Exploring the Political in Contemporary Youth Citizenship

Abstract

Accepting that politics is “an activity through which individuals and groups articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce competing claims to social change or maintain status quo” (Sheehan 2006: 3), this panel is interested in bringing together a series of interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical papers about contemporary practices, attitudes and models of youth citizenship. Young people, especially, have expressed a distain about the way in which politics is run and have made a repeated attempt to change long-established practices via, for instance, non-institutionalised forms of political participation. Among these the climate emergency is perhaps the most-far reaching at present, bringing students out of schools and into the streets. Yet, it is also young people whose voices are often unheeded by institutionalised and elite-led narratives on politics, migration or indeed citizenship education. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples to this effect is the overlooked issue of young peoples’ roles in migrant families. This panels seeks to respond to the resulting paradox in what we call as ‘contemporary models of youth citizenship.’ Specifically, we invite papers which explore the political in the many arenas, situations and movements in order to provide a ‘voice’ to young people. Of special interest are papers dealing with case(s) 1) where young people invent new spaces and create options for their voices to be heard; 2) acts of youth citizenship (Isin and Nielsen 2008) are exemplified, whereby young people make ground breaking steps for invoking their political agency on their own or as part of larger social movements and 3) revisit outdated models of and opportunities for youth citizenships to emerge.

Title	Details
Citizenship on Timeout? Mapping Youth Perceptions of ‘Good’ Citizenship in the Nexus of Migration and Social Media	View Paper Details
Youth Understanding of Participation: a Case from a European Project	View Paper Details
Can Group Consciousness Predict Styles of Political Involvement?	View Paper Details