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Context: Rooted in the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this article explores how a team of youth community activists extended their coalition virtually to produce a bill of demands for structural social change in their city and its surrounding county. Focus of Study: Our inquiry focuses on how the youth's dialectic goal of arriving at consensus (through debate fiercely, and intentionally, tied to the country's own internal reckonings) loomed, uncomfortably at times, over the dialogic process of inviting youth from across the city to share experiences, exchange ideas, and build relationships. Setting: The youth's coalitional work extended outward from the Yamacraw Center, a community literacy center and social justice organization based in a historic coastal city in the southern United States. Participants: The primary team, reported on here, was made up of eight youth researchers and two adult allies/co-researchers responsible for supporting youth as they engaged in YPAR. Research Design: Our study is a reflexive thematic analysis of the interplay between youth during 11 planning and organizing sessions. Data Collection: The data collected for this study are video digital Google Hangout meetings recorded over a five-month period. Findings: Our findings consider key strategies youth exhibited in coming together to hear one another, triage priorities, and carefully attend to the ways they needed to craft their arguments to be taken seriously. Conclusions: We highlight the importance of process in building youth capacity, detail discursive moves youth made to maintain critical momentum, and situate the project within a larger ethos that recognizes the immanent value of cultivating youth capacity to engage in fierce and humanizing exchanges with their peers in pursuit of collective progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student activism is a highly underresearched topic in psychology despite the field's commitment to studying person–environment interactions and advancing social justice aims. Furthermore, less is known about the ways in which student activists navigate the neoliberal or "corporatized" university in the United States. This research study utilizes a hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative method in order to attempt to describe the experience of being a student activist within a "corporatized" or neoliberal university. The results demonstrate that the apolitical rhetoric and the consumerization of student life, characteristic of neoliberalism in higher education, influence the process through which students become activists and become explicit targets of discipline as well. Students understand their activism in terms of repoliticizing the university and reconfiguring their approach toward education away from consumer metaphors. The results also have significant implications for understanding how the experience of student activism interacts with the other social and economic stressors, simultaneously increasing demands on students while creating possibilities for connectedness and purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic, the polarized political context, and the intensified racial justice movement delineate a time of crisis in the United States. In the field of education, the significant impacts of the turbulent situations represent profound darkness of people's lives, making the collaborative partnership between school, university, and community extremely constrained and critical. This article draws from an eight-week digital summer civic leadership program that took place during the time of COVID-19. We employed the framework of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and the concept of collective leadership to center youth's knowledge and critical voices. By integrating embodied, multimodal and reflective processes into the curriculum, the digital summer YPAR program provided an innovative approach to building a collaborative school-university-community partnership and enacting youth civic engagement through multimodal, digitalized, and artistic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1968, 54,000 of 57,000 New York City teachers went on strike in what has since become known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers' Strike. With schools closed for thirty-six days, from September to November, more than one million students were left without schools to attend. Nearly 300,000 of them were high school students—many of whom utilized their "time off" to become or, in some cases, continue to be socially and politically active. This article outlines high school students' involvement in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. It centers upon the New York High School Student Union, which was established as a citywide student organization in September of 1968. During the tense days of that autumn, members of this organization openly supported the African American community's call for decentralization of schools and firmly opposed the United Federation of Teachers's strike action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores youth activism in the US, not through the lens of collective action, but as the product of personal choices. By drawing on existentialism, and particularly on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, this article proposes to shift the focus of the debate from youths’ collective action to the self - a conscious self that observes, perceives and makes sense of the surrounding world through personal experience. It is this conscious self that decides how, and whether, to intervene against the ‘wrong’ that the self experiences. In this perspective, it is not only the acts (of citizenship) that matter, but the conscious process through which the self chooses to become political. Such an understanding will ultimately help uncover not only how the undocumented act and how to conceptualise their acts but also how they perceive and experience their current status and who they want to become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines why a group of students representing two high schools became involved in an activist organization, the benefits they gained as a result, the impact they had on their school and community, and their recommendations for how school personnel can foster civic engagement in young people. The student-led group campaigned for a school levy, produced a documentary on diversity, hosted a Community Forum on school climate, and educated classmates on the root causes of hunger. Data were analyzed through the lens of positive youth development theory. Findings confirmed previous research suggesting the bi-directional nature of development, in which young people with significant developmental assets both contributed to the community and garnered additional assets as a result of their engagement. Members of the group recommended that school personnel invite and value student input, foster respectful discourse on controversial issues, show students models of engagement in the community and invite them to become involved, facilitate access to resources, and mentor students on navigating systems. The researchers recommend that school personnel foster a school climate conducive to civic engagement, nurture student leadership among all demographic groups, and promote opportunities for collective action on issues relevant to students' lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, youth organizing has emerged as an important strategy for social change, particularly within education policy; however, the ability of youth to influence policy is limited by the tendency of adults in positions of power to find reasons to distrust, discredit, or otherwise ignore them. This paper draws on interviews with 31 adult civic leaders in one American city to discern their views on a particular youth organizing group, Philadelphia Student Union (PSU), and to uncover the grounds on which they either dismiss or defend its work. Findings show that the tendency to doubt or deny the voices of youth organizers is not concentrated within any one institutional setting; that the most common reason for doubting or distrusting SFE's work is the belief that adult organizers manipulate the youth members; and that every reason adults offer to dismiss the youth organizers can be matched by a different reason other adults give to defend them, their work, and their place in the policy sphere. Implications for youth organizing groups, their adult allies, policy-makers, and the field are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, young activists under 25 have increasingly advocated slowing global population growth through family planning as a climate change strategy. While this approach is developed and disseminated by population and development NGOs, young advocates transform the debate by asserting their role as activist leaders on issues of climate change, population, and women's empowerment. This article explores the logics and discursive strategies employed by a group of transnational youth during a workshop at the sixth annual Climate Change Conference of Youth ( COY) as well as training workshops in the USA. It tracks the practices through which young climate change activists engage demographic-climate studies and broader development discourses as a basis for advocacy to influence international population and family planning policies. I argue that development paradigms, activist discourse, and new demographic-climate studies represent both an expansion of the range of issues considered under the climate change umbrella, and simultaneously a narrowing of understandings of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) issues for women through the technicalisation of women's rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite wide agreement on the goals of environmental education (EE), the promotion of action is still considered contentious. Critical environmental education (critical EE) teaches students to combine critical reflection with the ability to engage in local action to address social/environmental problems. This article examines a critical urban farming school in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward for how student action is addressed. Results found that critical learning within an egalitarian, youth-centered community located in a disadvantaged area produces students who are more enlightened and empowered to create change. However, concerns regarding funding and safety led staff to not adhere to maintaining an egalitarian ethic, undermining the individualism and unpredictability that critical EE thrives upon and producing “disconnects” in students’ education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Second-generation Mexican youth in San Diego actively engaged with the immigrant rights movement by participating in protests they organized and orchestrated in spring 2006. The protests highlighted the encounter—and clashing—of different categories of immigrant social belonging in U.S. society. State-oriented constructions of social belonging clashed with the teens' own notions of belonging developed in relation to the lived experiences of members of their social circles. The teens generally constructed their own boundaries of belonging to be more inclusive of "contributing" immigrants; however, they also internalized—and self-defensively rearticulated—negative messages about immigrant "illegality." The teens' engagement with the immigrant rights movement demonstrated they were not merely "partial" citizens, as youth are typically portrayed. Rather, the teens had their own ways of navigating extant categories of belonging and articulating messages about cultural citizenship. The protests were ultimately transformative for the teens because they were both consciousness-raising and identity affirming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the issue of political socialization among the youth population in the U.S. as discussed in a study by Reed Larson and Hansen. It addresses several questions concerning the role of the Generation Y program in bringing about successful political action. It discusses the history and evolution of youth-promoting socialization programs. It also reflects on whether the accomplishments of the Generation Y program can also be achieved within schools. It states the possible advantages of after-school and out-of-school programs which can espouse explicit political philosophies and employ activist methods that provide civic socialization.