Homies, Comrades, Kin: Growing intergenerational solidarity between youth organizers and adult accomplices (Poster 8)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

This study aims to surface how youth activists and their adult accomplices build intergenerational solidarity and challenge age-based power dynamics in their social movement collectives. Using semistructured interviews and participatory multimodal methods, I investigate these questions from the perspective of 10 youth organizers involved in counterhegemonic organizing movements in the United States, as well as 10 of their chosen adult accomplices. My analysis reveals that youth and adults forge solidarity relationships by engaging in processes of “mutual seeing” to build trust, communication, and empathy with one another. Furthermore, youth and adults negotiate and attend to adultism in their organizing by participating in processes of consent and co-creation. This research contributes to a bottom-up understanding of youth activist praxis in relation to larger cultural discourses and adultist systems, while identifying practical implications for intergenerational support.

Author

• AL Liou, Teachers College, Columbia University