When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us? The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order. The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism. Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

This volume engages with the contested concept of ‘active citizenship’. It analyses the use and understanding of active citizenship in youth civic and political initiatives in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the UK. Using ethnographic data and insights from the cross-European project CATCH-EyoU, the contributors to this collection illuminate the experiences of young people taking action for social change. It does so at a unique moment when a resurgent populist political right is deploying racial prejudice and neoliberal protectionism in both established media and new digital media to fuel xenophobic nationalism. The book asks a range of questions, including: What is life like for active young citizens with an interest in the civic and political spheres? What practices, relationships and motivations characterise their participatory movements, organisations, initiatives and groups? The chapters use case studies to analyse how friendship and emotion, social media, diversity-work, racism, precarity and burnout feed into motivating and developing or curtailing sustained pro-democratic activism. Youth Active Citizenship in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including politics, sociology, education and cultural studies.

A 2023 CIES Book of the Month pick! How we think about civic participation has changed dramatically and informs our understanding of how civic education is being transformed. Nations, globally, are redefining what is needed to be a ‘good citizen’ and how they should create them. ‘Civic’ participation increasingly extends beyond voting in elections, to informal and unconventional action. Making one’s voice heard involves diverse communication media and wide-ranging skills. Young people are motivated to engagement by concern about climate change and the rights of marginalised people. Social media empower but bring the threat of extremism. Civic education – New Civics – must channel and foster these trends. To create critical, active and responsible citizenship, knowledge alone is not enough; young people need to able to take critical perspectives on a wide range of social and political issues, and to acquire the social, cognitive and organizational skills to do so. How is new civics pedagogy being manifested? What traditional practices are under scrutiny? In this volume sixteen projects in eight countries address questions in research, practices, policy and professional development. What is civic identity and how does participation reflect it? Where do new discourses and definitions come from? How do contemporary social and cultural debates and issues intersect with practice and precepts?

Since the 1990s, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs have experienced unprecedented expansion in American public schools. The program and its proliferation in poor, urban schools districts with large numbers of Latina/o and African American students is not without controversy. Public support is often based on the belief that the program provides much-needed discipline for "at risk" youth. Meanwhile, critics of JROTC argue that the program is a recruiting tool for the U.S. military and is yet another example of an increasingly punitive climate that disproportionately affect youth of color in American public schools. Citizen, Student, Soldier intervenes in these debates, providing critical ethnographic attention to understanding the motivations, aspirations, and experiences of students who participate in increasing numbers in JROTC programs. These students have complex reasons for their participation, reasons that challenge the reductive idea that they are either dangerous youths who need discipline or victims being exploited by a predatory program. Rather, their participation is informed by their marginal economic position in the local political economy, as well as their desire to be regarded as full citizens, both locally and nationally. Citizenship is one of the central concerns guiding the JROTC curriculum; this book explores ethnographically how students understand and enact different visions of citizenship and grounds these understandings in local and national political economic contexts. It also highlights the ideological, social and cultural conditions of Latina/o youth and their families who both participate in and are enmeshed in vigorous debates about citizenship, obligation, social opportunity, militarism and, ultimately, the American Dream.

Rethinking Youth Citizenship After the Age of Entitlement provides a primer for exploring hard questions about how young people understand, experience and enact their citizenship in uncertain times and about their senses of membership and belonging. It examines how familiar modes of exclusion are compounded by punitive youth policies in ways that are concealed by neoliberal discourses. It considers the role of key institutions in constructing young people's citizenship and looks at the ways in which some young people are opting out of established enactments of citizenship while creating new ones. Critically reflecting on recent scholarly interest in the geographical, relational, affective and temporal dimensions of young people's experiences of citizenship, it also reinvigorates the discussion about citizenship rights and entitlements, and what these might mean for young people. The book draws on global research and theories of citizenship but has a particular focus on Australia, which provides a unique example of a country that has fared well economically yet is mimicking the austerity measures of the United Kingdom and Europe. It concludes with an argument for a rethinking of citizenship which recognises young people's rights as citizens and the ways in which these interact with their lived experience at a time that has been characterised as 'the end of the age of entitlement'.

"Co-published simultaneously as Child & Youth Services, Volume 29, Numbers 3/4 2007."

Too young to vote or pay taxes, teenagers are off the radar of political scientists. Yet civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in experiences as members of families, schools, and community organizations. Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage civic engagement, and how their political identities take form.