Reconciling the Voices: Youth Action Researchers and the Ecology of Political Socialization

• In Event: 15.033 - Black Youth Activists' Political Education: Developing Critical Politics in the Absence of a "Truth Era"

Abstract

Contemporary youth-based organizations for racial and anti-colonial justice like Black Youth Project 100 and Afrikan Black Coalition, have rightfully been celebrated by movement scholars and the political left for their autonomous, organized, and thoughtful presence in modern campaigns for justice and human rights. However, not much is known about how youth wrestle with understanding the social-political structure, and how they negotiate political orientations with consideration to all of the other political influences in their lives.

This study explores youth action researchers’ political identity development in relation to the implicit and explicit political messages communicated by individuals and institutions that they identified as influential during the sixteen months that we spent in YPAR. The scope of the larger project from which this study derives called for an analysis of youth researchers’ political views overtime, while I served as facilitator of their YPAR group. In this study, I raise the questions, “How is this political development shaped by people, processes, and practices both within and beyond the action-research setting, and how do youth negotiate and appraise the various (possibly divergent) political messages and information to which they are exposed?” I analyze how people with whom youth spent significant amounts of time or whom youth identified as shaping them in some significant way, talked about race/ism, class, and social change to identify and draw connections between young people’s political orientations and the views communicated by these influences in their lives.

This research is ethnographic and draws on field notes from sixteen months of participant observation as well as interviews with youth and youth-identified influences. Participant observations attended specifically to how youths’ political views developed in relation to race/ism, inequality, and social change during their time in YPAR. Interviews with youth-identified outside influences were intended to gather information about how people/institutions attempted to socialize youth around the aforementioned issues. Operating from a social production theoretical framework (Holland & Lave, 2009; Hayward, 2014), this study understands power and hegemony as central to understanding why particular political orientations are more readily available to the public as well as why certain others remain at the margins, and that individuals exercise relative agency in navigating these structures to form elastic political identities (i.e. political orientations).

Findings demonstrated that aspects of each young person’s political orientation were in some significant way related to the people (and/or their views) that youth identified as influential. Overall, many of the neoliberal discourses engaged by youth were also prevalent among the institutions and people they identified as influential. Some youth also demonstrated an inverse correlation between their views and the views of people they identified as influential, in ways that strengthened their connection to the activist program. These findings suggest that youth involved in progressive organizations identify, experience, and gravitate toward outside political messages that may or may not resonate with the political ethos of their activist association. These findings have implications for how we might better understand what sustains some youth in progressive activist work and not others.

Author

• Kevin Lowell Clay, Rutgers University - Newark