Engaging in politics through youth transitions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential of youth transitions to explain and contextualize young people’s engagements with politics. It starts with the discussion of the alleged detachment between young people and politics, recently challenged by research on alternative engagements and Do It Ourselves (DIO) politics (Pickard, Sarah. 2019. Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in the 21 Century Britain. London: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7). Then follows the discussion on the contributions which different currents on youth research have brought to the role of youth transitions in young people’s engagements with politics. Youth transitions are afterwards defined as the strategic setting where intensive and plural engagements with politics may emerge if certain conditions are met. This is the context where a sense of place in the structural spectrum of inequality starts to develop and the correspondent agentic response blossoms, fostered by crucial encounters with significant others and the occurrence of critical moments. This account is brought by a qualitative approach based on the biographical records of a group of intensely mobilized young people, which retraces the individual processes of engagement made through transitions during education and from education to work, highlighting the contribution that transitional features may bring to the development of successful ‘militant careers’ (Filieulle, Olivier, Lilian Mathieu, and Cécile Péchu. 2009. Dictionnaire des Mouvements Sociaux. Presses de Sciences Po. doi:10.3917/scpo.filli.2009.01) and to incorporate contemporary young people’s subjectivities in the political process.