Problematizing Youth of Color Empowerment

• In Event: 31.075 - Troubling Youth Leadership: The Complexities of Youth "Empowerment" Programs

Abstract

Purpose

The author critically troubles the concept of youth empowerment and leadership by examining how youth organizing operates as a strategy for empowering youth through their voluntary participation programs offered by nonprofit organizations. It broadens typical micro-focused studies of youth by addressing the larger relations of political governance and power that govern youth empowerment programs.

Perspective

Recent scholarship has examined how youth activism broadens the spectrum of traditional youth development outcomes from a focus on the individual to include their engagement with society (Eccles &Appleton-Gootman, 2002; Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006). Others have underscored the critical role of community-based youth nonprofit organizations in supporting positive youth development outcomes, youth empowerment, and political activism (Irby, Thaddeus & Pittman, 2001; Kwon, 2008;). But few have taken a critical look at youth empowerment.

Methods and Data sources

This paper relies on theoretical critique, historical archives, and three years of ethnographic study of youth of color organizing nonprofit based in California.

Findings

This paper argues several key arguments/findings:

a) Since the Progressive era, youth empowerment programs have targeted marginalized youth for intervention through after-school, community-based programs, which are posed as a preventive solution to these young people’s probable delinquency and sexual immorality.
b) Strategies and programs of youth empowerment are closely intertwined with youth criminalization as a form of governance and intervention that is aimed at helping “at-risk” youth to become better citizen-subjects. This productive mobilization and effects of empowerment to promote, transform, and improve are not neutral; instead, they reflect relationships of power (Foucault, 2008).
c) The identification of youth of color as potentially transformative agents of individual and community change through their voluntary participation is closely tied to the interests and investments of private foundations and state actors, which increasingly institutionalize social justice–oriented nonprofit organizations, beholden to neoliberal principles of personal responsibility and self-government.

Scholarly significance

Attention to youth organizing and activism is importantly extending the scope of research and literature on youth political participation, civic engagement and education, and positive youth development. But also necessary is a simultaneous examination of the relations of power that enable and limit their political practices and its significance to contemporary neoliberal governance and citizenship.


Eccles, J. & Appleton-Gootman, J. (2002). Community programs to promote youth development. Washington: National Academies Press.

Edwards, D., Johnson, N., & McGillicuddy, K. (2003). An emerging model for working with youth: Community organizing + youth development = youth organizing. New York: Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing.

Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the college de France 1978-1979. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ginwright, S., Noguera, P. & Cammarota, J. (eds.) (2006). Beyond resistance! Youth activism and community change. New York: Routledge.

Irby, M., Thaddeus, F., & Pittman, K. (2001). Youth action, youth contributing to communities, communities supporting youth. Washington: Forum for Youth Investment, Impact Strategies.

Kwon, S. (2008). Moving from complaints to action: Oppositional consciousness and collective action in a political community. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39,1, 59-76

Author

• Soo Ah Kwon