“People give and take a lot in order to participate in things:” Youth talk back – making a case for non-participation

Abstract

Common typologies frame youth participation as something that exists at different hierarchical, or linear, levels or stages. In these models, non-participation is positioned as something negative or not addressed at all. Scholars have critiqued these typologies for ignoring contextual specificities and complexities, nuances, and power dynamics inherent in participatory processes. In this article, I draw from narratives of young people to productively theorize what non-participation might engender for thinking about and enacting participatory processes. In this study, I asked stakeholders at a youth-led HIV prevention and harm reduction peer-education program to take and discuss photographs that reflected their ideas about youth engagement. I provide a thematic analysis of how young people understood and navigated their participation in complex and self-determined ways. I put their narratives in dialogue with critical scholars’ writing on settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and willfulness to tease apart why and how young people’s comments on non-participation offer a sophisticated counter-hegemonic understanding of the “call to participation” and its discursive and material effects. Last, drawing on the work of Indigenous theorists who advocate for a politics of refusal, I argue that young people’s refusal to participate (or to participate on their own terms) may be an act of resistance – especially for young people whose bodies are regulated on a daily basis. I conclude by making a case for non-participation as a conceptual tool to disrupt and refuse hegemonic, linear theories of change and invite practitioners working with young people to do the same.