"Maybe You Should Try It This Way Instead": Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge

• In Event: 63.063 - Critical Examination of Emerging Tensions in Youth Participatory Action Research and Building Liberatory Praxes

Abstract

Youth organizing spaces offer a critical opportunity for young people to investigate and act to disrupt systems of oppression, as well as envision and create culturally sustaining and emancipatory spaces within their schools and communities.

Young people conceive plans of action based on their research, personal values, and political orientations; however, the limitations imposed by institutions and adults often attempt to dampen or redefine the scope of their political intervention/s in ways that curtail what are often radically progressive youth-led initiatives (Gordon, 2009; Gordon & Taft, 2010). Through ethnographic inquiry, this paper responds to questions related to how youth researchers renegotiate action plans when confronted by managerialist institutional forces--typically liberal and neoliberal in nature (Apple, 2006). Specifically, how do managerialist impositions attempt to curtail, recreate, or redefine the scope or course of young organizers’ political action? How do youths’ political values and action plans respond to obstacles and limitations imposed by the neoliberal state and adult representatives of state institutions? We draw on analyses of YPAR groups based on both the east and west coast. We draw on field notes using critical ethnography as our mode of inquiry. Through critical ethnography, we highlight how the day-to-day processes of political meaning making are created, negotiated, and challenged, and reconstructed. Author 1 recorded nearly 50 meetings and interviews with youth over the course of sixteen months between July 2015 and November 2016, working with as many as fourteen Black and Latinx youth enrolled in an Upward Bound program. Author 2 recorded 20 sessions over the course of 180 days during the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years with two groups of youth in an educational nonprofit: one group of all Black male youth, and another group of Black and Latino youth.

We found two common themes from our field work. First, we found that adult allies worked to limit the racial justice imaginations of students by encouraging a “colorblind” analysis of the data that youth collected. In Author 2’s study, he observed how teachers and other adults imposed a colorblind frame during the analysis portion of the YPAR project to limit the types of demands that Black students could make on the administration. Students were encouraged to think about their project on teacher-student relationships as “raceless” in order to appeal to teaching and administrative staff. Second, we assess how local government and its proxies attempt to impose managerial limitations/mechanisms of control to redefine the political interventions that youth attempt to make. In Author 1’s study, this kind of managerialism was revealed as youth collaborated with a nonprofit organization that discouraged their pursuit of a progressive community center and, in the name of efficiency and savings, encouraged them to focus on already-existing after-school and non-profit youth programs. Social practice theory (Holland & Lave, 2009) and affirmative governmentality (Kwon, 2013) provide a theoretical lens from which to analyze how youth activists are both positioned within and might respond to the managerialist state at conflict with the goals of their political program.

Authors

• Kevin Lowell Clay, Rutgers University - Newark

• David Charles Turner, University of California - Berkeley