Re-Thinking Youth Participation

PARTISPACE has started from the assumption that the dominant understanding of youth participation in research, policy and practice is narrow and limited to institutionalised forms and meanings of (political, social or civic) participation.

Neglecting other practices of young people contributes to reproducing social inequality and has a double effect of exclusion: discourses draw a picture according to which a majority of young people do not participate while young people express disinterest in getting involved in officially recognised forms of participation and thus seem to reproduce the discursive picture (cf. Kovacheva et al., 2016).

The central research question of PARTISPACE was how and where young people do participate differently across social milieus and youth cultural scenes. What styles of participation do they prefer, develop and apply and in what spaces does participation take place? This paper addresses that question