Youth Activism Online: Publics, Practices and Archives

Abstract

In keeping with the book’s focus on examining how young people have used life writing to critique discourses of youth, this final chapter examines two recent examples of activist projects that explicitly link utilise youthful subjectivities with political and social change. We consider two young women’s use of the blog to critique the political situation and its impact on the education of young women in their countries: Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and Isadora Faber in Brazil. We examine how Yousafzai and Faber have crafted a speaking position that utilise the ideologies and cultural constructions of childhood and youth—particularly as citizens and representatives of a nation’s future—to become the voices of educational reform.