Spatializing Identity: Identity Projects in the Lives of Youth Organizers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 21st-Century Youth: Unlocking the Potential of Peer Networks and Identity in Youth Activism

Abstract

Youth organizing groups like the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) offer young people the opportunity to join with other youth to effect systemic change. As they participate in political organizing work, youth take on an identity project as an organizer, which is aimed at fulfilling the “well-being concerns” of community, integrity, and efficacy (Harré, Tepavac, & Bullen, 2009). Drawing on data from a qualitative study of PSU members, this paper contends that this organizer identity project inhabits intellectual, emotional, social, and temporal space in these young people’s lives, shaping their relationships with others and with the work of PSU. Importantly, this process allows youth to reimagine themselves and complicate what it means to address the themes of community, integrity, and efficacy.

Author

• Sonia Michelle Rosen, University of Pennsylvania