Beyond empowerment and inspiration: towards a critical program for multicultural youth leadership

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which multicultural youth leadership programs reflect a model of participatory citizenship and individual empowerment that risks affirming white institutional worlds. Drawing on data from a national study of migrant and refugee youth in Australia, it suggests that while these activities offer useful forms of civic and vocational training for its participants, leadership programs can burden migrant youth with forms of cultural labor that other young people are not expected to perform. Programs of multicultural youth leadership make young migrants responsible for their communities, while also obscuring these communal attachments and responsibilities via an emphasis on individual achievement. It is argued that such programs form part of a wider discourse of neoliberal nationhood and youth futurity, where ideas about the productive potential of migrant youth are shaped by normative ideas about what the nation should be. These programs could instead be reoriented to emphasize the critical and creative capacities of migrant youth. Strategies of co-production can enable young people to take up a more flexible range of positions through which they share their expertise, and contribute to collective forms of cultural citizenship that can challenge, rather than affirm, the white institutional worlds through which they are governed.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant youth
• leadership
• cultural citizenship
• empowerment
• multiculturalism
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The project, ‘Defining the Status of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Young People’ was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant (LP150100219, 2016-2018). Ethics approval was provided by the University of Melbourne’s Human Research Ethics Committee in 2016 (ethics id. 1545979.1) and 2017 (ethics id. 1545979.2).

2 For a detailed analysis of the MYA census data see Wyn, Khan, and Dadvand (2019) and Khan (2021).

3 These migrant youth leaders were formally involved, or affiliated, as volunteers or in an advisory capacity, with the partner organisations on the research project.

4 Almost one third (31.7%) of the sample had signed a petition or online campaign in the last year, 27.5% expressed an opinion on social media about an issue they cared about, 23.7% thought ethically about products they buy, 10.3% attended a protest or demonstration, and 8.4% had contacted a politician about an issue they cared about (Wyn, Khan, and Dadvand 2019). When asked what they believed were issues of importance in Australia, the most commonly cited issue was diversity and discrimination.

5 This usage of the term reflects the policy category, ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’, or ‘CALD’, which refers to first- and second-generation migrants who come from countries where the main language is not English.

6 One of the funders of CMY is the national Department for Home Affairs, the same body that oversees Australia’s punitive refugee deterrence policy. In 2018–2019 CMY was funded by seven state government agencies, and 2 federal government departments, as well as thirteen philanthropic bodies (CMY 2019c, 37).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number LP150100219].