Youth Urban Worlds: Aesthetic Political Action in Montreal

This book argues that urban environments and their cultures challenge the very meaning and contours of the political process. Through ethnographies with racialized youth, urban farmers, “voluntary risk-takers”, skateboarders, student protesters and others, the book theorizes aesthetics as an increasingly crucial form of political action in contemporary urban life. Bringing together aspects of philosophy, critical geography, political sociology, urban anthropology, urban studies and cultural studies, this interdisciplinary work examines the centrality of pleasure, warmth, aesthetics and bodily feeling in these young people’s experience of the world. Aesthetics explains how young people can concretely influence the political process through disruptive behavior. Moving from a contemporary history of the city of Montreal since 1960 to an ethnographic description of the realities of urban youth in the city today, the book offers a different take on political life.