Researching the everyday: young people’s experiences and expressions of citizenship

Abstract

This paper reports on a research study which drew attention to the constitutive nature of the everyday world in young people’s subjectivities and practices of citizenship. Central to the aim of this research was a need for alignment between the focus of the research (‘everyday’ citizenship), with methods which could illuminate the day-to-day experiences of being a citizen. In this paper, I re-examine some of the ‘everyday’ data generated by two research methods which were initially discounted as rambling or divergent. This data characteristically had frequent interjections, incomplete sentences, questions and queries, or a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Through a re-analysis of this data, I consider the potential it offers to contribute conceptual and theoretical insights into young people’s citizenship dispositions and practices. The research revealed the diverse, complex and contested understandings of citizenship that young people were forming in the context of day-to-day social and spatial interactions.

Keywords:

• everyday
• citizenship
• young people
• research alignment
• feminist citizenship theory

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the three anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on this paper. I would like to acknowledge the creativity and enthusiasm of the young people and teachers who participated in this research and the guidance and support of Dr Joanna Kidman and Dr Mark Sheehan. I am grateful for funding for this research from the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission’s Bright Futures Trust.

Notes

1. Youth participants are identified by self-selected pseudonyms for this research. While these chosen pseudonyms can at times be disruptive to the reading of research (Valentine 1999), I chose to leave their unusual or playful names unaltered to reflect the care they took in inventing these as well as honouring their personal (and indeed) political creativity.

2. Social studies is the curriculum area in New Zealand which is the primary vehicle for citizenship education. In particular, I was interested in how students (and teachers) defined and practised ‘social action’ which is a compulsory aspect of this curriculum (Ministry of Education 2007).

3. A decile 1 school represents the lowest 10% of socio-economic communities in NZ and decile 10 the highest.

4. Other terms for similar approaches include photo-elicitation (Allen 2009), auto-photography (Dodman 2003) and participatory photo interviews (Jorgenson and Sullivan 2010).