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This thesis examines forms of activism among middle-class youth in the context of neoliberal urban change in Delhi. The research is set within four interdisciplinary bodies of literature reflecting the experiences of young activists: middle-class identity, everyday politics and new modalities of social action, intersectionality, and active citizenship. What emerges from each of these bodies is a view to the contradictory politics of the young middle-class. Focusing on new forms of social action at the community level, this thesis uses an expansive definition of both activism and middle-class to encompass a range of activities from social enterprise, to technology-enabled mobilization around social issues, to political campaigning among India’s expanding middle-class. The research is framed within young peoples' period of waiting: for full adulthood, marriage, and importantly, full-time employment. Grounded in qualitative fieldwork, this thesis concentrates on young people, aged 18 to 30, in the middle-class with putatively distinct activist practices. Young people in Delhi are engaged in various activities that loosely correspond to different ideals of social justice or social work. I illustrate the innate differences in these ideals, their motivations, and methods. I analyze the limitations of different activist projects and the extent to which the social action is constructive—in the sense of enhancing the capabilities of marginalized sections of society and promoting inclusivity. The young people at the core of this project contend to be anti-politics, yet they are quite political. Additionally, the interlocutors show contempt for the state and the commercial interests of the market but deploy and rely on strategies from both. My examination gives prominence to the improvised nature of young people's lives and the decisions they make at key life stages. Activation of the self, and actualization for the researched youth, manifests in entrepreneurial activity, community work short of politics, and the negotiation of class, caste, and gender on an everyday basis. This thesis argues for more scholarly attention to the everyday lives of middle-class youth that can offer insights into this key demographic and connect individual decisions to broader social and political change.

This thesis enquires into the kinds of citizenship taught and learned in formal and informal settings of citizenship education in Scotland. There has been a ‘perceived’ crisis in democratic citizenry in the UK and elsewhere across the world since the 1990s and this has brought about renewed interests in citizenship education whereby young people are a specifically targeted group. Yet, citizenship education is a fundamentally contested domain where conflicting and contrasting ideologies co-exist and the Scottish version of ‘education for global citizenship’ is an archetypal example of this. By exploring similarities and differences between accounts of ‘what adult practitioners do’ and ‘what young people learn’ in each setting, the thesis emphasises tensions and challenges of citizenship education and their implications for the wider debates about the complex relationship between citizenship, democracy and education. The thesis deploys a synthesised theoretical framework for differentiating and analysing the types of education and learning that are legitimate points of reference in citizenship education for democratic life. It distinguishes between approaches to education for citizenship that focuses on membership of the community (relationships and service work in communities), formal political participation (political literacy in terms of institutions, processes and procedures) entrepreneurial citizenship (employability skills and economic participation) and social and political activism (the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively to realise the inherent goals of democracy). These different approaches entail a broad ideological mix of civic republicanism, liberalism and neoliberalism which informs citizenship education. The increasing emphasis on economic participation in educational contexts resonates with what can be termed as a neoliberal version of ‘responsiblised citizenship’ that promotes an individualised and depoliticised conception of citizenship by equipping young people with knowledge, skills and experiences to get on and get into the labour market through their own individual efforts rather than being concerned with the collective needs and interests of young people. Formal education and, to some extent informal community education, tend to overlook the de facto issues, experiences and contributions of young people as engaged citizens and the need to focus on the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively in order to realise the inherent goals of democracy as an unfinished project. Consequently, the experience of citizenship education is one young people often feel marginal to or marginalised from. This thesis challenges the dominant assumption of ‘disengaged youth’ to focus instead on the democratic deficit at the heart of citizenship teaching and learning. Along with the ‘invited’ spaces of citizenship education, in both formal and informal settings, the goal of democracy should include the ‘invented’ spaces of citizenship learning which reflects the lived experience, concerns and aspirations of young people.

The purpose of this study is to better understand Kentucky youth climate activism. The research questions explore how youth define their climate activism in Kentucky, their Significant Life Experiences (SLE) that motivated them to commit to climate activism, and what challenges and sustains their involvement. This qualitative study utilizes a blended framework of social/environmental positionality and political ecology to analyze 7 semi-structured interviews with participants between the ages 18 to 24 years old who are acting to address climate change in Kentucky. New contributions to the existing body of SLE literature are discussed.

Los Angeles has been heralded as the city of inmates and prison capital of the world. In this study, I used mixed qualitative methods to explore the ideas and experiences of Black and Latinx young men in what I refer to as carceral Los Angeles. Carceral Los Angeles recognizes criminalization, confinement, and punishment as central to the making of the city. These carceral logics expand beyond prisons, jails, and detention centers. Informed by the carceral history of Los Angeles, this study was guided by questions such as: (a) What does it feel like to be a young person of color criminalized in the city of inmates? and (b) How does criminalization shape gender ideologies and gendered practices? I found Black and Latinx young men are constantly experiencing and witnessing criminalization across contexts and institutions. Their experiences revealed an overlapping ensemble of institutions and social actors were implicated in their criminalization not because they are committing a crime, but because by their very existence they are assumed to be criminal. With these experiences beginning as early as 6 years old, I show how racialized emotions (e.g., fear, paranoia) in a context of criminalization are described and understood by the young men. I argue racialized emotions are a central process through which the carceral state materializes. I also revealed that criminalization and hostility across contexts produces gendered enclosures that shape the young men’s gender ideologies and practices. Gendered enclosures bring attention to how policy, punitive practices, and discourse serve as formal and informal means to impose white patriarchal heteronormative ideals that confine the expressions and behaviors of Black and Latinx boys and young men. I argue gendered enclosures foreclose vulnerability, emotional expressions, and the opportunity to process experiences with criminalization and violence. Thus, a second set of questions also guided this study: (a) Where do Black and Latinx boys and young men find spaces to heal from criminalization?; (b) How, and to what extent, do the organizational practices in community-based educational spaces shape the gender ideologies of young men?; and (c) What strategies are Black and Latinx young men adopting in their efforts to combat the carceral state? Based on participation observations with Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition (BSS)—a coalition of nine community-based organizations across Los Angeles County engaged in abolitionist activism and political education—I found community-based educational spaces function as a homeplace (hooks 1990) that mediates gendered enclosures at the interpersonal level because being part of a homeplace provides alternative understandings of manhood via relational practices, political education, and healing programming. Thus, I argue the young men’s participation in BSS programming, including healing practices, buffers gendered enclosures. To illustrate this buffer, I honed in on BSS programming and the practices of youth workers to illuminate the ways the young men extend their understandings of gender and sexuality by their participation. Lastly, I demonstrate how intersectional thinking and an abolition ethos informs the young men’s visions of social transformation, coalition building, and relational practices. Particularly, how their intersectional thinking attends to relational practices that pose a challenge to carceral logics of abandonment, criminalization, and disposability. Based on these findings, I use water seepage as an organizing metaphor to argue the carceral backdrop the young men navigate can be understood as carceral seepage. Carceral seepage attends to the intensity, scale, and consequential nature of the carceral state on the lives of Black and Latinx youth.

This dissertation is a historical analysis of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the movement for Black lives (MBL) in Los Angeles from 2013 to 2021. It is also a theoretical consideration of the prospects and complications of racial justice activism in the 21st century. It interrogates the political philosophies and organizational strategies of BLM/MBL. This study explores how the intervention of intersectional, intergenerational, and decentralized leadership forms have disrupted heteropatriarchal traditions in the Black freedom struggle. It evaluates the significance and utility of Marxism in addressing issues of economic crisis and state-sanctioned violence from the 2008 Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also evaluates how BLM/MBL has interfaced with labor organizing and other racial justice developments like the #StopAsianHate, #AbolishICE, and Indigenous Sovereignty movements. Lastly, it examines the vital role of youth and student activism in college campuses and community-based non-profit organizations in both initiating BLM/MBL and in sustaining its mobilization.KEY WORDS: Black Lives Matter, racial justice activism, abolition, anti-capitalism, intersectionality, Marxism, state-sanctioned violence, labor organizing, youth activism

Much has been written on the history of the civil rights movement in the U.S. South during the 1960s. Historians have devoted most of their attention to the movement in the urban South and the role of adults. We need more attention to the activism of young people, especially in the small-town and rural South. My thesis shines a light on the youth-led civil rights movement in Americus, Georgia, in the summer and fall of 1963. I focus on the story of thirty-two Black girls who, after being arrested at a protest in Americus, were detained in the Leesburg Stockade, a decrepit Civil War-era building. My thesis investigates what happened, how it was covered at the time, how some of the women recalled their experiences, and how efforts continue to memorialize this significant but still not well-known episode in civil rights history. I hope that my work will reinforce the case for more academic and public attention to the historical contributions of young people to the ongoing Black freedom movement.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which rose to prominence following the state-sanctioned murders of several unarmed Black Americans, shed light on the power of social media to serve as a platform for transformative resistance, counter-storytelling, and civic engagement for marginalized youth. With some of the highest rates of social media use to date, it is not altogether surprising that Black college-age youth, particularly young Black women, were the primary curators of the politicized social media storm that captured the nation’s attention and spurred a viral hashtag into a historical movement. While Black women’s persistent use of social media to enact resistance in their schools, in their communities and in popular media is indicative of its importance in their socio-academic experiences, there remains a substantial dearth in educational scholarship examining the nexus of race, gender and resistance as it relates to the digital realm. By drawing upon critical race theory in education (CRT), Black feminist thought (BFT), and Black Feminist Technology Studies (BFTS), this study centers the voices of 17 Black undergraduate women from eight universities across the US and Canada in an attempt to answer these research questions. Findings revealed the ability of social media to provide young Black women with a sense of safety, visibility, and community that is not regularly available in offline settings. In addition to the benefits of digital resistance, this study also illuminated a spectrum of unintended health impacts of reading, responding to and witnessing anti-Black violence online. A growing skepticism of internet technology to single handedly transform society also emerged from the findings.

I utilize Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model as a conceptual framework to consider the challenges of primarily low-income, Mexican American youth living on the Westside in Los Angeles. Through a case study method I analyze the ways in which the Urban Youth Program (UYP) a program of the Family Leadership Center (FLC) a community based organization (CBO) provides a vital resource for youth. Although UYP strengthens the ecological environments of youth involved, I argue that a positive youth development framework, which underscores the functioning of UYP is ill-equipped to address macro-level issues such as the new and emerging challenges of gentrification and increasing foundation reliance which can potentially undermine the youth’s ecological environment. I argue that FLC should shift its program towards a youth organizing model.

The Chosen Universalists contributes to our understanding of the sociocultural consequences of growing income inequality. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on American Jewish philanthropy, service, and activism in post-Katrina New Orleans, my dissertation presents Jewish philanthropy as a crucial discursive field within which American Jewish identity and community are constructed and contested. I develop a series of interlocking arguments about contemporary Jewish social justice activism and its relationship to Jewish philanthropy. Anthropological theories of the gift illuminate the ways in which an awareness of Jewish identity as social privilege can sometimes motivate progressive activism. This emergent sense of Jewish privilege must be understood in relation to initiatives funded by extremely wealthy philanthropists to promote Jewish continuity in the face of concerns about the biosocial reproduction of Jews and Jewish institutions. The Chosen Universalists analyzes how this continuity agenda intersects with intra-Jewish debates related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I argue that while Jewish social justice agencies are de-centered or post-diasporic, the American Jewish Zionist mainstream and Jewish anti-Zionists can be understood as inverted and opposite formulations of a diasporic Jewish identity centered on the State of Israel. Through these investigations, The Chosen Universalists traces the processes whereby religious groups and ideologies are continually reformulated and illustrates the impact of a donor class eager to use wealth to achieve large-scale social projects. My work thus highlights the ways in which class dynamics and growing socioeconomic inequality are shaping and reshaping contemporary American religion. Research completed in support of this dissertation included archival research on the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans as well as interviews with current lay leaders and professionals working for the organization. I also interviewed a number of philanthropists active in New Orleans as well as professional staff working for family foundations. My research of Jewish youth culture included the ethnographic study of a yearlong service corps, an informal Jewish youth activist community, and six service tours to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Informed by a critical multicultural framework, this research explores how youth raise awareness, critique inequitable structures, and engage in an array of social justice work. Two research major questions that guide this project are as follows: How do students create youth activist narratives using social justice experiences? What do students' reflections about the narrative writing process reveal about why they engage in social justice work? In order to answer these questions, I used critical narrative inquiry as I entered a ninth-grade World Humanities classroom at Justice High School for a ten-month qualitative study. In the Humanities classroom, I focused on how students developed social justice projects on a variety of contemporary injustices (e.g., human sex trafficking, domestic violence, discrimination against LGBTQI youth, gentrification) and explored how youth came to understand, speak, and write about social inequities and injustices as well as how they position themselves as advocates, allies, and/or activists. Through thematic analysis of their Capstone Project, I analyzed how four girls used stories to engage in socially just activist practices. The narratives that emerged from this work can offer insight into how K-20 classrooms can foster partnerships that generate transformative, activist curricular engagements. I propose that major implications of this dissertation research will ultimately impact theoretical, methodological, and praxis-oriented understandings of teaching, learning, and sustaining socially just partnerships.

In nationalist Armenian American youth activism and expression, the practice of memory of woundedness and genocide is conceived as a form of resistance related to claiming a particular subjectivity and identity as diasporan Armenians and as a minority group in the United States. Armenian American youth position themselves in history as remnants and freedom fighters, demanding recognition of the Armenian genocide in a "struggle for justice" that simultaneously calls for their recognition as survivors in a context of perceived denial. The tradition of activism on which this dissertation focuses has tended toward anti-assimilationism and the assumption and display of woundedness as a means of obtaining perceptibility, for it is the distinction of woundedness on which Armenian American survivorship is legitimated. The Armenian genocide and its denial are often cited as the cause of the wound, producing survivorship as a specific position to the past. Youth experience and claim survivorship through historically significant diasporan institutions that structure commemoration services, cultural events, and political protests where practices of memory are encouraged as well as in U.S. political spaces including public schools where denial and ambiguity are personally perceived. This dissertation is based on eighteen months of field research in the Los Angeles region, one of the largest populations of diasporan Armenians.

Despite existing literature that demonstrates the relation between an attitude of social responsibility and activism; few studies have examined the underlying factor structure of social responsibility. The current study had two goals. The first goal was to examine the structure of a measure of social responsibility attitude for urban adolescents. The second goal was to examine the associations of social responsibility with civic and political activism. The participants were 221 adolescents from schools and youth serving organizations in metropolitan Atlanta, GA. Confirmatory factor analysis of social responsibility items revealed that a model with a single latent factor explained the data better than a two-factor model with one latent factor representing neighborhood social responsibility and the other representing global social responsibility. There were significant positive relations between social responsibility and civic activism and political activism when controlling for parental activism and peer activism. This study suggests that a social responsibility attitude may exist as a single factor amongst urban adolescents and it has added empirical support to show that higher levels of social responsibility are associated with greater depth of involvement in civic and political activism. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Youth of color are routinely dehumanized and treated as objects both in schools and in society. The “banking method” approach to teaching and stringent zero tolerance policies that are prevalent in low-income schools predominantly populated by youth of color serve to push youth out of school and pull them into the school-to-prison pipeline. When students do not meet their school’s standards, the institutional gaze is fixed disapprovingly on the child and the family. The history of segregation and institutionalized oppression that led to a legacy of inadequate and culturally irrelevant schooling and a poor quality of life for communities of color is erased. For the children who grow up in such environments, a historical silence makes it difficult if not impossible to make sense of their present-day conditions and the changes they are witnessing in their communities. People Organized in the Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER) is an organization that focuses on issues of environmental, economic, and social justice, and strives to facilitate youth empowerment through their Young Scholars for Justice (YSJ) summer program. The youth of color in the program are positioned as knowledgeable researchers and historical actors in their community. The Chicana feminist epistemology of PODER’s staff members creates a nurturing and family-like environment for the youth, which has a significant impact on the females, and enables youth to utilize personal experiences to develop a structural analysis of oppression. As youth acquire a historical conocimiento of East Austin, they also learn about organized resistance to oppression vis-à-vis environmental justice campaigns. In doing so, a spiritual activism blossoms in the youth that is born from their wounds of oppression and rooted in a cultural and historical awareness of their community. The youth engage in a cycle of praxis as their spiritual activism mobilizes them against injustices and ushers in their transformation into subjects. Through participant observation and interviews, I weave together a critical case study of the YSJ program that is informed by the metamorphosis I experienced after participating in the program.

This study is concerned with how marginalized people come to question and challenge societally-accepted injustice and inequality. It asks, how does the discourse and practice of immigration policy shape the political consciousness of undocumented Latino youth in California? To answer this question, this ethnographic study focuses on the experiences of individual activists and members of a college-campus based support group of undocumented students, who are active in the statewide campaign to pass the DREAM Act. The narrative around illegal immigration is widely taken to be common sense, yet little is known about how the identities of undocumented young people are produced in and through this process. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and common sense, I question how common sense is made and unmade among undocumented immigrant youth. This study draws from ethnographic data collected at three sites over the course of 18-months. First, I conducted life-history interviews with 50 undocumented Latino youth activists across California. Second, I conducted participant-observation throughout the 2007-2008 school year at a Northern California college-based support/activist group of undocumented students. Third, I monitored the statewide campaign to pass the DREAM Act between February 2007 and October 2008 through interviews, participant- observation with the statewide network, and formal and informal archival research. The introductory chapter presents the political context surrounding undocumented immigrant youth in California, a literature review of the theoretical trends that seek to explain the experiences of undocumented youth, and a description of my study and methods. Chapter 2 focuses on the individual undocumented youth activist by examining his/her development of oppositional consciousness. I argue that oppositional consciousness is forged out of the dialectic between ideas that are both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. Chapter 3 focuses on the student group "UPSRG," and looks at collective action, the development of collective political identity, and the tensions and possibilities that come from an organization that has an identity as a support group and an activist group. I argue that undocumented youth experience a unique kind of insider/outsiderness which shapes their political engagement and their personal-political trajectories. Chapter 4 focuses on the statewide campaign to pass the DREAM Act, and takes up questions involving resistance/ accommodation, constructions of citizenship, and the racial state. I argue that mainstream and seemingly "assimilationist" campaigns to access citizenship can play a significant role in shaping a structural, radical political analysis among marginalized people and that through these appeals for citizenship, undocumented youth are actively reconfiguring and renegotiating the institution of citizenship, the idea of belonging, and the role and responsibilities of the racial state. In my conclusion, Chapter 5, I ask how we can utilize the findings from this study to understand how other marginalized groups become engaged in counter-hegemonic social movements.Social movement literature under-theorizes the role of everyday processes of meaning-making in patterns of political engagement, and literature on undocumented students focuses solely on educational barriers. This results in the near absence of theoretical tools to understand the multiple material and ideological processes that shape the political engagement of undocumented youth. My research addresses these gaps by connecting micro-processes and individual personal histories with macro-processes of displacement, discourse-production, and social movements in order to analyze the ways undocumented youth interact in a public process of political engagement and how they theorize that engagement. Understanding this process enables policy-makers, scholars, activist-intellectuals, and all people engaged in social change efforts to develop a more critical approach to the role ideas, discourses, and the development of consciousness play in the building of social movements.

This study investigates the democratic developments in Ukraine beginning with the 2004 Orange Revolution. After its break-off from the Soviet empire, Ukraine began democratizing its systems but continues to struggle with remnants of its communist past. The non-violent Orange Revolution was a democratic breakthrough in the recent history of the country, and youth activists were key agents in the revolution. Their perceptions of the revolutionary events, political self-efficacy as one of the identifiers of civil society, and futures of democracy in Ukraine will help to depict the socio-political climate inside the country and in Europe. The dissertation employs three research methods: content analysis of extensive testimonials written by 19 youth activists (to generate information about youth activists' socio-political experiences during and after the revolution), a survey of 76 youth activists (to collect demographic and political efficacy data), and Ethnographic Futures Research interviews with nine youth leaders (to extrapolate futures of democracy). Study findings on post-revolutionary developments are composed into 14 semantic themes that summarize youth activists' perceptions. Political self-efficacy results indicate high levels of internal and task-oriented efficacy among youth activists. This study also provides extrapolations of optimistic, pessimistic, and most probable futures of the Ukrainian democracy as projected by youth leaders.