Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development

Extract

Dominant societal discourses often categorize young people as either holding democratic promise for the future or as monstrous and destructive folk devils—Giroux’s (2012) ‘disposable youth’. These stereotypes range from patronizing to prejudiced. They are also patently myopic, as Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development demonstrates. A contribution to the Policy Press ‘Rethinking Community Development’ series, this collection presents a diversity of voices exploring young people’s democratic practices in eight countries and across a wide range of issues. The book addresses several key themes for radical democracy including citizenship, activism and hope, as well exploring important movements such as Black Lives Matter and ecojustice.

How are we to understand young people’s struggles for autonomy, agency and participation in a world where they are denied full participation in civic life? In their introductory chapter, Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü employ a Bordieusian lens to theorize the symbolic violence of adultism, which imposes a state of exception on young people where their agency and autonomy is limited and their full citizenship is denied. The editors draw on Isin and Nielsen’s (2008) concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ to analyse how young people are constituting themselves as citizens regardless of the status ascribed to them by adults. The diverse groups of young people who we meet through the pages of this book are experimenting with a variety of forms, orientation, strategies, technologies and modes of being political. For example: young LGBTQ+ people in Britain creating and occupying online spaces to express new subjectivities and sexual citizenship (Carr and Hanbury, chp. 7); young Kenyans organizing to resist their marginalization in political decision-making (Ochieng et al., chp. 9); young climate activists from across the globe converging on the streets as part of diverse intersectional alliances for climate justice (Arya, chp. 13). Examples such as these illustrate the ways in which young people globally are at the forefront of radical democratic experiments to shift social norms and cultural practices. Adults have much to learn from them.