Security Spectacles, Neoliberal Urbanization, and Homeless
Youth in Vancouver 2010 – 12th July
Tuesday 12th July 3.30 – 5.30 Room 151 Birkbeck Main
Building
Free and open to all – no registration – just turn up
Jacqueline Kennelly (Carleton University, Ottawa)
This paper examines the experiences of homeless and street-involved young people with policing and
surveillance practices instituted within the city of Vancouver in preparation for the 2010 Olympic
Games. Tracing intensifed and differentiated encounters with the security apparatus before and during
the Games, the paper accounts for the experiences of the youth through a theoretical frame that
understands security as a ‘spectacle’ – related to the spectacle of the Olympics themselves – that
intersects with practices of city marketing. These two forces in combination constitute the conditions
whereby particular forms of symbolic (and material) violence are enhanced within the Olympic city for
its most marginalized members.
Jacqueline Kennelly is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is the
co-author (with Jo-Anne Dillabough) of Lost Youth in the Global City: Class, Culture, and the Urban
Imaginary (Routledge, 2010), and the author of Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism, and Agency in a
Neoliberal Era (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011). Jacqueline is co-author (with Paul Watt, Department of
GEDS, Birkbeck) of a forthcoming paper – ‘Sanitizing public space in Olympic host cities:
the spatial experiences of marginalized youth in 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London’ – in a
special issue of Sociology on the London 2012 Olympics. Her research interests include youth cultures,
social exclusion and inclusion, citizenship, gentrification studies, and social movements. Her current
research project is a cross-national study of the impacts of the Vancouver (2010) and London (2012)
Olympic Games on low-income youth.
This event is presented jointly with the Olympic City Critiques Reading Group (Department of GEDS, Birkbeck)
