Ilaria Pitti

Searching for adulthood: young people, citizenship and participation

Focusing on the relation between youth and citizenship and between youth and adulthood, the article investigates youth paths of civic and political engagement by presenting the results of a qualitative research conducted in Bologna in 2012 which has involved a sample of young people and a sample of “significant adults” through semi-structured interviews. The intergenerational analysis shows that youth civic and political engagement, still influenced by social and economic factors, can be interpreted as a multiform expression of agency towards an environment perceived as not welcoming for the younger generations.

New Forms of Solidarity and Young People: An Ethnography of Youth Participation in Italy

Drawing from the findings of the European project ‘Partispace,’ this chapter analyses three solidarity initiatives promoted by youth leftist groups in Bologna (Italy). Materials were collected through an ethnographic study that included in-depth interviews with young activists. This material highlights the connections between the initiatives of these groups, their objectives and practices, in the context of the global financial crisis. The analysis shows that these initiatives, while seeking to mitigate the problems faced by vulnerable groups (i.e. migrants, refugees and the homeless), were also fuelled by practices of self-help aimed at responding to the unheeded ‘generational needs’ of the young people themselves. The projects emerge as ‘laboratories of political resistance’ where strategies for collective action based on mutual help and self-empowerment are experimented with and enacted.

“If Not Now, When?”: Young Italian People and the Occupied Social Centre

This chapter presents a case study realised within a centro sociale (social centre) created in an occupied barrack by a group of Italian young people dealing with the difficulties exacerbated by the crisis and the austerity measures. The case study, conducted through participant observation and biographical interviews with the young activists of the social centre, explores how young individuals try to get back a control on their present and on their future through the self-managed space. The analysis of the practices of engagement makes it possible to underline how young people engage in a series of processes of re-elaboration of existing physical and symbolic objects, socio-economic models, and socio-political tools to create a new world in the shell of the old one.

“What Do We Want? We Want Everything!”: Young Swedish Activists and the “Union of Citizens”

This chapter presents a case study conducted among the young people taking part in a Swedish social movement. The case study has been realised between 2016 and 2017 through participant observations and biographical interviews with the young activists and analyses the process of bottom-up politicisation of a neighbourhood through which the young activists are creating a “union of citizens”. The analysis of the collected data discusses how young activists seek to win back a power of self-definition and self-determination through a series of projects which, starting from the solution of a specific difficulty concerning the access to housing, entail big ambitions of societal transformation. In so doing, they attempt to abandon the role of “claimants” in relation to institutions.

Unconventional Is the New Conventional

This chapter looks at the results emerging from the presentation of three case studies and reflects on their implications for the understanding of contemporary youths’ unconventional political practices. The prolonged and gradual process of social peripheralisation experienced by young generations since the last decades appears to have fostered deep evolutions in the relationship between them and the state-based institutions. A shift towards a more “competitive” position in relation to institutions emerges among young people whose unconventional political practices go beyond claim and protest. Prefigurative political projects aimed at creating a new world within the shell of the old are enacted in an attempt to re-appropriate and re-conquer politics. In the light of these results, the chapter discusses whether it still makes sense to talk about “unconventionality” when we look at youth political practices.

Young People and Unconventional Political Engagement

This chapter focuses on youth and its relationship with unconventional participation as it has been portrayed in literature. The chapter aims to highlight how sociological studies have, since the very beginning, conceived unconventionality as an intrinsic character of youth practices of political engagement. Referring to a life-course perspective, youth studies have frequently explained the youth preference for unconventional political behaviour as just a consequence of a series of characteristics distinguishing youth as a life phase, such as physical vigour and the need for experimentation. In line with the book’s general intention to actualise the existing understanding of unconventional political engagement, the chapter presents the choice to analyse youth unconventional political behaviours through a generational approach and clarifies the basic concepts of generational location, generational consciousness, and generational unit. In order to frame the analysis of the three case studies presented in the following chapter, an interpretation of young people’s contemporary conditions in terms of social peripheralisation is discussed.

“We Will Never Be What You Want Us to Be”: Young Football Fans and the Ultras Centre

This chapter focuses on a case study conducted on a group of young professional football fans (ultras) in Italy. Combining biographical interviews with participant observations, the research has analysed the process through which these young people have transformed an occupied building in a social centre which proposes services and leisure activities. The analysis of the collected data highlights how unconventional political practices allow them to overcome a tendency towards “preventive apathy” deriving from the experience of social marginalisation and stigmatisation. Discussing how unconventional political participation allows them to affirm their presence without changing what they are, the chapter reflects on the relationship between participation and recognition in young people’s political practices.

Unconventional Political Participation: An Overview

Engaging in an analysis of unconventional political youth participation in contemporary society requires a preliminary conceptual effort to clarify the basic concepts of “political participation” and of “unconventionality”. In this perspective, this chapter specifies the thematic focus of the present analysis by providing a definition of political participation and by exploring the different ways in which the concept of “unconventional political participation” is currently understood in literature. In so doing, the chapter intends to show how existing definitions of unconventional political participation swing between “purist” positions (unable to account for the contemporary phenomenology of youth non-conventional participation) and “vague” definitions (where the label “unconventional” is applied to almost every youth political action beyond voting). Reflecting on the limits of the traditional ways through which the unconventional nature of a participatory act has been defined (innovative, heterodox, non-institutionalised practices, and protest behaviours), the chapter discusses the need for a conceptual actualisation of the definition of unconventional political participation.