Layered Youth: How a South Korean Housing Movement Made “Youth” Politically Usable

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: The Power of Student and Youth Movements

Abstract

This paper examines how a grassroots housing movement in South Korea transformed “youth” from a demographic descriptor into a politically actionable collective identity. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists, I analyze how organizers strategically reconstructed youth as a structural condition defined by housing precarity, labor insecurity, and prolonged transitions to adulthood.

Rather than mobilizing a preexisting constituency, activists engaged in sustained category-making work. Through campaigns targeting substandard dwellings, counseling practices, media interventions, and legislative advocacy, the movement layered new meanings onto the category of youth. These efforts culminated in the 2020 Framework Act on Youth, which institutionalized youth as a rights-bearing policy constituency and formalized participatory governance mechanisms.

Institutionalization, however, generated new tensions around eligibility boundaries, representation, and generational turnover. As members aged out, activists developed organizational routines to sustain youth as a political category beyond biological age. I conceptualize this dynamic as “layering,” a process through which movements sediment meanings, practices, and institutional footholds over time, enabling identity categories to endure despite demographic instability.

By foregrounding category-making and layering as central movement strategies, this paper contributes to scholarship on collective identity and movement outcomes. It demonstrates how movements reshape governance not only through policy change but also by constructing durable political categories that reorganize relations between citizens and the state. The case highlights how youth activism under neoliberal conditions generates new forms of political subjectivity and institutional transformation.

Author

• Eunchong Cho, University of California-San Diego