Participating as young citizens in diverse communities

Abstract

Despite the plethora of social, educational, and youth-related policies that have encouraged children and young people’s citizenship participation in the past two decades, it is increasingly apparent that the landscape of youth participation is far from even or equal. Moreover, the application of uniform notions of identity and narrowly conceived categories of “what counts” as participation has had the effect of excluding many young people who fall outside of the normative majority culture. So how can we understand and theorize the unevenness of young people’s citizenship and practices in ways which give account of their differing experiences of citizenship in diverse communities? In this chapter, a critical social constructivist theoretical framework is proposed that draws on Bourdieu’s “species of capital” (social, economic, cultural, and symbolic) to interrogate and understand diverse practices of citizenship participation. Analyzing the “participatory capital” held by young people in two ethnic minority communities in New Zealand and England shows how citizen imaginaries are inseparable from gender, class, and race and the everyday experiences of being a citizen within social and spatial contexts. This analysis describes how participatory capital was created and generated in such communities, contributing to a fresh vision of the potential for transformative and collective understandings of youth citizenship within everyday spaces and places.