Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples’ activities. Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.

Prominent studies and opinion polls often claim to show that young people distrust politicians, they are disengaged from political institutions, and are disillusioned about democracy. But academic work conversely shows that young people are engaging with politics, merely in new and innovative ways. Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation responds to the gap between the claims of these findings. It explores whether, and how, young people work with and against contemporary politics - at institutional and grassroots levels. It also examines the role of civics education in addressing this so-called crisis of democracy. Instead of seeing civics education as the solution, they offer an approach to civics that acknowledges the increasingly diverse ways in which young people are engaging politically.

Young people’s participation is an urgent policy and practice concern across countries and context. This book showcases original research evidence and analysis to consider how, under what conditions and for what purposes young people participate in different parts of Europe. Focusing on the interplay between the concepts of youth, inequality and participation, this book explores how structural changes, including economic austerity, neoliberal policies and new patterns of migration, affect the conditions of young people’s participation and its aims. With contributions from a range of subject experts, including young people themselves, the book challenges current policies and practices on young people’s participation. It asks how young people can be better supported to take part in social change and decision-making and what can be learnt from young people’s own initiatives.

The Politics of Wellbeing in Transition examines the factors that can either help or hinder of young people's health and well-being through the lens of migration and migration control. It draws on data from a three-year-long study that examined former unaccompanied migrant children and young people with varying immigration statuses as they made the transition to adulthood. The accounts of the lives of young people from Afghanistan, Albania, and Eritrea presented in this book reveal the complexity realities that lie behind the concept of wellbeing within contexts of fluctuation and uncertainty; and how the ability to secure subjective well-being is governed by factors including country of origin, ethnicity, class, caste, and gender. By situating this work within an interdisciplinary analysis of wellbeing and how it has been conceptualized to date, this book highlights the limitations of existing understandings and how they might better capture the realities of what wellbeing means for lives in transition. At the same time Chase demonstrates the inherently political nature of wellbeing as a theory and a domain of policy and practice--to understand the promotion of well-being in the context of youth migration means critically engaging with issues of power, social justice, inequity, and discrimination.

Sarah Pickard offers a detailed and wide-ranging assessment of electoral and non-electoral political participation of young people in contemporary Britain, drawing on perspectives and insights from youth studies, political science and political sociology. This comprehensive book enquires into the approaches used by the social sciences to understand young people’s politics and documents youth-led evolutions in political behaviour. After unpicking key concepts including ‘political participation,’ ‘generations,’ the ‘political life-cycle,’ and the ‘youth vote,’ Pickard draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to trace the dynamics operating in electoral political participation since the 1960s. This includes the relationship between political parties, politicians and young people, youth and student wings of political parties, electoral behaviour and the lowering of the voting age to 16. Pickard goes on to discuss personalised engagement through what she calls young people’s (DIO) Do-It-Ourselves political participation in online and offline connected collectives. The book then explores young people’s political dissent as part of a global youth-led wave of protest. This holistic book will appeal to anyone with an interest in young people, politics, protest and political change.

This book redresses a pressing need for us to understand the motivations of children and young people in playing sport, what it means to them, and how it fits into their everyday lives. It is research-heavy, with each chapter presenting the results of a different study conducted on children’s and young people’s participation in sport across a diverse range of ages, settings and sports from a humanistic perspective. Well-written and accessible, it captures the texture, nuances and meanings of participation in different sports in Australia, France, Japan and New Zealand in order to situate learning and the nature of children’s experiences within their social and cultural contexts. It provides valuable insights into the subjective nature of children and young people’s participation in sport, and should be read by anyone interested in children’s and youth sport, from academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students to coaches, teachers, parents and youth sport administrators.

Popular representations of the women’s movement in India have created many misconceptions about its size and scope—from the assertion that the movement relates exclusively to urban, middle-class women, to the claim that there is no ‘mass women’s movement’ to speak of. Debates within the movement itself take in these issues, but go one step further in posing a different set of related questions: what, if any, is our definition of a women’s movement? How far has the movement been able to address the issues of caste and class? What has been the relationship between ‘feminism’, non-party, autonomous women’s groups and the left? How far have activists within the movement been able to build a theoretical perspective, to conceptualize issues that tie in at the base of the struggle? What, in other words, has been the ideology of the movement? The essays in this collection address these questions both directly and indirectly. Written by activists from within the different movements, as well as by researchers, they deal with popular movements over the past few decades in which women have participated in large numbers. The ways in which such movements have had to define struggles and issues to ‘accommodate’ women in their ranks have charted out new dimensions for women’s struggles in India. These dimensions have not only gone beyond existing definitions of ‘feminism’—a concept that has acquired a value-loaded connotation of being ‘narrow’—but have also exploded the common left standpoint that women’s issues do not matter in larger struggles against class exploitation. It is argued here that an understanding of the nature of these struggles becomes important in order to gain a perspective on the women’s movement that is more truly representative of the aspirations of the generality of Indian women than most currently available feminist theory.

Young People’s Human Rights and The Politics of Voting Age explores the broader societal implications of voting age eligibility requirements and the legislative bar against youth voting in North America and in Commonwealth countries (where ‘youth’ is defined as persons 16 and over but under age 18). The issue is raised as to whether the denial of the youth vote undermines democratic principles and values and ultimately the human dignity of youth. This is the first book to address the topic of the youth vote in-depth as a fundamental human rights concern relating to the entitlement in a democracy to societal participation and inclusion in influencing policy and law which profoundly affects one’s life. Also examined are international perspectives on the issue of voting age eligibility. The book would be extremely valuable for instructional purposes as one of the primary texts in undergraduate or graduate courses on children’s human rights, political psychology, political science , sociology of law or society and as a supplementary text for courses on human rights or constitutional law and would be of interest also to members of the general public concerned with children’s human rights issues.

The solution to youth voter turnout requires focus on helping young people follow through on their political interests and intentions.

A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation brings together key thinkers and practitioners from diverse contexts across the globe to provide an authoritative overview of contemporary theory and practice around children’s participation. Promoting the participation of children and young people - in decision-making and policy development, and as active contributors to everyday family and community life - has become a central part of policy and programme initiatives in both majority and minority worlds. This book presents the most useful recent work in children’s participation as a resource for academics, students and practitioners in childhood studies, children’s rights and welfare, child and family social work, youth and community work, governance, aid and development programmes. The book introduces key concepts and debates, and presents a rich collection of accounts of the diverse ways in which children’s participation is understood and enacted around the world, interspersed with reflective commentaries from adults and young people. It concludes with a number of substantial theoretical contributions that aim to take forward our understanding of children’s participation. The emphasis throughout the text is on learning from the complexity of children’s participation in practice to improve our theoretical understanding, and on using those theoretical insights to challenge practice, with the aim of realising children’s rights and citizenship more fully.