CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND UNCERTAINTY Chemical Youth Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life Anita Hardon Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty Series Editors Patrick Brown University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anna Olofsson Mid Sweden University Östersund, Sweden Jens O. Zinn University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia Palgrave’s Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty series publishes mono- graphs, edited volumes and Palgrave Pivots that capture and analyse how societies, organisations, groups and individuals experience and confront uncertain futures. This series will provide a multidisciplinary home to consolidate this dynamic and growing academic field, bringing together and representing the state of the art on various topics within the broader domain of crit- ical studies of risk and uncertainty. Moreover, the series is sensitive to the broader political, structural and socio-cultural conditions in which particular approaches to complexity and uncertainty become legitimated ahead of others. It provides cutting edge theoretical and empirical, as well as established and emerging methodological contributions, and welcomes projects on risk, trust, hope, intuition, emotions and faith. Explorations into the institutionalisation of approaches to uncertainty within regulatory and other governmental regimes are also of interest. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15840 Anita Hardon Chemical Youth Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life Anita Hardon University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, the Netherlands ISSN 2523-7268 ISSN 2523-7276 (electronic) Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty ISBN 978-3-030-57080-4 ISBN 978-3-030-57081-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57081-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Inter- national License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Krishna Chavda This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgments So many young people generously shared their chemical practices and experiences with us on street corners and beaches, in lodgings, bars, and parks, in classrooms, and at conferences. They live in eight global cities—Amsterdam, Paris, Makassar, Yogyakarta, Cagayan de Oro, Puerto Princesa, Brooklyn, and Addis Ababa—where they are busy in their quests for a good life. They engaged with us in many different ways. In one-on-one chats, informal groups, and focus group discussions that we held in karaoke bars and other relative private public spaces, they told us about their everyday chemical habits, and their collabora- tive experiments, and in doing so they gave us insights into their dreams and aspirations, and their concerns and challenges. I am also grateful for the enthusiastic participation and fine-grained ethnographic research done by the 25 youth ethnographers involved in the ChemicalYouth project, eight of whom did so as part of their doctoral research and many of the others as part of their master’s or bachelor’s degrees. Their bios are appended to the chapters in which their findings are presented. They collaborated with their peers to unravel specific kinds v vi Acknowledgments of chemicals practices, analyze our findings, and write up their ethno- graphic insights in chapters and articles, which together form the basis for this book. I thank them for doing research in difficult circumstances on sensitive topics, and for staying in touch long after their research contracts ended. Nastasja Roels, Mariana Rios Sandoval, Swasti Mishra, Tait Mandler, Rosalijn Both, Lisanne Claessens, Efenita Taqueban, Gideon Lasco, and Diana Pakasi collaborated in the project as Ph.D. students, which meant that we worked together for many years. To them I wish to say: I have learned so much by traveling with you along your Ph.D. trajectories. I thoroughly enjoyed and learned so much from participating in field- work with you, and I admire how you overcame challenges along the way, by openly discussing them with me and your other supervisors and by finding support from your peers. I have done multisited ethnographic research before, but the collaboration I observed in the ChemicalYouth project is notable for its quality and depth. Your commitment to field- work, your creativity and diligence in writing up your monographs, and your support for your peers has been key to our joint endeavor. I am happy that this book showcases the impressive work that you have done, and provides a basis for continued work in ChemicalYouth 2.0. Throughout the project, Hayley Murray coordinated the European portion of our team and provided managerial support to the project. Our intense collaborations and ever-expanding inquiries created a heavy administrative burden, which Hayley managed in a calm and professional way. She also helped develop the ChemicalYouth website, which is linked to this book, with Mariana Rios Sandoval and Nastasja Roels, and she liaised with the designers who helped us develop the online space. She organized the ChemicalYouth seminars and workshop, and facilitated the travel of invitees, who were always impressed by the hospitality and efficiency that she radiates. In the Philippines and Indonesia, I collaborated with Michael Lim Tan and Nurul Ilmi Idrus. They helped train and provided guidance to the youth ethnographers working there with much enthusiasm and analytical rigor, and they edited the books that we published in these countries. In Indonesia, Pande Made Kutanegara and Irwan Hidayana participated in the ChemicalYouth project by supervising students and Acknowledgments vii advising on implementation and impact strategies. In the Philippines, Soledad Dalisay, Madel Landicho, and Efenita Taqueban facilitated and organized the ChemicalYouth fieldwork, integrating the theme into two field schools of the Department of Anthropology of the University of the Philippines which proved to be intense learning events. Our collab- orations in the past six years of this project have been invaluable to the novel understandings that have emerged from our collaborative inquiry. Being anthropologists, our roles in the project went beyond supervision. We also collaborated in fieldwork, engaging with youth to better under- stand their lives and their chemical practices, and we jointly wrote up case studies. Michael Lim Tan and Nurul Ilmi Idrus further helped orga- nize panels at national and regional conferences, and played a key role in the artistic translations that emerged from this project. I know our collaboration will not end here. Special thanks go to the ChemicalYouth team of the Palawan Studies Center in Puerto Princesa, the Philippines. Together we did long-term fieldwork, providing insights into the dynamic nature of chemical use in a rapidly transforming economic hub, resulting also in a separate edited volume “Modernizing Frontier.” Thank you Michael Doblado, Alvie Timbancaya, Ian Anthony Davatos, Leo Diego, Floralice Josol, and Ralph Pulanco for intense periods of collaborative inquiry, including our discussions during the 14 hour boat ride to Cuyo, Palawan’s oldest town and former capital city, where we isolated ourselves to analyze our fieldnotes. In the Netherlands and France, Emilia Sanabria, while still working at Ecole Superiere Normal, Lyon, was appointed as co-investigator on the ChemicalYouth project, to develop with me the analytical frame- work for the project and to supervise Ph.D. students. It was such a plea- sure to work with Emilia in this project. She provided consistent and generous inspiration to the ethnographers, linking them to new liter- ature, carefully reading their work, and pushing them to rethink their observations. She also invited a series of inspiring scholars to visit the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam to interact with us in seminars and workshops. Together,