The Social Life of Teen Attention: Navigating Citizenship, Schooling and the World Wide Web in Cochabamba, Bolivia and Warsaw, Poland
This thesis is an anthropological treatise on teenage attention based on ethnographic fieldwork at two urban schools in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Warsaw, Poland. It proposes a socio-cognitive framework for an analysis of attention as a nexus comprised of ideological, bureaucratic, somatic, and affective elements as well as a form of practice that acts upon the world. I argue that youth are attentional agents capable of modifying their environment through attentional practice, which is, nevertheless structured by factors within the attentional nexus. I further argue that attentional practice has an intrinsically political character. The first section of this thesis considers the historical and institutional setting of my fieldsites and the import of combining psychological and anthropological perspectives on cognition towards an understanding of social phenomena at the collective level. In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of the social attentionscape to speak of elements within a delineated society that come to the centre of collective attention and are likely to become part of political agendas, including educational policies. The social attentionscape is grounded in historically shaped value systems and world imaginaries endorsed by governments and civil society. In Bolivia, imaginaries of Western modernity and development have a strained coexistence with ideologies of decolonisation. In Poland, a nationalist and Catholic ideal of Polishness clashes with the urban ideal of liberal European citizenship. In Chapter 2, I consider how those imaginaries relate to quotidian practices at the school, guiding pedagogic orientations through the (re)production of teachers’ normative attention and interacting with on-the-stop attentional needs of exam bureaucracy in Warsaw and the local community in Cochabamba. The second section of the thesis examines three areas of alleged youth ‘disconnection’: political participation (Chapter 3), social media (Chapter 4), and the classroom (Chapter 5). Social media and digital marketing technologies are often considered root causes of bottomless distraction and youth disinterest. Without negating their attention-grabbing qualities, I flip the focus to the broader ecology of youth’s attention. I show how youth disenchantment in electoral politics is not tantamount to political disinterest. Political participation is contingent on attention-grabbing moral sentiments such as “the right to decide” (for Warsaw youth) or “the right to work” (for my interlocutors in Cochabamba). I analyse the sphere of teenage digital sociality in terms of the phatic attention mechanisms it engages but also recognise social media as an integral constituent of other spheres of attentional practice, influencing political decision-making and youth’s attention at school. Attention in the classroom is shaped by a nexus of institutional and social factors. Those affect the development of joint attention and mutual correspondence between students and teachers. The thesis contributes to long-established anthropological debates on the relationship between agency and structure and between global and local influences, considering their interaction in attentional management. It also speaks to the rather novel concern in anthropology of the politics of cognition by exploring how directions in collective and individual attention work to assemble, strengthen, and reshape local cultural landscapes and power relations, contributing to the reproduction and contestation of the discursive and institutional status quo.
Adolescence, Attention, Bolivia, Poland, Politics, Schooling
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations