‘Dear colleagues, I ask you to act like adults’: minority youth and their political participation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on conceptions and representations of political participation. It is based on ethnographic research of a civics course that a multicultural NGO designed for young people from different racialized and ethnic minorities in Finland. We ask how political participation is conceptualized in such efforts to ‘engage’ or ‘empower’ ‘marginalized’ young people, what opportunities for political participation these practices present and how young people make use of them. We draw on new citizenship theory, which focuses on lived and acted citizenships and practices of mundane political agency. Our analytical focus is on performative acts and processes, and how these may transform conventions. Thus, we examine the political inherent in young people’s actions and tackle the difficulty in recognizing young people’s political activeness and agency. The young people on the civics course actively took the space provided for them and performed political participation. Adults often failed to recognize this, leading us to question what, in the adults’ eyes, counts as acts and sites of political participation. We conclude that recognizing young people as political agents not only requires access and resources, but also negotiation of what is seen as political participation and what it can entail.