city. We utilize an ethnographic methodology drawing from diverse but interrelated fields: border studies, the phenomenology of estrangement and a materialist version of critical race studies [(Ahmed, S. 1999. “Home and Away Narratives of Migration and Strangeness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347, Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ahmed, S. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge; Kearney, R., and V. E. Taylor. 2005. “A Conversation with Richard Kearney.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6 (2): 17–26)].     

Gender,Ethnicity, and Hybrid Forms of Community-Based Urban Activism in Vancouver, 1957–1978: The Strathcona story revisited

In the 1960s and early 1970s, residents of the neighbourhood of Strathcona in the city of Vancouver, Canada, successfully fought the grand designs of planners, engineers, politicians and developers to displace residents, demolish homes, clear lands, and rebuild the area. Against all odds, a relatively politically powerless group of residents and their supporters from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds formed a neighbourhood organization, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) to mount a last-ditch struggle to defend their homes, ways of life, and right to place. This article re-examines existing explanations of these historic events. It identifies the unique activism of ethnic minority women, and introduces the concept of culturally hybrid forms of oppositional practice—the interaction of cultural practices of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural residents of Strathcona with mainstream Canadian political discourse and structures. The article stresses the critical importance of broadening and complicating existing analyses of multi-ethnic women's community-based urban activism as a way of rethinking feminist conceptualizations of movement activism around place and identity.