Final Report Summary - CHEMICALYOUTH (What chemicals do for youths in their everyday lives)
The ChemicalYouth project describe how chemicals help young people imagine their future and achieve their aspirations in diverse urban settings. It builds on past studies that have sought to interpret illicit drug use, describing how youth “feel about their drug use”, the pleasures that taking drugs entail, and how drug use informs youth identity and social relations. Moving beyond these more interpretive studies of illicit drug use, our ethnographies address how youth, almost invariably in groups, use a wide range of both licit and illicit chemical substances as tools to enhance their lives: to feel happy, beautiful, confident, strong, alert, energetic, eloquent, modern, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and much more .
The project situates chemical enhancement within the conditions of economic and labor market precarity now faced by young people around the world. While better educated than ever, youth today have a harder time landing secure jobs, having to comply with strict work and/or residency requirements and facing stiff competition from their peers. When they do find jobs, they often have to contend with temporary contracts, with work in the informal sector being even more insecure. Although increased access to education fuels hopes for a better future, the precarity of their working lives leads them to wonder whether their aspirations can truly be achieved.
The ChemicalYouth project provide insights into young people’s everyday and pragmatic regimes of drug use, showing how chemical enhancement helps them to manage stress and fulfill their aspirations in diverse living and working conditions. With a team of youth researchers, the Principle Investigator conducted case studies in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Paris and Lyon (France), Brooklyn (the United States), Makassar, Yogyakarta and Bira (Indonesia), and Batangas and Puerto Princesa (the Philippines). In these urban centers—vibrant magnets for young people as they seek to work, study, and make their futures—youth often inhabit “innovative, unchartered borderlands along which the global meets the local” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). These urban spaces of interaction gather people, ideas, and material objects and practices from around the world, creating gateways to a wider world of opportunities. Youths in these cities connect to each other and to opportunities through a wide range of social networks, music scenes, and social media, facilitated by mobile phones and growing access to the internet. And in doing so, they encounter a bewildering array of chemical products in their everyday lives.
Collaborative contrasting analysis was a key feature of the project, which involved 8 PhD students and 30 junior scholars. We exchanged field notes and read each other’s transcripts, seeking core themes for further analysis, and held workshops to interpret the emerging insights from our field sites in Asia, Europe and the US. We asked: Why are some practices similar and others so different? Contrasting enabled our team members to sharpen the analysis of their individual ethnographic sites, while also identifying core themes for analysis across the sites. Collectively, we attended to cross-cutting themes, such as the implications of chemical enhancement for moral selves and collectivities, and the ways that it is related to work.
Contrasting ethnographic analysis revealed that enhancement practices are temporal, dependent on situated life projects and future orientations. It pointed to the variety of practices at play—from rational techniques to trust and rituals—at play in the different contexts in which young people use chemicals. In Amsterdam and Paris, for example, youth mitigate harm by a combination of placing trust in each other’s experiences, utilizing formal services that determine the composition of ecstasy and other recreational pills, and relying on online reports made by peers. In places where youth are less connected to the digital world, they integrate their own embodied experiences with biomedical knowledge held by peers who work as nurses, doctors, and pharmacy assistants, and with advice given by psychiatrists and other doctors. While some risks are faced individually, the uncertainty, more often than not, is managed together.
The project situates chemical enhancement within the conditions of economic and labor market precarity now faced by young people around the world. While better educated than ever, youth today have a harder time landing secure jobs, having to comply with strict work and/or residency requirements and facing stiff competition from their peers. When they do find jobs, they often have to contend with temporary contracts, with work in the informal sector being even more insecure. Although increased access to education fuels hopes for a better future, the precarity of their working lives leads them to wonder whether their aspirations can truly be achieved.
The ChemicalYouth project provide insights into young people’s everyday and pragmatic regimes of drug use, showing how chemical enhancement helps them to manage stress and fulfill their aspirations in diverse living and working conditions. With a team of youth researchers, the Principle Investigator conducted case studies in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Paris and Lyon (France), Brooklyn (the United States), Makassar, Yogyakarta and Bira (Indonesia), and Batangas and Puerto Princesa (the Philippines). In these urban centers—vibrant magnets for young people as they seek to work, study, and make their futures—youth often inhabit “innovative, unchartered borderlands along which the global meets the local” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). These urban spaces of interaction gather people, ideas, and material objects and practices from around the world, creating gateways to a wider world of opportunities. Youths in these cities connect to each other and to opportunities through a wide range of social networks, music scenes, and social media, facilitated by mobile phones and growing access to the internet. And in doing so, they encounter a bewildering array of chemical products in their everyday lives.
Collaborative contrasting analysis was a key feature of the project, which involved 8 PhD students and 30 junior scholars. We exchanged field notes and read each other’s transcripts, seeking core themes for further analysis, and held workshops to interpret the emerging insights from our field sites in Asia, Europe and the US. We asked: Why are some practices similar and others so different? Contrasting enabled our team members to sharpen the analysis of their individual ethnographic sites, while also identifying core themes for analysis across the sites. Collectively, we attended to cross-cutting themes, such as the implications of chemical enhancement for moral selves and collectivities, and the ways that it is related to work.
Contrasting ethnographic analysis revealed that enhancement practices are temporal, dependent on situated life projects and future orientations. It pointed to the variety of practices at play—from rational techniques to trust and rituals—at play in the different contexts in which young people use chemicals. In Amsterdam and Paris, for example, youth mitigate harm by a combination of placing trust in each other’s experiences, utilizing formal services that determine the composition of ecstasy and other recreational pills, and relying on online reports made by peers. In places where youth are less connected to the digital world, they integrate their own embodied experiences with biomedical knowledge held by peers who work as nurses, doctors, and pharmacy assistants, and with advice given by psychiatrists and other doctors. While some risks are faced individually, the uncertainty, more often than not, is managed together.