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ABSTRACT
This article explores the potential of youth transitions to explain and contextualize young people’s engagements with politics. It starts with the discussion of the alleged detachment between young people and politics, recently challenged by research on alternative engagements and Do It Ourselves (DIO) politics (Pickard, Sarah. 2019. Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in the 21 Century Britain. London: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7). Then follows the discussion on the contributions which different currents on youth research have brought to the role of youth transitions in young people’s engagements with politics. Youth transitions are afterwards defined as the strategic setting where intensive and plural engagements with politics may emerge if certain conditions are met. This is the context where a sense of place in the structural spectrum of inequality starts to develop and the correspondent agentic response blossoms, fostered by crucial encounters with significant others and the occurrence of critical moments. This account is brought by a qualitative approach based on the biographical records of a group of intensely mobilized young people, which retraces the individual processes of engagement made through transitions during education and from education to work, highlighting the contribution that transitional features may bring to the development of successful ‘militant careers’ (Filieulle, Olivier, Lilian Mathieu, and Cécile Péchu. 2009. Dictionnaire des Mouvements Sociaux. Presses de Sciences Po. doi:10.3917/scpo.filli.2009.01) and to incorporate contemporary young people’s subjectivities in the political process.
Acknowledgements
The empirical material used for this article is part of the fieldwork undertaken between 2012 and 2013 for the MYPLACE research project, coordinated by Hilary Pilkington (University of Manchester) and funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission (GA 266831).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 This agenda persisted after the government’s renewal of mandate, in the 2019 legislative elections, based on a similar parliamentary support. However, a more conflictive relationship among the left-wing political parties supporting the government resulted in its early dismissal and dissolution of the parliament. In the 2022 general elections, the electorate punished the extreme-left and compensated the Socialist Party with un unexpected absolute majority. The anti-precariousness agenda persists at the time of writing although with far less momentum, dictated by the new political balance, the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the more recent armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
3 Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement (MYPLACE) was a multi-methods international research project involving 16 partners from 14 universities and research centers that endeavored to capture how young people social and political participation is shaped by the shadows (past, present, and future) of populism and totalitarianism in Europe. The project employed a combination of survey, interviews, and ethnography research instruments to obtain new and pan-European data on young people’s levels of civic and political participation and meanings associated with it. PI was selected as a relevant group for ethnographic observation among the MYPLACE’s anti-capitalist movements cluster due to its relevant action against labour precariousness and their protagonist role in the Anti-troika social movement occurred in Portugal in the period between 2011 and 2014.
4 The interview schedule used included open questions on several themes (trajectory of political engagement and participation, the structure and organisation of the group, experiences of participation, political transmission, and political legacies), however, the analysis undertaken here focuses specifically on the first part of the script, which contained questions about the interviewee’s trajectory of political participation and civic engagement.
5 All names referred here are pseudonyms.
6 Other MYPLACE work package included the execution of 60 qualitative interviews with young people with ages between 16 and 25 from two different localities in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Alves Citation2021). When asked if they had any personal involvement in the political popular mobilization against the Troika and the crisis, only a few reported being present. The large majority showed an ambivalent attitude to this sort of political mobilization or even a dismissive position regarding the outcome of such initiatives.