Young People’s Participation. Группа авторов
href="#ulink_6da124c0-a063-5a68-a6c9-df9c253868d7">2018). Several studies have highlighted the different possibilities of engagement accessible to urban and rural young people (Farrugia, 2019), while temporal aspects are relevant in explaining young people’s involvement (Feixa et al, 2016), especially in relation to forms of engagement that require a relevant investment of time to be fulfilled (such as volunteering or activism) (Pitti, 2018). The book explores the relationships between participation and both traditional and emerging forms of inequality.
Participation can be a means through which young people seek to cope with the different forms of inequality they encounter in their lives (Loncle et al, 2012). However, some practices and logics of youth participation produce and reproduce forms of inequality that hinder young people’s full engagement and their rights to participate (Batsleer et al, 2020). The book provides a critical assessment of how specific ways of structuring and promoting youth participation can create ‘hierarchies of engagement’ and systematic forms of exclusion, and accentuate certain inequalities. It also examines participation’s possibilities for inclusion, innovation and change.
Outline of the book
This book arose out of network meetings in 2018 and 2019 with scholars across Europe and from different fields in the social sciences, who shared a strong interest in strengthening young people’s inclusion, recognition and participation on issues that matter to them. With evidenced examples and substantive research from these authors, the book challenges current policies and practices on young people’s participation and asks, as a result, how young people can be supported to take part in social change and decision making and what can be learnt from young people’s own initiatives.
The first part of the book contains three chapters written by and with young people who explore the experiences and the outcomes of their own participation. Chapter 2 is written by Alessio La Terra, a young activist involved in the leftist social movement organisation Làbas, based in Bologna. The chapter considers the story of Quaderni Urbani, a self-organised cultural project that, through art, is seeking to develop and share radical messages and political activism on migration, housing and other social issues. The chapter focuses on the practice of ‘cultural activism’ and discusses the opportunities and challenges of combining radical political activism and cultural engagement. Chapter 3 learns from experiences in Scotland, where young people involved with Young Edinburgh Action (YEA), the city of Edinburgh’s youth participation strategy, undertook participatory action projects and, subsequently, went on to co-produce a UK-wide network to improve young people’s mental health (TRIUMPH). The chapter is co-authored by Katherine Dempsie and Myada Eltiraifi, two young people involved in first YEA and then TRIUMPH, along with Christina McMellon, who supported their involvement throughout. Chapter 4 is written by Darpan Raj Gautam and Barwaqo Jama Hussein, who took part in a project entitled Part of the Community, organised by the NGO Action Aid Denmark. The project aimed to develop fora for young people in deprived neighbourhoods, so young people could share their experiences of inequality and, together, gain influence and democratic experiences. These three chapters provide insights into the forms of and motivations for young people’s engagement, as well as some of the difficulties these young people encountered in their participation journeys.
In Part II, four chapters revisit youth participation and inequality by investigating contemporary conditions and forms of youth participation. The section examines how young people’s participation has been affected and shaped by broader changes in the economy, technological innovation, regimes and policies. Chapter 5 develops a context-based definition of social participation, to then consider the diverse forms of participation and factors that influence young people’s agency and ability to engage. The authors find that experiencing inequalities seems to spur, rather than dissuade, young people’s engagement. Chapter 6 revisits young people’s political engagement, taking a historical perspective from the 1970s on youth rebellions and reflecting on surveys with young people via the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Chapter 7 focuses on young people’s digital citizenship. Drawing on cross-European quantitative data and qualitative findings from Estonia, it explores how young people become informed, take a stand and take action through digital participation. The authors discuss how digital participation can also create inequalities of participation between groups of young people. Chapter 8 introduces the term ‘project regime’ to demonstrate how young people’s participation is often facilitated and organised as projects, and how the managerial orders and logics of projects profoundly affect the conditions for young people’s participation. Drawing on two case studies, the authors shows how the orders and logics of project organisation decide which, how and to what aims young people can participate in change and decision making within these project-based spaces for participation.
In Part III, chapters focus on how young people’s participation takes different forms in different contexts. Each chapter is based on a study or project with a specific group of young people, where young people seek to make changes for their lives and others. Chapter 9 considers five cases of youth activism in political squats, to demonstrate how young people’s activism aims to counteract austerity measures and economic crisis in Italy. The chapter focuses on young people’s collective reactions to inequality through self-organisation and prefigurative actions. Chapter 10 likewise looks at young people’s self-organisation in public spaces. The author explores how young people seek to turn abandoned urban spaces into spaces of participation and the accompanying challenges for the young people when they self-organise. In Chapter 11, the space for participation changes from a public to an individual and institutional space, with an analysis of how young people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder struggle in their meetings with their statutory caseworkers. The study shows the young people’s struggles to be considered active participants in decision making concerning crucial matters in their lives. Chapter 12 describes how young asylum seekers in the UK worked collectively to make their experiences heard and visible within a hostile and alienating public space.
Part IV addresses how young people’s participation can be supported through specific approaches and methodologies within research and practice. Research on young people’s participation has a strong tradition of developing methodologies that seek to enable young people to express and explore their views (Pink, 2007). This section builds on that tradition, to consider which methodologies appear effective in supporting young people’s participation – and potential innovations. Chapter 13 reviews the pernicious challenges for young people’s participation activities, such as tokenism, lack of impact on decision making, and criticisms that the young people involved are unrepresentative. It then explores examples of youth-led research, which address many of these challenges, due to young people being recognised as generators of knowledge, with legitimacy and credibility. Chapters 14 and 15 both present and explore new methodological approaches to support young people’s participation in research. Chapter 14 discusses the methodology ‘journey mapping’ and illustrate how the methodology can support young people to form and share their often multifaceted experiences when taking part in participatory projects. Chapter 15 explores how film making can provide a playful framework for young people to express their non-verbal, embodied and visual experiences living in rural settings. Finally, Chapter 16 draws on the methodologies of participatory action research and critical utopian action research to argue for transformative learning to be central to participation processes for young people at risk of marginalisation. The chapter underlines that participatory processes necessitate reciprocal learning for both the young people and adults involved and that this, in turn, redresses power imbalances and engenders co-inquiry and mutual reciprocity in relationships of respect. The editors’ concluding remarks in Chapter 17 complete the book.
Notes
1Broadly, the book address young people between the ages of 12 and 24 (see