1The very concept dossier is an appropriately celebratory but also imperfect signalling of the multiple layers and labours involved in producing a collection of articles that end up published in an academic journal in finished form under a shared thematic umbrella. In this short coda, I would like to reflect on what makes this collection “special” by focusing on three elements: First, I’ll comment on its inception, as the backstory of a dossier is a vital part of any collection’s intellectual biography and yet the process of convening a group and the discussions that animated and informed a dossier are often somewhat invisible by the time the final pieces are published. Second, I’ll offer brief remarks about each piece to draw attention to their shared tension concerning youth and this particular conjuncture. Third, I’ll reflect on the matter of gender, which is both an implicit theme across the dossier and one that deserves a little more explicit attention here.
2This dossier, titled It takes time to become young: Creativity, exchange and uncertainty in global scenarios, emerged from a workshop held in September 2024 at the Department SARAS at Sapienza University of Rome. The workshop was co-organised by two early career scholars, Andrea Buchetti and Irene Casagrande, whom themselves were in the midst of their own graduate studies – the thrilling and tortuous phase of dissertation writing following fieldwork in Mexico and Tunisia, respectively. Andrea and Irene worked tirelessly to invite a group of mid career scholars whose academic research and writing featured shared concerns and ethnographic sensibilities, focused on how youth in situated geographies navigate globally resonant uncertain times and spaces. Andrea and Irene hosted us over two days, curating a generative, lively, and generous space for individual presentations and group deliberations, punctuated by several smoking, coffee and snack breaks to take the academic conversations to the outdoor university pavements and the street cafés. The papers reflected different research and career stages and although we were all studying ‘youth’ in one way or another, each paper reflected a particular theoretical orientation. Each of us spoke about embedded research in field-sites spanning different parts of the globe, ranging from densely populated urban spaces to rural forests. I look back now on my 30 pages of frantic notes from those two days with much fondness and amusement. The breadth of empirical contexts and details were so wide, and yet each of our papers seemed to converge around certain themes and dilemmas that hat were, and remain, impossible to settle. That is the point perhaps in any social research trying to make sense of the unstated norms that govern behaviour, especially among cohorts whose very position challenges hegemonic assumptions.
3The workshop echoed a long standing duality within youth studies: where youth are depicted as both disruptive agents and redeemers, “makers and breakers” (Honwana, De Boeck 2005). Each paper emphasised in different ways how youth life worlds reflect pervasive uncertainty and also propositional modes of being and doing. Read together, our papers spoke to the myriad ways in which youth negotiate social adulthood, embodied practices, moral orders, cultural practices, and economic terrains. It is within these tensions that we collectively identified a space from which to think and write: a space where youth signal ways of imagining and building otherwise. Over time, some of us were able to commit to turning these workshop papers into journal articles, (which I will discuss in the next section) whilst others had competiting commitments including other publication outlets. Here I am thinking in particular of Ramy Aly and Monika Stern, who both enriched the workshop discussions and whose work and contributions implicitly informed this dossier. I too was unable to commit a full-length article at the time, but grateful to be given the chance to write this coda instead, which starts by naming and honouring the workshop that gave us all a reason to covene in the first instance to share works in progress and hold space for the informal conversations that would eventually turn into this “special” issue. Such collections are often the outcome of collective thinking spaces and gatherings that carry a certain kind of magic in their intensity and ephemerality. And it is the behind the scenes labour of those who co-host and facilitate such gatherings that often also turns into the editorial work involved in extending the collective conversation and liasing with an interested and receptive journal. For that workshop at Sapienza in September 2024, and indeed what followed in the form of this dossier, deep gratitude is owed to Andrea and Irene.
4Let me start here by by recounting the contributions of each piece included in this dossier, in no particular order. I will then offer some reflections on cross-cutting themes. In Rejuvenation by the State: Legal Identity and the Moral Economy of Age in Côte d’Ivoire, Armando Cutolo examines the widespread Ivorian practice known as «René Caillié», in which individuals strategically remake their legal identities by lowering their official age through supplementary civil registration procedures. Rather than interpreting these practices simply as fraud or bureaucratic dysfunction, Cutolo situates them within a broader moral economy of age, personhood, and social becoming. As Cutolo put it during the September 2024 workshop, «these guys are reborn in the realm of administration!». Through ethnographic attention to the tactical appropriation of state documentation from below, Cutolo shows how young people strategically rework the relationship between legal age and social age in contexts where bureaucratic timelines often obstruct social mobility, education, employment, and adulthood itself. The article ultimately argues that these practices represent a vernacular domestication of bureaucratic systems in order to restore socially meaningful trajectories of becoming. Rather than posing a rejection or defiance of the state tout court, these practices also raise important questions about the delicate dance between social time and biological time, what it takes to be rendered legible as a young person vis à vis the state and others, and ultimately speak to the broader set of performances involved to claim the very status of “youth”.
5In The Globally Familiar Revisited: Ethnographic Returns and Changing Masculinities, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan revisites earlier ethnographic work with aspiring hip hop artists in Delhi. Dattatreyan reflects on how the «globally familiar», the affective and mediated proximity produced through circulating digital cultures, has evolved alongside changing political and economic conditions in contemporary India. Focusing in particular on masculinity, aspiration, and precarious labour, the article explores how young men from migrant and working-class backgrounds use hip hop aesthetics, social media, and audiovisual production to reimagine themselves and their place within the city. Yet these practices are situated within increasingly unstable futures shaped by economic insecurity, platform capitalism, Hindu nationalism, and the uneven promises of visibility and success. Dattatreyan demonstrates how digital cultural production becomes both a resource for self-narration and a site through which anxieties about adulthood and masculine responsibility are negotiated. This piece also plays with an important methodological and analytical proposition: that of “ethnographic return”. As Dattatreyan writes this piece on the back of a recently published book by the title Globally Familiar, this article raises generative questions about what it mean to return not only to the place of one’s long-durée ethnographic engagement, but also to one’s own writing.
6In Dealing with “Crisis”: Kanak Youth Imaginaries and Styles in Rural Kanaky–New Caledonia, Matteo Gallo explores how Kanak youth in rural New Caledonia creatively engage with and rework dominant public narratives surrounding a supposed «youth crisis». Focusing on vernacular practices such as the «capuche» style (covering the face with hoods or shirts) alongside tagging and tattooing cultures, Gallo examines how these indigenous youth embody, negotiate, and resignify racialized discourses that frame them as deviant, depoliticized, and disconnected from tradition. Situating these practices within broader histories of colonial marginalization, intergenerational hierarchy, and media-driven moral panic, Gallo argues that youth styles function as aesthetic and embodied responses to social exclusion and uncertain futures, rather than merely forming modalities of resistance. In doing so, the article showcases the creative agency of Kanak youth as they transform stigma into shared forms of identity, visibility, and belonging.
7In The Coloniality of Casa: Homing, Emerging Adulthood, and Differentiated Embedding among South-Italian Youth in Northern England, Stefano Barone investigates the home-making practices of young South-Italian migrants living in Northern England, exploring how «homing» mediates experiences of migration, adulthood, and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic research among migrants in Preston, Barone shows how ideas of successful adulthood become closely tied to hard work, meritocracy, rootedness, and the ability to make a life abroad while managing nostalgia for Southern Italy. At the same time, these ideals produce distinctions between migrants deemed successful and those perceived as insufficiently «integrated» or unwilling to «move forward». Through the lens of coloniality, Barone demonstrates how neoliberal European values surrounding deservingness, productivity, and self-improvement shape migrants’ understandings of adulthood and belonging, even as these aspirations remain fragile, contradictory, and unevenly attainable.
8In The Gift of Being Young: Scraps Consumption and Coming of Age on the US–Mexico Border, Andrea Buchetti examines how young people in Tijuana creatively repurpose “discarded” U.S. consumer goods circulating through border street markets as part of an informal gift economy that support peer-to-peer processes of growing up, mentorship, and social reproduction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among a community of young skateboarders navigating family fragmentation, precarity, and US-Mexican border capitalism, Buchetti tells the backstory of skateboards that are made in Mexico, sold in the US and returned to Tijuana as second hand “discards”, thus becoming decommodified through everyday exchanges and transformed into gifts from older youth to younger youth. These “gifts” sustain peer solidarities, belonging, and age-based transitions. Challenging rigid distinctions between market exchange and moral economy, Buchetti shows how young people rework the terms of global capitalism, active agents reshaping the social lives of objects in ways that generate care for things and people, and shape particular forms of reciprocity, learning, care, and collective forms of becoming.
9These five articles reflect a shared tension: holding on the one hand affirmative and creative practices reflecting forms of experimentation, gifting, aspiration, sociality, style, and even humour. And on the other hand, reflecting structural harms and violence that condition situated but globally resonant forms of precarity, fracture, failed promises, exclusion, delayed adulthood, and loss. These tensions, between vitality and exhaustion, joy and mourning, creativity and uncertainty, seem to underpin our contemporary world in all its contradictions. It is also perhaps exactly why ethnography, as method, as a mode of being in the world, and as written genre, is more urgent than ever. Towards the end of our September 2024 workshop, Ramy Aly remarked that «it’s all about this tension… staying in the missing bits». These are tensions that cannot be quickly perceived, nore can they be easily counted or categorised. They require care-full, slow, sustained and committed engagements that seek ways to describe and analyse without resorting to flattening narratives of either uplift or despair. They call for what I call «staying with breakdown» (Thieme 2021).
10Let me explain what I mean by breakdown here, as it can be read in several ways. Breakdown can of course connote a sense of harm, violence, and enduring uncertainty. AND, at the same time, it can evoke other possibilities that coexist with backdrops of harm and uncertainty. For example, if we think in musical terms and jazz in particular, a breakdown is a vital part of a track. It offers a moment of suspension, interruption, and stripping back. While it remains within the flow of a piece, the rhythm and structure loosen to create space for improvisation, tension, and recomposition. It creates a vital space for musicians to explore a moment of autonomous creativity and experimentation whilst remaining committed to the ensemble with whom they are playing. The breakdown in this context stretches the imagination, and turn rupture into something else. If we connect the break-down as harm and break-down as expanded imagination, break-down can evoke the propositional register of what Stephen Jackson calls «broken-world thinking» (2014), which attempts to flip the script of modernity by taking erosion, breakdown, and decay (rather than growth, novelty, and progress) as its starting point (Jackson 2014; Thieme 2021). In doing so, it foregrounds the fragility and limits of the social, technological, and urban worlds we inhabit, while recognizing that the dominant stories and orders of modernity are themselves coming apart, perhaps to be remade, «but perhaps not» (2014: 221).
11Staying with breakdown, then, could offer ways to recognise that many of the dominant structures of modernity are in processes of undoing, decay, falling apart, and putting in sharp relief the false promises and premises of so-called progress. I have argued that breakdown can take place alongside life, or even be integral to «making life work» against the odds (Thieme 2021; 2025). It is not merely a sudden, unforeseen momentary collapse of structures and infrastructures. It is often witnessed and apprehended, generating countless ways to intersept breakdown and find opportunities for intervening, including within the cracks. What takes place (and takes time) in the cracks, at the interstices, hints at ways to see and do otherwise and in the meantime. Breakdown is therefore both a condition and an analytical register: it evokes a condition of living through fractured futures; it evokes both a mode of interruption and recomposition; and it offers an analytical invitation to unpack and rethink dominant assumptions. As such it allows us to “see” differently; to be curious in counter-intuitive ways, to play with our ethnographic disposition in order to suspend normative stances as we witness how individuals and groups rendered relationally precarious (such as youth) are vulnerable in one sense, yes, AND also the very people actively remaking the world around them at different scales and in different styles, on their own terms and on their own time. Again, «it’s all about this tension…»
12It seems appropriate here to make a note about gender, and the ways in which gender is reflected in several ways in this dossier. It was a coincidence that the five authors who were able to commit to this dossier were all male academics. It is worth mentioning that the workshop in September 2024 included three women, still a minority but still, represented none-the-less, and male over-representation was by no means deliberate. It is simply worth noting. Alongside the dominant male authorship of this dossier, it is also interesting to note that across all five articles, the ethnographic protagonists themselves, and the moral anxieties reflected in the empirical contexts narrated here, are overwhelmingly oriented around young men and masculinised forms of social becoming. We can see this recurring in different ways: the pressure to achieve «réussite» and social adulthood through bureaucratic recalibration in Côte d’Ivoire (Cutolo infra); the forms of predominantly hip hop masculinity, provision, aspiration, and precarity in Delhi (Dattatreyan infra); the moral panic around «delinquent» Kanak male youth in Kanaky-New Caledonia (Gallo infra); the geographies of migration and becoming amongst Italian youth transitioning to adulthood in England (Barone infra), and the peer-to-peer gifting practices and informal border economies that manifest on the US-Mexican border to form collective masculine sociality (Buchetti). That is to say, the social dramas that play out in these ethnographic works show us how labours, movements, modes of provisioning, navigations of legal and bureaucratic structures, social lifeworlds and aspirations concerning adulthood are mediated through masculine expectations and pressures. Most notably, across each of these articles, and as a collection, masculinities are place-based fragile social formations that are continually negotiated under conditions of breakdown, and operationalised through breakdown. In that sense, masculinities become part of an experimental terrain of improvisation, performance, and recomposition.
13To me, a female academic who has tended to work with predominantly young men across my research projects – in Nairobi’s popular neighbourhoods, in a London all-male prison, with migrant solidarity groups in Paris and Berlin –, this dossier made me think about gender in new ways. To what extent have 21st century preocupations with “youth” across academic, policy, and popular debates often been publically imagined through the figure of young men? “delinquent” young men, “hustling” young men, “migrant” young men, “aspiring” young men, “surplus” young men… What groups of youth become hyper-visible in moments of social, economic, and political break-down, and through what gendered lens? What groups of youth become invisible or narrated through other analytical categories all together? These questions of course emphasise the now well established notion that “youth” is not an age-based category, but rather a socially constructed and contingent one (Honwana, De Boeck 2005; Honwana 2012). These questions also emphasise the enduring relevance of Judith Butler's theory of gender and performativity (1990), arguing that gender is a verb, not a noun. Butler’s work asks us to pay attention to the myriad ways in which gender is continuously constituted through repeated embodied acts, performances, and evaluated according to particular socially constructed norms. But it merits re-emphasising that youth studies have always and continue to carry significant gendered, classed, and racialised considerations. In my own work and recent book Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi (2025), I recognise that hustle economies are also deeply gendered, in practice, in their representation (across fiction, film and music) and in their everyday embodied and storied performances. Even when women are centrally present, the public figure of “the hustler” is often masculinised in particular ways, and when women are seen as “hustling,” their livelihoods and dispositions have been depicted and moralised in particular ways (e.g. chapter 5 “Ghetto Gal: Gender, Life and Work at the Urban Margins”, Thieme 2025).
14The articles gathered here remind us that youth studies include an expansive repertoire of stories, biographies, and theories that continue to raise vital questions about how young people make their way in and through the world. Everyone, at one stage of their life, is in some sense a “youth.” And what these articles do show us, in conversation with wider youth scholarship, is that moving out of this phase of life is more than ever unobvious. During our workshop, Cutolo spoke about his interlocutors in Côte d’Ivoire and the dramatic reality of aging whilst still being unable to reach social adulthood. Speaking about «social time», Cutolo exclaimed, «it is terrible to become an old guy but not an elder!». This reflects not just a reality across all our research contexts, but also the alarming reality amongst so many “not so young” youth today whose life chances, livelihood prospects, and imagined futures have been systematically stunted by a confluence of economic, ecological, and political crises. Alcinda Honwana wrote about this in A Time of Youth (2012), where she develops the notion of «waithood» to describe prolonged and uncertain transitions between youth and adulthood. These five articles underline is the ways in which these periods and spaces of waithood and liminality, be they legal, spatial, temporal, administrative or affective, are not fixed or a fait accomplis. In this conjuncture, more than ever, staying with breakdown involves a constellation of ordinary experiments carried out by youth in diverse contexts. In worlds marked by breakdown, uncertainty, and uneven futures, young people are actively engaging in everyday labours of remaking the terms, tempos, and possibilities of life, juggling individual plans and intimate vacillations, and collective formations of solidarity, obligation, and becoming.
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