In Search of Political Youth Studies as a Subfield of Political Science: Editorial Introduction

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Girls and activism in a neoliberal time: How teen girls from Toronto negotiate care, activism, and extraordinary girlhood

Recently, a number of prominent teen girl activist leaders have been gaining the world’s attention, but how do girls not in the public eye and with less social power think about activism? Moreover, how do girls who may not exclusively define themselves as activists, negotiate their own desire to contribute to social change with challenges they identify as holding them back from doing so? Through qualitative research with eight teenage girls in Toronto, I explore the ways these teen girls define the “activist,” their role in activism, and the challenges holding them back from being more active. My methodology is congruent, reflecting my feminist and youth studies commitment to girls leading research, and my findings indicate that such an approach is crucial in order to truly understand how girls with less social power and public visibility experience the world and their roles within it. Doing so also challenge pre-conceived notions and standards of extraordinary girlhood. The findings coincide with what Catherine Rottenberg refers to as neoliberal feminism. The extraordinariness implicit in visible activism framed the girls from my study’s views on what it would take to be a true activist themselves, which was both intimidating and also at times is in contention with their monumental care and concern for loved ones.

Youth Studies

The field of youth studies is important to education for many reasons, but two stand out. First, understanding the learner is a central component of high-quality teaching. The vast majority of educators are working with young people, so having an understanding of young people’s lives underpins good educational practice. Second, education is “forward looking” in the sense that it is preparing young people for their next steps in life. This means that educators have a vested interest in understanding how social change impacts youth. Youth studies emerged in the early 1950s, in English-speaking countries, as researchers sought to account for the changes in young people’s lives brought about by mass secondary education and new youth consumer markets. At the outset, developmental psychology provided a framework that characterized youth as a stage of life between childhood and adulthood—a vulnerable stage that required monitoring and support. Critical of this approach because of its tendency to universalize youth out of context, sociological approaches have taken up a range of positions. These include a focus on young people as deviant or problematic; as consumers and as the instigators of new social and cultural approaches. Young people’s situation in 2019 reflects the opaque nature of the relationship between education and work, and there has emerged, on a global scale, a new “precarious” generation, one that has high levels of unemployment and underemployment and that also experiences high levels of poor health. Although the approaches to youth studies that were established at that time still resonate today, the situation of contemporary youth has ushered in new approaches. These include methodological innovations and developments, such as participatory research involving young people that ensures research is with, not just about, them and the opportunities that technological advances offer in the form of new digital methods and approaches to data archiving. Youth studies has shifted from concerns about how the young generation will “fit in” to society to an awareness that social and political decisions are required to ensure that young people can take their full place in the economic, political, and social processes and institutions of society. This development also shifts the focus from education as a producer of human capital for economic development to considerations of the role of education in equipping young people to participate fully in our changing world.

A Southern Charter for a Global Youth Studies to Benefit the World

This essay reflects on the process of developing a handbook that foregrounds Southern perspectives on youth life-worlds, and does so by realigning theory, praxis, and justice. It applies the principles of self-reliance, solidarity, self-knowledge and a move from subordination to interdependence as described in the 1990 report of The South Commission, led by Julius Nyerere, to youth studies scholars from the Global South. Taking seriously the South Commission’s injunction that responsibility for change rests with those from the South who need to recreate their relationship with the North in order to make a global rather than parochial contribution, it describes the aims of the handbook and the many challenges experienced in producing it. Among these challenges are the difficulty Southern scholars have in producing theory, the precarity of their lives, the invisibility of much existing Southern scholarship, and the importance of communities of practice within the South and between the South and North. It concludes by offering a charter for remaking youth studies from one that universalizes Northern perspectives into a truly global youth studies, one that is enriched by, and welcomes the contribution of Global South scholars on their own terms.

Global South Youth Studies, Its Forms and Differences among the South, and between the North and South

This essay comprises reflections of scholars in and originating from the Global South, plus some comments from Northern scholars, forming an integrated dialogue. It focuses on the development of youth studies in Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean, illuminating how youth studies in, from, and for the South emerge as a result of struggle—to get recognition, to theorize beyond dominant Northern frameworks, and state-led developments, and to be heard. Paradoxically, youth studies from the South are strongly influenced by the work of Northern scholars. Despite these influences, Northern ideas struggle to grasp local contexts and conditions and consequently there is a need for more localized knowledge and theorizing to make sense of young people’s lives outside the Global North. The reflections provide a reminder that struggles over the meaning and situation of youth, within particular contexts, are highly political.

Realigning Theory, Practice, and Justice in Global South Youth Studies

This essay outlines an agenda for youth studies from the vantage point of the Global South and describes the structure of the Oxford handbook of Global South Youth Studies. Youth in the Global South emerge in the postcolonial world in relation to material and social precarity, with their everyday practices constituting embodied forms of knowing, responses to their social, material, economic, and political circumstances. Research with Southern youth therefore involves working alongside, documenting, and acknowledging these practices, an exercise that constitutes a form of ‘epistepraxis’: a knowledge creation endeavor underpinned by contextually relevant theory, aligned with people’s innovative practices, in search of social justice. This approach is reflected in the structure of the handbook. An introductory section distils the conditions that precipitated the Global South and the characteristics of youthful populations that inhabit it. The second part grapples with features of life for youth in the Global South, unpacking eleven relevant concepts, using Southern theory. The final section continues to explore the intersections of theory, practice, and politics, shifting focus to look specifically at examples of methodological, practical, and policy-related interventions, in an attempt to disrupt business-as-usual knowledge production.