Young People and the Struggle for Participation

Contested Practices, Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces

Andreas Walther, Janet Batsleer, Patricia Loncle, Axel Pohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429777950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples' activities.

Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.

Chapter 1

Contested practices, power and pedagogies of young people in public spaces

An introduction

Axel Pohl, Janet Batsleer, Patricia Loncle and Andreas Walther

Youth as a life phase has emerged in modernity parallel to the idea of democracy. Both youth and democracy reflect the need to institutionalise ways of coordinating the lives of individuals within a secular societal order. Since then, youth research has been concerned with the degree to which young people accept and reproduce this existing order. Studies focused on political interest, democratic orientations or participation in elections or voluntary engagement signal either concern because of apparently declining participation rates or – on the contrary – refer to persisting acceptance and support of democracy, yet in other forms.

The attention to young people’s participation has increased since the end of the 20th century marked by policy acts of international organisations such as the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989) or the European Commission’s White Paper ‘A New Impetus for European Youth’ (2001). Historically, this increase in attention coincides with the de-standardisation of the institutionalised life course and of youth transitions in particular. Precarious work and life conditions, unemployment and poverty as well as uncertain life perspectives imply a suspension of full citizenship status. The emerging discourse, therefore, conceptualised young people’s participation as involvement and engagement in decisions ‘which concern them and, in general, the life of their communities’ (ibid.: 8). However, at the same time, there is evidence that policies related to and resulting from this discourse tend to be ‘weak’ in terms of implementation and are limited to pre-defined themes and forms of involvement with limited power (cf. Loncle et al., 2012).

In fact, there is a broad critique that most youth policies aimed at facilitating youth participation are tokenistic and that consequently most young people are reluctant, sceptical or even unaware of them. In the dominant discourse, however, this constellation is ascribed more to young people’s lack of information, knowledge and competence than to the weakness of these policies. Consequently, a key aspect of these policies is educating young people in terms of providing them with ‘participation competence’ (EC, 2009: 9). This means that although aimed at empowering young people, they involve a deficit-oriented perspective that makes participation conditional on accepting to learn how to participate in a specific way claimed to be the ‘right’ one.

However, there is increasing discomfort in youth research and – to a lesser extent – in youth policy and practice with this discourse and understanding of youth research, even if this has not yet led to significantly different approaches. The most important critique formulated against ruling conceptualisations of (youth) participation regards the definition of youth participation (the deficit-oriented approach, the implicit norms, the forms and contents of the approach) and the exclusion of some groups of young people according to age, gender, ethnicity, class or milieu or level of education.

While in policy and practice, there is an increasing call for innovative methods of youth participation these tend to be limited to ways of attracting young people to ‘get involved’ – in activities that have been pre-defined and are held as relevant for society – rather than asking if young people are already participating on their own terms in activities and spaces of their own.

There is a new series of European research projects that have started taking another route relying not exclusively but to a significant degree on qualitative research, which permits the analysis of the meaning of youth participation by including the perspective of the young people. The project ‘Youth as Actor of Social Change’ (UP2YOUTH) analysed how the de-standardisation of youth transitions affects young people’s status, practice and meaning of citizenship (Loncle et al., 2012). The project ‘Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement’ (MYPLACE) analysed the ways in which young people in general and young activists in particular refer to and/or break with traditions of political culture in their local and national contexts (cf. Pilkington et al., 2017). The project ‘Spaces and Styles of Participation. Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of young people’s participation in European cities’ (PARTISPACE) has undertaken an even more fundamental approach of re-thinking youth participation and it is the findings of this project that represent the basis of this volume.

Exploring contested practices, power and pedagogies of young people in public spaces

In contrast to many other publications on young people’s participation, this book is not primarily concerned with the question if, and to what extent, young people do participate. On the contrary, it starts from the assumption that young people do participate, but in different styles and spaces not all of which, however, are recognised by other societal actors as participation. In fact, we start from the assumption that not only do different local and national contexts involve different representations of and policies for young people, but also that both their position in social structure and their positioning with regard to youth culture contribute to a high level of diversity of young people’s participation in public spaces. In fact, being active in public spaces is the main sampling criterion underlying the fieldwork of the PARTISPACE project. Thus, the research question was operationalised in terms of asking what young people do in public spaces and what it means to them. Only after that analysis was concerned with the question of whether these activities include claims of being part of society – and in what way.

The project relied on a broad concept of participation defined as biographical self-determination in the public and/or through the use of public institutions. This implies that potentially all actions (and therefore different styles of action) of groups or individuals carried out in and/or addressing the public (which is not homogeneous but consists of a variety of formal, non-formal and informal spaces) can be interpreted as participation – unless dialogue has revealed that the individual actor does not refer to a wider community or society (Walther, 2012). Such a broad concept of participation allows for the inclusion of actions by which young people articulate interest in being and aspiration to be part of society. These include actions which are normally not recognised as participation, such as youth cultural practices, conflicts with authorities, ‘filling the gaps’ of public action and/or meeting the needs of other societal groups and finally ‘riots’ and ‘unrest’.

This required, first, broadening the concept of participation in terms of contexts (spaces) and forms (styles) beyond formal participation in order not to reproduce the limitations of dominant views while neglecting other participatory activities of young people. Therefore, activities occurring in formal, non-formal and informal spaces and styles were analysed. Second, participation was understood as a practice of individuals in cooperation with and/or in relation to others. This required a research design which was able to understand the meaning that such practices have for the individuals as well as reconstructing how such practices evolve in interaction with others. Third, participation is constructed by discourses, policies and stakeholders. These need to be analysed in their official and/or explicit forms as well as in the ways they interact with young people’s practices. Fourth, it was assumed that participation biographies and practices of young people develop from concrete issues and experiences in everyday life to more generalised orientations. This accounts also for the participation at different institutional levels and across a range of geographical dimensions. Fifth, the local level was considered as appropriate for analysis as it permitted the exploration of specific constellations of convergence versus conflict, of interaction and interdependency, the examination of the roles of decision makers, youth workers and other providers of non-formal spaces of participation and the comparison of official policies, collective practices and individual meaning.

For this purpose, the PARTISPACE project has applied a multilevel and multi-perspective research design combining an in-depth qualitative fieldwork in major cities in different European countries with context-related studies. It was conducted in Bologna (Italy), Eskişehir (Turkey), Frankfurt (Germany), Gothenburg (Sweden), Manchester (United Kingdom), Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Rennes (France) and Zurich (Switzerland). These cities are comparable in terms of dimension and relevance in the respective country. They do not represent but are embedded in different national contexts and welfare states. In fact, sampling reflected the model of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and of youth transition regimes (Walther, 2006) which have both been developed on the basis of comparative analysis of different modes of integration between individuals and society.

The study evolved in three phases. The first phase was concerned with providing a contextual framework, especially regarding knowledge at European and national levels. On the one hand, country reports were produced describing youth policy structures at national level, reviewing national youth research, reconstructing discourses on youth participation and contextualising the selected cities with regard to the national context (cf. Andersson et al., 2016). On the other hand, recent European policy discourses on youth participation were analysed including analysis of how they have been taken up and interpreted at national level (Becquet et al., 2016). Apart from this, a secondary analysis of data of the sixth wave of the European Social Survey was conducted in order to see what patterns of youth participation emerge from quantitative data in a cross-country perspective (Kovacheva et al., 2016). Outcomes of this first phase provided the contextual data necessary for the analysis of young people’s practices of participation at local level.

Against this backdrop, the core of the project consisted in qualitative fieldwork in the eight cities (phase two). Extensive local studies have been conducted consisting of two major parts: first, mapping processes were undertaken aimed at getting an overview of and insights into different ‘arenas’ (cf. Laine and Gretschel, 2011), practices and representations of youth participation. Expert interviews with policy makers and practitioners from different fields concerned with young people (20 per city) and 12 group discussions per city with young people covering different age groups, social milieus and institutional contexts were conducted. Some of the group discussions included city walks during which young people presented their neighbourhood to the researchers. One result was the selection of different settings of participatory activities which were subject to ethnographic in-depth case studies as a second step of the local studies. In each city, six settings were selected ensuring contrast and diversity across formal, non-formal and informal spaces and modes of participation. Formal settings are those in which youth participation is explicitly institutionalised and in most cases initiated by adults such as student or youth councils or youth sections of political parties. Non-formal settings refer to institutionalised practices in which participation is not an explicit goal but an implicit objective and integral work principle. Although departing from adult and/or professional intentions, activities start from young people’s interest and are developed by or jointly with the young people. Finally, informal settings are activities emerging from young people coping with their everyday lives in public spaces without being initiated or guided by adults and often also without being intended as participation by the young people themselves. These in-depth cases consisted of participant observation, group discussions, and sometimes expert interviews with ‘gate keepers’ or external actors. The aim was to reconstruct the emergence, the meaning and the functioning of the respective groups and practices, the ways in which they are addressed by and interact with their social environment (for an overview see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Overview over in-depth case studies in the eight cities

Additionally, biographical interviews have been conducted with two young persons per case (12 per city). The aim was to reconstruct how young people got and stayed involved in different activities in public space and what this involvement meant subjectively to them in the context of their life stories.

All qualitative interviews and group discussions conducted in the project have been audio-recorded and fully transcribed, and all observations have been protocolled by extensive field notes. Transcripts and field notes have been subject to an open coding process according to grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss, 1990; Charmaz, 2014), even if some sensitising concepts have been applied to all interviews across cases and cities to allow a minimum of comparative analysis. The analysis of the biographical interviews combined grounded theory with biographical case reconstruction following Rosenthal (2004) which allows relating the life trajectory with the subjective biographical construction. From all qualitative data sets, English summaries were produced and ten data sets per country were translated for joint analysis. The analysis of the mapping phase and of the in-depth case studies was documented in national case study reports on the basis of which a comparative case study report was produced (Batsleer et al., 2017).

From the local studies, two to three groups per city encountered in the mapping phase or with whom case studies had been conducted were selected to carry out participatory action research projects. This step of the research process implied shifting from analysis to action and also sharing or even handing over the power to define themes, research questions and activities as well as approaches to young people. The aim was to give young people the chance to raise issues and views and to observe and analyse learning processes involved in young people’s participation processes. The action research projects have been documented by young people while the processes have been analysed and documented nationally and in a synthesis report (McMahon et al., 2018; see also www.partispace.eu/download).

The third phase of the project consisted in thematic and comparative analysis as well as in dissemination of findings. Analysis occurred in five thematic working groups on comparative analysis of local constellations of participation (Lüküslü et al., 2018), on spaces of participation (Zimmermann et al., 2018), on styles of participation (Rowley et al., 2018), participation biographies (Cuconato et al., 2018) and on the learning processes involved in the process of ‘staging’ participation.

At local level, hearings were held with experts and stakeholders as well as with young people to disseminate and validate the findings and to stimulate processes of policy making. At European level, findings were discussed during a policy seminar together with practitioners, policy makers and researchers from the studied cities, from other European countries and the European institutions. Further, findings were used for a manual for the training of youth workers and other professionals working with young people (McM...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contested practices, power and pedagogies of young people in public spaces: an introduction
• PART I Conceptual and contextual frameworks of youth participation
• PART II Empirical insights into forms and meanings of youth participation
• PART III Towards new ways of understanding and supporting youth participation
• Index