ABSTRACT
As a sphere of social relations, everyday life has gained increasing attention since the 1960s, when several scholars started to analyse the shaping and intertwined power that individuals’ agency and structural forces have on social existence through the lenses of the ‘ordinary’. This chapter looks at youth cultural practices as activities through which young people claim to act as citizens in their daily environments. It analyses how cheering, graffiti and art youth cultural practices are used by young people to participate in the public sphere and how they are later turned into more formalised forms of civic and political engagement. After presenting the methodological framework and the case studies, the chapter also looks at how the participative potential of a series of youth cultural practices is cultivated through the development of participative projects and the implications that this evolution has for the groups and their relationships with institutions.
