Young people, well-being, resilience and enterprise: critical perspectives for the Anthropocene
Disparate times call for disparate methods. Let’s just say that this is the end of pre-history, this moment when planetary constraints start really coming to bear on the ever-expanding universe of the commodification of everything. This is the worldview-changing realization that some now call the Anthropocene. (McKenzie Wark 2016)
Rationale
Well-being, resilience and enterprise are key-words (Raymond Williams) in many policy, academic and community discourses about contemporary populations of children and young people around the globe. These ‘states-of-being’ are frequently imagined as being able to ‘inoculate’ individual children and young people against many of the education, training, work and life ‘disruptions’ that characterise the start of the 21st century.
Most often these key-words take the form of individualising and responsiblising, psycho-biological based, encouragements for persons to care for their own physical, mental and social health and well-being, to develop their resilience, and to become enterprising in a world that is taken-for-granted as being troubling, challenging and ‘disruptive’.
This call emerges from a sense that we need to develop new ways of ‘troubling’ these keywords at a time when planetary systems – environmental, capitalist – are in crisis.
We are looking to start conversations, collaborations 
and networking to discuss theoretical and/or methodological contributions to discussions about children and young people’s well-being, resilience and enterprise that:
1) Critically engage with and/or review what the literature on the Anthropocene offers childhood and youth studies for thinking about such things as ‘agency’, ‘structure’, ‘identity’, ‘belonging’,…
2) Trouble/unsettle key dimensions of these keywords, and the forms of regulation, intervention, and problematising of children and young people that they enable.
Important dates
Conference dates: 5-7 September, 2019
200-300 word abstracts to be sent to:
young.people.anthropocene@gmail.com
Call closes: March 15, 2019
Acceptance notified: April 05, 2019
Registration for presenters opens: MAY 15, 2019 (link here)
Registration for presenters closes: JUNE 15, 2019 (link here)
Registration for general public opens: JUNE 15, 2019 (link here)
Registration for general public closes: JULY 24, 2019 (link here)
Young People and the Anthropocene 