Beyond empowerment and inspiration: towards a critical program for multicultural youth leadership

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which multicultural youth leadership programs reflect a model of participatory citizenship and individual empowerment that risks affirming white institutional worlds. Drawing on data from a national study of migrant and refugee youth in Australia, it suggests that while these activities offer useful forms of civic and vocational training for its participants, leadership programs can burden migrant youth with forms of cultural labor that other young people are not expected to perform. Programs of multicultural youth leadership make young migrants responsible for their communities, while also obscuring these communal attachments and responsibilities via an emphasis on individual achievement. It is argued that such programs form part of a wider discourse of neoliberal nationhood and youth futurity, where ideas about the productive potential of migrant youth are shaped by normative ideas about what the nation should be. These programs could instead be reoriented to emphasize the critical and creative capacities of migrant youth. Strategies of co-production can enable young people to take up a more flexible range of positions through which they share their expertise, and contribute to collective forms of cultural citizenship that can challenge, rather than affirm, the white institutional worlds through which they are governed.