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.
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