Youth, activism and agency: Investigating how secondary school students in Australia develop an activist disposition

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Investigating the empowerment of youth activists: transforming education for social change

Proposal

Recently, we have seen a significant increase in student activism, mainly in relation to climate change, ongoing human rights movements (e.g. LGBTQI+, Black Lives Matters, etc). as well as current events (e.g. Ukraine/Russia conflict, Israel/Palestinian conflict, etc.).

Yet, how an activist disposition develops remains a complex picture. Young people today exist in a time of incredible complexity shaped by competing narratives, post-truth narratives, gen AI, misinformation, identity politics, etc. The exposure to powerful and contradictory content on various social media platforms informs – to varying extents – their understanding of topical, of-the-moment human rights related issues. How people come to understand these issues is often in reference to celebrity culture, influencers and nano-influencers contributing to their own production of activist subjectivities. Within this exposure, there is often an expectation or pressure to voice one’s opinions regardless of how well-informed they may be.

Within this presentation, we problematise current manifestations of youth activism – what has been referred to as the ‘Greta Thurnberg effect’ – and consider the implications for schools. Schools, for the most part, have struggled to keep up with the rise in student activism where they are often uncertain of how support young people to engage with contentious and divisive issues. Deepening our analysis, we are witnessing a moral panic regarding how we regulate what young people interact with in online environments and how we can best safeguard them for the future. This panic is particularly pronounced in Australia where we see outcries for more of an emphasis on the teaching of critical thinking skills specifically in relation to social media posts.

In this presentation, we draw on 35 focus groups with Australian people across a variety of secondary schooling contexts in order to better understand 1) how they are defining themselves in relation to the increase in activist efforts and the visibility of such efforts, 2) how they are deciphering and critically reflect on what they are exposed to online, specifically in relation to activist content and other forms of propaganda and 3) how they see their formal schooling experience in preparing them to understand quite complex social and political issues.

The presentation concludes with drawing some tenuous connections to how young people develop and activist disposition and what this means for educators who are teaching in an increasingly digitized society.

Author

• Garth Stahl, The University of Queensland