‘I wanted to take on a lot of responsibility’. Reconstructing biographies of young people engaged in formal participation

ABSTRACT

Youth councils, youth parliaments or youth organisations are often referred to as the king’s road to young people’s participation, at least from the point of view of policymakers. At the same time, there is evidence that many young people are either uninformed about or sceptical of institutionalised forms of youth participation as they distrust institutions in general. This article is interested in understanding why some young people actually engage in those institutionalised forms of youth participation that most of their peers assess as being ineffective and irrelevant for their needs and interests. Based on qualitative interviews with young people involved in different forms of participation in the context of a European research project, we take a biographical approach aimed at reconstructing what makes young people interested in getting and staying involved with youth councils, youth parliaments and/or youth organisations. The aim is, on the one hand, to analyse the different biographical pathways that lead young people into formal engagement as youth representatives. On the other hand, this article draws on a reconstructive analysis of the life stories of young people who engage in formal participation to elaborate the key dimensions and constellations that can be reconstructed from their participation biographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• participation
• biography
• institutions
• power

Acknowledgement

This paper draws on data generated and analysed as part of the project, ‘Spaces and styles of participation. Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities for young people’s participation in European cities’ (PARTISPACE) funded by HORIZION 2020 (contract no. 649416). The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 PARTISPACE stands for ‘Spaces and Styles of Participation. Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of participation for young people on European cities’. It was funded from 2015 to 2018 under the EU programme HORIZON 2020 (contract No. 649416). The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. The European cities involved were Bologna (Italy), Eşkişehir (Turkey), Frankfurt (Germany), Gothenburg (Sweden), Manchester (UK), Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Rennes (France), and Zurich (Switzerland) (more information under www.partispace.eu).

2 All names of respondents and organisations have been changed for reasons of anonymisation.

3 ‘The personal is political’ is a slogan of the second wave of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. This slogan seems to fit well to this constellation of participation biographies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Commission (HORIZON 2020): [project number 649416].