Yearning to labor

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight. Based on ethnographic field research in the housing projects of Limoges, the author chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate--and the despair it engenders. The book illuminates how the global spread of neoliberal ideologies and practices is experienced by contemporary urban youths in the process of constructing their identities. It also explores the ways they respond to the challenges of economic liberalization, deindustrialization, and social exclusion. It explores whether the French republican model of social integration, assimilation, and equality before the law remains viable in a context marked by severe economic exclusion in communities of ethnic and religious diversity.