Fijian Urban Youth Futures: Arts | Transmission | Resilience

The online exhibition iSausauvou: Arts | Transmission | Resilience (2022–ongoing) was organized in the framework of “Urban Pathways: Fiji. Youth. Arts. Culture.,” a collaborative research project funded by the British Academy’s Youth Futures program. Following an overview of the project and its core activities, this article focuses on the online exhibition, which showcases artworks created by young people who live in Fiji and its diaspora communities. Asked to reflect on urban youth culture, these young artists contemplate the social and cultural expectations that come with being youth in a multifaith, multilingual urban environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. By putting these youth artistic expressions within the framework of scholarship of “the future,” this paper aims to move away from the tendency to associate youth with problems such as youth unemployment and lack of education, and instead focus on how youth imagine the future through art.