Young People and the Struggle for Participation Contested Practices, Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces

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.

1. Contested practices, power and pedagogies of young people in public spaces: an introduction. PART I: Conceptual and contextual frameworks of youth participation. 2. Researching youth participation – theoretical and methodological limitations of existing research and innovative perspectives. 3. Discourses of youth participation in Europe. National and transnational perspectives. 4. Do youth policies matter? National and local youth policies as contexts of Youth participation. Part II: Empirical insights into forms and meanings of youth participation. 5. "This is a compressed political system." Ambivalences of formal youth participation. 6. Young people’s appropriation of public space: participation through voice, sociability and activity. 7. Making a home in the city: how young people take part in the urban space. 8. Examining styles of youth participation in institutionalised settings as accumulation of capital forms. 9. Participation and everyday life: emerging meanings in youth cultural practices. 10. The interplay between life trajectories and participation careers. 11. Participation biographies: meaning-making, identity-work and the self. Part III: Towards new ways of understanding and supporting youth participation. 12. Everyday pedagogies: New perspectives on youth participation, social learning and citizenship. 13. Struggle over participation: Towards a grounded theory of youth participation.

Andreas Walther is a Professor for Educational Sciences and Director of the Research Centre ‘Education and Coping in the Life Course’ at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Janet Batsleer is a Reader in Education and Principal Lecturer in Youth and Community Work at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Patricia Loncle is a Professor of Sociology at the French High School of Public Health, Rennes, France.

Axel Pohl is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Work and Social Spaces at the FHS St. Gallen, University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.