XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

803

Between the ‘No Longer’ and the ‘Not Yet’: Youth Political Participation in Time of Economic Crisis and Populism

RC48 Social Movements, Collective Actions and Social Change (host committee)

Language: English

The expression “economic crisis” has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Yet since the beginning of this new phase of neoliberalism, instability and worsening of job precariousness, the pathways of political participation of youth have also changed. In the last decade, far from being simply passive or cynic, young people did not renounce to be present in the public sphere and engaged participation in informal and infra-political activities, usually local, contingent, connected to specific interests, practices and networks, without overarching horizons and projects. In this scattering landscape of individualized initiatives, no longer related to the conventional collective actions of the past, the ‘not yet land’ of the political risks to leave room to the shortcut of ‘populism’, both of right and left-wing. Indeed, the tentative to imagine the new of a subjective and collective political participation, to redesign critical agency and political responsibility, faces social urgencies and needs of quick answers.

The session welcomes the presentation of researches and studies that try to critically investigate the current situation of youth political engagement, analyzing – beyond the description of single cases and examples - their potentials and pitfalls, their historical and generational characteristics.