ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter Chapter 1|12 pages
Contested practices, power and pedagogies of young people in public spaces
part I|52 pages
Conceptual and contextual frameworks of youth participation
chapter Chapter 4|16 pages
Do youth policies matter? National and local youth policies as contexts of youth participation
part II|112 pages
Empirical insights into forms and meanings of youth participation
chapter Chapter 5|17 pages
‘This is a compressed political system’. Ambivalences of formal youth participation
chapter Chapter 6|15 pages
Young people’s appropriation of public space
chapter Chapter 8|17 pages
Examining styles of youth participation in institutionalised settings as accumulation of capital forms
chapter Chapter 9|16 pages
Participation and everyday life
part III|42 pages
Towards new ways of understanding and supporting youth participation