Journal Article: Making Ends Meet: Youth Enterprise at the Intersections

Stephen Young, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Craig Jeffrey, University of Oxford

Much of the scholarship associated with the “urban turn” in South Asia has focused on the upper middle-class or the poor. We instead examine social change through the lens of interstitial places and populations. In particular, we focus on young men who find themselves “in-between” in multiple senses: between youth and adulthood, the rich and poor, and the rural and urban. We argue that this “in-betweenness” is something that is actually felt by young men and that it shapes how they navigate a changing economic and institutional landscape. We further show how the forms of enterprise they engage in work to stitch together the rural and urban in new ways.