How "Youth" Gets Deployed as a Social Category in Community Organizing: A Discourse Analytic Study

• In Event: 31.075 - Troubling Youth Leadership: The Complexities of Youth "Empowerment" Programs

Abstract

Objectives

References to the social category of “youth” are ubiquitous in the civic engagement and community organizing literature, but the word remains strangely under-theorized from a discourse perspective (Gee, 1996). This paper will analyze varied meanings of the term “youth” as it surfaces in ethnographic research about youth organizing in three cities: Belfast, Cape Town, and New Orleans.

Perspective

Youth organizing groups often mobilize the social category of “youth” as a central human rights frame, but they do so in complicated and varied ways (HoSang, 2002). The reference to “youth” can be a source of unity across age, but marginalize some based on race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Recent critics have argued persuasively that the discourse of “youth empowerment” is linked ideologically to the privatization of public responsibility for human welfare (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2011). “Youth” and “adult” represents a binary that flattens developmental categories and limits possibilities for intergenerational action.

Methods

Given this context, this paper makes “youth” the object of analysis and examines the varied meanings it takes on across a variety of contexts. The study adopted an interpretive ethnographic approach that emphasizes how people construct meaning.

Data sources

Local ethnographers living in each city collected data. Sources include field notes (>50 documents); interviews with a range of participants (>25), meetings with program staff (>5), and artifacts, such as videos produced by each program. Analysis focused on ways that the term “youth” was deployed by organization members and in interactions with outsiders.

Findings

Current patterns include:

1) Cultural variation in the meaning of “youth”: These meanings vary across the three countries in multiple ways, such as age, rights, and history.

2) Strategic mobilization of “youth”: Across all the sites members mobilize the category of youth to build credibility and/or support for their cause in the public arena.

3) “Youth” invoked to undermine the organization: In two of the three cities we have evidence of adult decision-makers who were targets of organizing campaigns alleging that the organization is manipulating children or youth.

4) “Youth” in internal decision-making: Organizations created varied strategies for ensuring that “youth” have a voice in decisions made by the organization.

Significance

This work is significant for youth studies and civic engagement scholars who wish to expand our frames beyond a United States context. Through critical analysis of “youth” as a category, the paper offers alternatives to the youth/adult binary and generates new ways to think about how young people develop power and agency.

Gee, J. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies. London: Taylor and Francis.
Hosang, D. (2003). Youth and community organizing today. (Occasional paper #2). (pp. 1–15). New York: Funder’s Collaborative on Youth Organizing.
Pollock, M. (2005). Race-bending. In S. Maira & E. Soep (Eds.), Youthscapes: The popular, the national, the global. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2011). The positivity imperative: a critical look at the “new” youth development movement. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(6), 675–691. doi:10.1080/13676261.2011.571663

Author

• Ben R. Kirshner, University of Colorado - Boulder