Conceptions of Youth Leadership in a Global Context: Reimagining Youth Empowerment for Justice and Radical Hope

• In Event: Youth Empowerment, Transformative Education, and Social Movements

Proposal

Amid rising global authoritarianism, the persistent threat of climate change, widening economic inequality, and political polarization, opportunities for young people to feel agentic, engaged in their immediate communities, and connected to social movements larger than themselves require re-examination from both researchers and practitioners alike. A plethora of global youth development programs, sponsored by large INGOs and smaller non-profits, have emerged in the last quarter of a century. These programs give youth hands-on experience in running interventions within their communities and hold the potential to create meaningful third spaces for youth (Anderson et al., 2023). The programs purport to teach young people how to initiate and sustain “change,” yet are often observed to deepen capitalist logics. In the current socio-political context, there is an urgent need to re-examine the impact of these programs and explore their visions of change. In our globalizing landscape, these contradictions raise a variety of questions: what is the vision of “change” that is being articulated and promulgated? How does the conception of “change” championed by the aforementioned organizations challenge, expand, or align with antiquated understandings of “development” and neoliberal frameworks of social entrepreneurship? How do these youth development programs counter or contribute to the entrenchment of neoliberal visions of change?

Scholars have critiqued the neoliberal nature of these programs, highlighting their potential to reify a capitalist logic through an overemphasis on career and professionally driven objectives. The literature further notes how youth programming often lacks a critical emphasis on analyzing and critically deconstructing the power structures that uphold and legitimize racism, cis-hetero patriarchy, and capitalist ideologies (Allen-Handy et al. 2020). The emergence of critical youth studies underscores the vital role these programs play in fostering “power-sharing” (Blanchet-Cohen & Brunson, 2014) and creating alternative spaces (Anderson et al., 2023) where young people practice the technical skills of organizing while also developing an ethic of change that weaves criticality, structural awareness, and self-reflexivity.

This research examines the narratives and reflections of young people who received both funding and mentorship over the course of one year to launch a community-based project. Our sample focuses on individuals from different geographic regions who were selected for these youth development programs based on their vision for their community and the potential the program had for broader impact. Through semi-structured interviews with individuals who participated in these programs, this research examines the following research questions:

What was the theory of change articulated by the youth program?
For the youth leaders who co-created these projects, how did participating in/leading these projects inform their own sense of agency/empowerment as community members and future collaborators?
How did mentors support young people in developing their capacity to lead or initiate social change?
As we look backwards to look forwards, how do youth programs need to adapt to meet the needs of our current moment?

This project endeavours to think critically about the future of youth programming in a global context by asking how we might challenge previous models of youth development and disentangle “youth leadership development” with capitalist logics to co-create more justice-praxies for change. Ultimately, this project aims to conceptualize youth development within a Freirian framework grounded in liberation, love, and radical hope. This research also contributes to the broader field of critical youth studies from a global perspective. It supports the broader intellectual commitments of 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis SIG.

Authors

• Sofia Antonia Gomez-Doyle, New York University

• Claire Okatch