Overview

This is the first handbook to focus exclusively on youth activism, to outline the current state of research and identify promising emerging areas, and to forecast what new developments one might anticipate in the future. It provides a comprehensive introduction to theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as insights into the directions of both the scholarly field and the phenomenon of youth activism itself within the context of global power relations. Youth political socialization, civic engagement, and citizenship attributes have frequently been highlighted as arenas of global concern, often by pundits and politicians declaiming the supposed ‘democratic deficit’ amongst more recent generations. Youth activism scholarship has often engaged with these debates, providing critical responses to more mainstream analyses of young people as apathetic, apolitical, or unconcerned about the society in which they live. In its place, youth activism scholarship provides more nuanced accounts of the possibilities and potentials for meaningful youth engagement in political social change, and, conversely, the barriers and proscriptions that prevent some young people from taking up a place within the polity.

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9783111214603

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Cihan Erdal earned his PhD in Sociology at Carleton University in 2025 and was awarded the Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement for his doctoral work on youth activism. Dr. Erdal’s broader research areas include youth cultures, social movements, democracy, coalitional politics, contemporary experiences of time and temporality, collective memory, political phenomenology, citizenship education, curriculum studies, and ethnographic methods. Erdal has been serving as an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and as the coordinator of the Centre for Urban Youth Research at Carleton University. He is also the founding director of the Istanbul Youth Research Center, a non-governmental organization specializing in critical and justice-oriented research on young people. Jacqueline Kennelly is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Centre for Urban Youth Research (CUYR) at Carleton University. Dr. Kennelly’s current research focuses on activist and homeless young people’s experiences of democracy, citizenship and public life, schools as sites of youth homelessness prevention, and the experiences of young people who have left homelessness.

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