How Does Montreal 'fabricate' Involved Youth?

The social involvement of young Quebecers differs from that of other Canadian provinces in its different modes of social participation. It is not surprising that Montreal is the first city in the South to host the World Social Forum since its creation in 2001 in Porto Allegre. We note that several spontaneous initiatives are emerging: collective gardens, public benches to promote solidarity; artistic expressions of citizenship (Ferraris, 2014a, b, c, Folie-Boivin, 2014). Quebec society has 'fabricated', as Gagné and Neveu (2009) put it, a generation of young people committed to certain common goods (Katz 2015) and who say they are paradoxically political orphans (St-Pierre Plamondon 2014). How has this social and political citizenship been fabricated? Our experience as observers during Citizen summer school of the Institut du Nouveau Monde (New world institute) a non-profit organization based in Montreal has shown that young people attend many types of organizations through their social participation paths and that they allow them to engage in different process of political subjectivization. In this paper, we will analyze the narratives of young people who have attended a citizenship school. We will analyze the life events and organizations that influence their social participation trajectory on the one hand, and analyze how this trajectory articulates or not with a process of political subjectivation and social change.