The establishment of living spaces for youngsters in poor neighborhoods, which have a fundamental rule of non-exclusion, raises thorny questions about the social and cultural treatment of their life together. What tools do we have for managing this ? How do we use the energies drawn from our desire to do good ? How to we imagine the training of an educator that would answer the challenge of unconditional acceptance ? In Jerusalem, the creation of youth centers with their rules for living, under the aegis of the Beit Ham association, shows us a singular and sometimes stuning experiment where the cultural object often serves as a hyphen bridging the gulf between people.
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Olivier Douville : on “ ethnicized ” withdrawal in excluded adolescents
This article crosses psychoanalytical and anthropological perspectives in order to analyse the logics of social fractures in adolescence when these are experienced and legitimized in terms of “ ethnic ”or “ racial ” fractures. These demands are made into the symptom of a serious rupture in the assemblages between otherness and identity. The fate of many young people, though dedicated to entering into a shared, secular world, is here envisaged as a response to a logic of segregation.
Antoine Kattar : the space of tradition in daily life, regarding lebanese adolescents
In this article, we offer a reading after-the-fact of interviews with Lebanese adolescents born at the end of the so-called civil war (1975-1990), experiencing their intersubjective and social relations in situations of fragility and precariousness in Karm Al Zaïtoun (a neighborhood in east Beyrouth). Three spaces of circulation influence the formation of identity processes in these Lebanese adolescents : the “ tradition ”space, the “ day-to-day survival ” space, and the “ imported models for identification ” space. Here we will speak more specifically of the relation that the Lebanese adolescent maintains with the “ tradition-” space and the “ day-to-day survival ”space. The latter is marked by identification with heroic figures, territorial domination and the rituals of daily practices. This daily space functions as a space for survival, in which adolescents have a deep investment. The space of tradition provides the adolescent with protection and a form of continuity of self, but it remains threatening and aleatory, insofar as it is marked by a break with the past tied to the war. The absence of confrontation of space with generational time does not facilitate reference to a shared, legitimized past, that could guarantee continuity of self.
Maria Fatima, Olivia Sudsbrack : project phoenix : collective effort at the protection of adolescents through the mobilization of family and institutional resources
At the request of a juvenile court judge from the Tribunal of Brasilia, the department of Social Psychology of the federal University as set up a project with two hundred youngsters the justice system and their families. Entitled “ Project Phoenix ”, this work aims to reinforce the capacities of families and adolescents to protect themselves against the violence and the hold of the favela, or slum. Exchanges within the group foster recognition of each person’s resources. This article written by Maria Fatima Olivia Sudsbrack, professor and initiator of this project, analyses the process itself through more than a year with these youngsters and their families. Through her first-person account and her analysis, she opens up some paths for French educators.
Teresa Cristina Carreteiro : brazilian youth, institutions and change in underprivelaged groups
Young Brazilians, living in troubled neighborhoods marked by the drug trade, experiment with violence and are often fascinated by it, even more so in that they are seeking recognition. To obtain this, they can not count on social service institutions, which have often tended to stigmatize them while the drug trade welcomes them. But some people know how to avoid this trap and overcome the conditions of their difficult living conditions. Thus Daniel, who with the author, elaborated his life story for several years, succeeded, thanks to support from differents sources and in spite of a life filled with obstacles and dangers in building his house, holding down a regular and legal job, helping to establish itself and changing his life by establishing other bonds of solidarity and conviviality.
Dominique Dray : adolescence : world shock at the crossroads of culture
Group homes that receive adolescents from urban housing projects are here envisaged as places of contact between two cultures – the shock of two cultures. Educators must create structural liaisons between the world of adolescents and that of discipline, to work to transform the shock into a cultural crossroads. This implies a rearrangement of the institutional setting.
The placement of a youth in a group home is here envisaged as a situation similar to migration. Without negating the relevance of the usual interpretation of transgressive adolescent behavior as symptomatic, a different, and complementary reading is offered here. These behaviors are a attempt by adolescents to maintain their inscription in the world they come from, and more generally, to deal with a conflict of norms.
The example of a runaway illustrates this argument.
Joëlle Bordet : modes of socialization of adolescents in low income urban housing projects and their relationship with legality
This article aims to retrace the evolution since the eighties of the relationship between youths and the economy of the drug trade and to analyze their influence on their modes of socialization. With reference to these analyses, we identify education issues, in relation to the youths themselves, their families and the professionals who have daily contact with them.
Denis Salas : (re)incarnating disciplinary law
This article deals with the relations that youths from urban housing projects and their families have with the law. The regulation of their lives by obscure and infra-legal norms interposes itself and relegates the official norm to the background. It becomes strange, threatening and inhospitable. So that the juvenile justice system must work with this widening gap if it is to avoid the risk of tipping into repressive violence.
Philippe Gutton : creation and society
We study the dialectic opposition between two dynamics : adolescent creativity, which is supposed to be shared, and socio-political institutions. The second may frame the first harmoniously or there may be a rupture of development.
Rémy Potier : the “ case of W. Gombrowicz ”. the ideal of youth in the indifference of the sexes
Follow the “ pattern ” of youth in W Gombrowicz’s work, which shows the specific nostalgia of the adult gaze upon time that for him has passed : youth. He reveals the difference through which he grasped that event. Far from restoring the “ genital archaic ” present in the process of “ sexual differentiation ”, it is in the indifference of gender that adolescence is gripped. Masculine and feminine are indifferent as a pure form, beauty being faddish, and are claimed in the adult’s nostalgia as an observer of youth. Three aspects of this point of view qualifying the unconscious dimension at work in this “ pattern ” : the adolescent ideal of purity, the adolescent relation to excess, and finally the question of evanescence in its relationship with time.