Young Generations and Practices of Activism.

This research consists in an analysis of the processes of individualization as a structural element of contemporary societies, observing them within young people’s practices of individual and collective subjectivation, and in an empirical research on youth participatory practices. The sociological literature that theoretically and analytically supports the research refers to the sociological approach of Youth studies, highlighting the centrality of the concept of generation, declined in a social and political sense, thus focusing on the analysis of changes, as part of the current “polycrisis” background, imposed by the processes of neoliberal globalisation such as deregulation market reforms, privatisation of education and precarization of work. On the one hand, these processes have “colonized” the different spheres of associated life and provoked structural and subjective transformations of contemporary societies; on the other hand, they have also brought out the need to move to a more complex definition of individual identity, arising from the intersubjective and relational infrastructure. This is what emerges from my doctoral empirical research, implemented through the realization of more than sixty qualitative interviews carried out by comparing three socio-territorial contexts: Padua, Perugia and Messina, and involving young people in the age groups between 18 and 35 years who are active in youth political and social organizations, as well as in the world of associations; the same interviews have been extended to young people outside them, carrying out a further comparative approach. In this frame, this research has also explored the emotional dimension of youth participatory practices, where anger, fear, indignation constitute the vectors of mutualism and solidarity activities as well as socio-political mobilizations from which it is possible to observe on an analytical level how young people’s agency in the public sphere can be traceable back to forms of reinvention of the social and political.