Youth, Arts, and Education: Reassembling Subjectivity through Affect

The arts are often sought as a way of helping troubled youth. Youth, Arts and Education: Reassembling subjectivity through affect tells a different story about art and disadvantaged young people. Based on trans-national, empirical research into youth, arts and social disadvantage, Youth, Arts and Education argues that art does not 'help¿ young people. Rather, arts practices allow young people to re-make themselves and re-invent the arts, through creating new senses of self, new relationships to place and community. This perspective can be seen as an ethics of the young self and of art practice: a line of thinking that differs from popular ideas that art can be used to fix problems in the lives of youth at risk. In developing this ethics of the young self and art practice Anna Hickey-Moody draws of the thought of Gilles Deleuze, who argues that art is able to erase social cliché and refigure the emotions.