Whether referring to the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter protests, the Paro in Colombia, or the global movement for climate justice, youth have played a leading role in many of the world’s most effective social movements in the 21st Century, helping to transform regimes, public policies, and state-society relations in the process.
But how do we define youth? How do generational identities compare with other social categories like race, ethnicity, and gender? Why do youth come to be politically consequential actors in some historical and geographical contexts, but not in others? How have the introduction of new digital technologies transformed youth’s political subjectivities and activism? And how are youth today changing the content and shape of contemporary political engagement? Finally, at an international level, how has the political participation of youth been mediated and shaped by broader changes in global society and political economy?
In answering these questions, this course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of youth politics combining readings from political science, history, political communications, youth studies, sociology, and anthropology, which attempt to better capture the diverse, often unconventional, means through which youth participate in politics. In examining this growing, interdisciplinary literature, this course moves beyond mainstream approaches to the study of youth politics which often focus on formal electoral politics, and tend to present young people derogatorily as passive, disinterested citizens, powerless victims, or violent perpetrators. Instead, this class proceeds from the understanding that youth is not simply a biologically determined, demographic cohort, but rather a heterogenous and diverse social category, which is mediated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. As such, the scope and meaning of youth, along with the social and cultural expectations attached to this social category, and their forms of political participation, have varied greatly across space and time.
The course will be organized in three parts. In part one, we will discuss different conceptualizations of youth and explore the main theoretical debates surrounding youth identity and politics. In part two, we will examine the historical origins of youth as a social category, situating its historical evolution in relation to broader processes of the expansion of capitalist economies. In part three, we will examine a diverse array of youth-led social movements from across the world within a comparative, historical framework.
Assignments for the class will include group projects, which require students to interview young political activists, analyze the politics of social media applications like tiktok and twitter, and consider the history of youth politics dating back to the 1960s.