Anita Harris

Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participation

This article addresses the changing nature of participation for young people. Our analysis is framed by the fragmentation of traditional institutions and the increasingly unpredictable nature of life trajectories. As a result, the identification of a crisis in young people’s engagement has become a recurrent theme in the literature, alongside a burgeoning interest in new forms of (sub)cultural participatory practices. We argue that there is further complexity in the reshaping of participation in times of social change, especially for a broad ‘mainstream’ of young people who are neither deeply apathetic about politics nor unconventionally engaged. Drawing on a research project with 970 young Australians, the article suggests that many young people are disenchanted with political structures that are unresponsive to their needs and interests, but that they remain interested in social and political issues and continue to seek recognition from the political system. At the same time, their participatory practices are not oriented towards spectacular antistate activism or cultural politics but take the form of informal, individualized and everyday activities.

Young women, late modern politics, and the participatory possibilities of online cultures

New technologies are often perceived as important resources in attracting young people to formal politics, but less is known about how young people use them to create participatory practice on their own terms. This article examines young womens less conventional technology-enabled political and social activity in order to understand how these are operating as emergent modes of participation in a new political environment. It explores young womens use of online DIY culture, blogs, social networking sites and related technologies to open up questions about what counts as politics, and what is possible as politics for young people, and young women in particular, at the present moment. It suggests that these activities represent new directions in activism, the construction of new participatory communities, and the development of new kinds of public selves, while also telling us important things about the limits of the kinds of conventional citizen subject positions offered to young women at this time.

Beyond the ‘transitions’ metaphor: Family relations and young people in late modernity

Against the backdrop of an emerging literature about significant change in family formation in late modernity, this article argues that youth studies over the last 20 years has tended to ignore the significance of family relationships to young people. It critiques the traditional youth-as-transition metaphor that dominates youth sociology, arguing that the assumptions of linear trajectories and of independence obscure the changing nature of family relationships and their significance for youth. Drawing on empirical evidence from a study of Australian youth aged 15–18, this article highlights the significance of family as a site for civic and citizenship enactments. It also highlights young people’s understandings of inter-dependence within a family context, as they contemplate the complexity of transitions in late modern life. The article concludes that it is timely to bring family back into focus in youth studies.

Shifting the boundaries of cultural spaces: young people and everyday multiculturalism

This paper investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of young peoples daily life to the development of new research directions for multicultural youth studies. It explores the idea of everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding the ways that young people deal with cultural difference in conditions of super-diversity. It considers how this approach gives descriptive and explanatory priority to sites and literacies such as everyday neighbourhood locales, vernacular expressions and popular culture that form an important part of young peoples ‘habitus’, and provides insight into how struggles over the decentring of whiteness from the national imaginary occur in quotidian ways.

Young People's Politics and the Micro-Territories of the Local

In spite of the late modern interpellation of youth as mobile and globally oriented, and a perception of social and political issues as increasingly playing out in a transnational arena, young Australians exhibit strong local and individualised tendencies in expressing politics. They are bounded by the ‘micro-territories of the local’; that is, their political thinking and acting takes place within the spaces of home, friendship groups, school and neighbourhood. This paper draws on an ARC project with nearly 1000 mainly 15–17-year-old Victorians to examine the relationship between young peoples embeddedness in their local worlds and their views of themselves as efficacious political actors. It considers how their competency within such micro-territories opens up neglected sites and strategies for political expression and engagement while limiting their sense of sense of political efficacy, and it asserts the significance of considering this age group, not for what these young people will become in the future, but for their particular location, socially, physically and politically in the present.

DIY citizenship amongst young Muslims: experiences of the ‘ordinary’

Debates abound about low levels of engagement in mainstream civic life on the part of young Muslims from immigrant backgrounds living in non-Muslim majority countries. This paper investigates the emergent types of civic practice enacted by first or second generation Australian youth of major Muslim migrant communities, and suggests that in order to better understand the commonly identified problem of low levels of civic participation amongst this group it is necessary to situate the debate in broader conceptual frameworks regarding the shift towards ‘do-it-yourself’ citizenship on the part of the current generation. The paper argues for a focus on practices of youth cultural production and consumption, civic networks in everyday spaces, and work on the self as new forms of civic engagement, drawing on qualitative research with 80 young Muslims, who are outside both radical and mainstream formal associational practice.

Youth Research in Australia and New Zealand

This article draws selectively on youth research in Australia and New Zealand to illustrate the distinctive nature of this emerging field. It reveals a vibrant, interdisciplinary field, which has developed rapidly from its derivative beginnings in the post-war period to a significant and distinctive field that is challenging theoretical and methodological traditions and providing new approaches to understanding youth, society and social change. The article highlights distinctive approaches to youth research that are characterized by two key elements. These are: (a) local conditions under which young people are growing up in Australia and New Zealand, including the ongoing shaping of meaning of indigeneity; and (b) active engagement with international debates on youth. The article first explores the traditions dominating the early conceptualization of youth in Australia and New Zealand, including the Birmingham school in the UK and psychological theories of development from the US. Next, the article describes how these traditions have resulted in a reconceptualization of youth in Australia and New Zealand. This is illustrated in discussions of the way in which discourses of youth and indigeneity and of health have been rethought. The paper also discusses emerging research traditions in the area of new identities and youth subjectivities, on young people’s participation in civic society and their engagement with global and virtual youth cultures.

Pedestrian Crossings: Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism

Young people have been the focus of both hopes and fears about the futures of culturally diverse nations. It has become commonplace to centre youth in debates about the impact on social cohesion of rapid and increasingly diverse global flows of peoples. Concerns proliferate about the capacity of youth of migrant and refugee backgrounds to ‘integrate’, and about the more flexible and critical forms of citizenship and belonging that some youth are forging. Others are idealised as the new cosmopolitans, eager consumers in the global youth market and adept players in the global economy. Paradoxical images emerge. Youth are often simultaneously imagined as at the vanguard of new forms of multicultural nation-building and social cohesion, and as those most inclined towards regressive nationalism, fundamentalism and racism. Images of youth-led interfaith and intercultural harmony projects compete with those of race riots and racist youth violence, deeply complicating the public representation and interpretation of young peoples place in multicultural nation-making.

Young People, Everyday Civic Life and the Limits of Social Cohesion

In recent times, many Western governments have shifted focus from multiculturalism to social cohesion in their efforts to address the impact of increased cultural diversity within communities. One of the many and complex triggers for this change has been concern about the marginalisation of young people of minority backgrounds from mainstream culture, in turn prompted by acts of civil unrest, violence, and even terrorism by youth. In this article I focus not so much on why the social cohesion ideal of integration is problematic for young people (although it clearly is), but on the implicit assumptions about what constitutes good participation in community that underlie any cohesion-driven emphasis on integration into civic life in the first place. In doing so, I consider how many young Australians’ modes of imagining, forging, and engaging in community, which are very much a product of growing up in times of super-diversity, globalisation, and individualisation, sit uneasily with mainstream communitarian notions of civic life that are founded on twentieth-century forms of community and participation that are no longer evident or sustainable in contemporary societies. I suggest that a social cohesion agenda may not adequately account for the particular circumstances and experiences of young people because of its assumptions about community and civic engagement that take both adult and modern life as its reference points.

MIND THE GAP: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave

More than 10 years after the publication of key so-called third-wave texts such as Generation f, Listen Up! and To Be Real, the idea of an even loosely organised movement of young feminists seems to have disintegrated. Those who attempt a comprehensive overview of feminist thought that includes recent times express bemusement at its current manifestations, mainly because there is no coherent agenda or singular movement (see, for example, Tong 2007). While the notion of a third wave seemed to hold hopes for a new surge in imaginative and diverse but linked-up feminist practice purportedly less driven by the perceived ideological alliances of previous waves, its little sisters, especially those young women now in their teens and 20s, have appeared less able to cash this out. For many commentators, this problem can be attributed to the neoliberal absorption of feminist ideology and the individualisation of concepts such as choice, power and independence (McRobbie 2007; Harris 2004) as well as the broader shift in social justice activism away from collective, hierarchical, state-oriented phenomena towards transitory engagements, heterogeneous movements and personal activities. This situation, sometimes characterised as ‘post-feminism’, leaves us with the image of feminism entirely mainstreamed and its political content removed or marginalised, the atomisation of feminist practice and the widespread disavowal of the feminist label. While the apparent dwindling of feminist activism and transmogrification of feminist identity (ladette, anyone?) is a problem for all who are committed to social justice, in recent times there has been a particular focus on what this means for young women. It is widely accepted that social justice activism, not only feminism, no longer exists in the form it took during the heydays (imagined as the 1960s and 1970s), but it is young people who are routinely singled out as those least likely to engage in traditional political activities. At the same time, there is a considerable amount of feminist research about young women’s (lack of) identification with the label ‘feminist’. For the most part this has demonstrated that young women today distance themselves from big ‘f’ feminism, although they do espouse notions of equality and choice. These problems seem to interrelate: if young women do not identify as feminists, how can young feminist activism exist? In this article I want to undo this knot by reflecting on the research about young women’s attitudes towards feminism and then looking at the growing evidence base for young women’s emergent politics. My intention is to highlight the complexity in what young women say about feminism, and then consider how this shapes the (many forms of) contemporary feminist practice in which young women are engaged. Overall, I suggest that a focus on young women’s attitudes has overshadowed a more productive investigation into contemporary young feminist practice, including its continuities with the past.