ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the ambivalence and puts it in historical perspective, taking an ethnographic look back at the construction of widely differing "publics" of youth activism in the 1980s and 1990s. It analyzes the ways in which political actors navigate among the partisan and civic components of their multiple affiliations as they build relationships and pursue projects in a complex field. The chapter focuses on the performative enactment of different identities and relations within complex publics that move beyond the instrumental-expressive divide and show how partisanship and civic life are intertwined. It shows how political actors enact their partisan relations in different ways, variously expressing and suppressing the multiple identities as they wrestle with the complexities of relation-building in particular settings and situations. The chapter ends with a discussion of how this reconceptualization of publics contributes to a new understanding of the role of partisanship in civic life.
