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There has been a notable increase in the public visibility of girl activists in the past ten years. In this article, I analyze media narratives about several individual girl activists to highlight key components of the newly desirable figure of the girl activist. After tracing the expansion of girl power discourses from an emphasis on individual empowerment to the invocation of girls as global saviors, I argue that girls are particularly desirable figures for public consumption because the encoding of girls as symbols of hope helps to resolve public anxieties about the future, while their more radical political views are managed through girlhood’s association with harmlessness. Ultimately, the figure of the hopeful and harmless girl activist hero is simultaneously inspirational and demobilizing.

Scholars of youth activism have recently produced an emergent and rapidly growing body of research that recognizes young people as engaged political actors. This work has made important interventions and increased the visibility of youth political subjectivity as a field of inquiry within the academy. However, public discourses on youth activism tend toward simplistic binaries, dismissing youth as either pawns of adults or naive idealists, or engaging in what some youth activists describe as “wowing”—that is, effusive gushing about how wonderful and exciting it is that young people are leading these movements. In this chapter, Taft thinks through some of these discourses by discussing dilemmas she has encountered in engaging with and writing about the Peruvian movement of working children. In addition to identifying the value of a critical approach for both scholarship and youth movements themselves, the author explores the very real risks of critique and outlines her own strategies for navigating these risks

Activists in the Peruvian working children’s movement have been theorizing about “children’s protagonismo” for nearly 40 years. Changing political contexts and the infusion of discourses from other social movements have produced three major sets of meanings for this concept, each reflecting different dynamics in Peruvian social movement history. First, the concept, infused with ideas from liberation theology and Latin American engagements with Marxism, was primarily understood in terms of class struggle and collective organization. Second, because of opportunities and threats in the 1980s and 1990s, it became more closely associated with children’s rights frameworks. Third, since the early 2000s, the movement’s approach to protagonismo has drawn on indigenous theories of interdependence and relationality to challenge the individualism of neoliberal capitalism and governmentality. In holding these diverse ideological commitments together, the concept has allowed the movement of working children to communicate across multiple discursive communities.Los activistas del movimiento de los niños trabajadores peruanos han teorizado sobre el “protagonismo infantil” durante casi 40 años. Los cambios en el contexto político y la influencia de discursos pertenecientes a otros movimientos sociales han generado tres grandes conjuntos de significado alrededor de este concepto, cada uno de los cuales reflejando distintas dinámicas en la historia del movimiento social peruano. Primero, el concepto se entendió en términos de clase imbuidos por ideas de la teología de la liberación, así como actitudes latinoamericanas de compromiso con el marxismo y la organización colectiva. Posteriormente, a raíz de las oportunidades y amenazas de las décadas de 1980 y 90, se relacionó de manera más estrecha con el marco de los derechos del niño. Desde principios de la década del 2000, el enfoque del protagonismo se ha ligado a teorías indígenas de la interdependencia y la relacionalidad para desafiar el individualismo del capitalismo neoliberal y la gobernabilidad. Al unir tal diversidad de compromisos ideológicos, el concepto ha permitido que el movimiento de los niños trabajadores tenga voz en múltiples comunidades discursivas.

Stories about individuals’ entry into activism are an important part of collective identity formation within social movements. This article, based on in-depth interviews and participant observation...

Recent work on children’s participatory rights has suggested the need to pay attention to adult–child relationships and foster intergenerational dialogue. Drawing on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with the Peruvian movement of working children, this article explores the ambiguous and complex status of adult voice in organizations that have taken up children’s participation. The ideal of egalitarian intergenerational collaboration is incredibly difficult to implement given the broader social context of age-based inequality. Despite good intentions and a deep commitment to children’s agency and authority, adults and children in this movement continue to replicate deeply structured patterns of behavior that give adults greater power.

Girls are increasingly being publically celebrated as community leaders, models for ideal citizenship, and central to economic development. Contemporary girlhood is rich with political implications and significance. In this essay, I outline some of the scholarship on the public discourses that idealize girls as model neoliberal citizens and address important findings and contributions from empirical research on the political lives of girls: girls' political beliefs, political socialization, political identities, and their practices of political and civic engagement. There is a growing body of scholarship that suggests that studying the political lives of girls enables and requires a re-thinking of some key concepts in political sociology, including the meaning of politics, of engagement, and of citizenship for different populations. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This article provides a critical examination of a common form of adult attempts to promote civic engagement among young people, namely, youth advisory councils. While youth councils have been widely celebrated as an effective way to integrate young people into political processes, little research has explored why some politically active youth choose to leave, or refuse to join, youth councils. Based on two qualitative studies of politically active teens throughout North and Latin America, the authors argue that teenage activists possess valuable dissident knowledge of, and critical perspectives on, the potential for youth advisory councils to promote youth political power. We argue that young activists understand democracy in ways that are fundamentally different from that offered to them by youth councils. Youth activists put forth a theory of democracy that emphasizes authority and impact, not just voice; they understand democracy as representing collective concerns and perceive youth councils as elitist and nonrepresentative; and they emphasize the value of controversy and contentious politics while expressing anxiety that youth councils can function as modes of social control that tame and channel youth dissent, rather than opportunities to foster youth political power.

Since we began work on this volume in 2011, images of youth who are politically and civically engaged have populated news stories. Youth activists played key roles in the social movements that sparked and spread through Africa and the Middle East in the “Arab Spring” of 2011 and 2012. In Norway, politically engaged youth attending a summer camp run by the ruling Labour Party became the victims of a mass shooting in July of 2011. Students in Chile, Mexico City, and Quebec took to the streets in order to challenge the rising costs of education and to organize for improvements to their colleges and universities. Undocumented youth in the United States publicly shared their stories and lobbied for passage of the DREAM Act. And local newspapers throughout the United States continued to celebrate youth who were honored for their volunteer service with awards and scholarships.

In recent years, civic and political institutions have stepped up their efforts to encourage youth participation: schools promote volunteerism, non-profits provide opportunities for service, local governments create youth councils, and social movement organizations discuss the need to encourage a new generation of activists. This volume adopts a critical approach to the civic and political socialization projects which aim to transform children and youth into upstanding citizens. By synthesizing the study of young people's civic and political socialization under the rubric of "Youth Engagement", the interplay of the civic and the political throughout young people's lives is considered. Chapters critically examine the multiple and contested meanings of ideal citizenship and reveal how children and youth craft active citizenship as they encounter and respond to the various institutions and organizations designed to encourage their civic and political development.

The girl with the light-brown dreadlocks and braces thought for only a few moments before settling on a pseudonym. “Ramona,” she says, “for the ‘Zapatista Comandante Ramona.’” “Okay, great,” I replied, “I’ll call you ‘Ramona’ when I write about you.” This young Ramona was 19, and in her last year of high school, when I met her. She and several of her peers had just started a new Zapatista collective, called El Caracol, within their Mexico City school, and Ramona, like her chosen namesake, was clearly at the center of the group. She had been part of the Frente Zapatista for several years before forming her school collective, and she worked hard to bring that experience to her peers without becoming a “leader” or “expert.” With a deep commitment to equality and nonhierarchical organization, Ramona was a frequent facilitator during discussions and planning meetings, as well as a consistent voice for participatory democracy, humility, and careful listening, all of which she saw as central to Zapatismo.

This article explores U.S. teenage girls' rejections of “politics,” arguing that for some girls, the refusal to identify with politics is a discursive strategy informed by their consciousness of inequality and their commitments to social justice. Drawing upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, I show how two different groups of girls reflect on their varied experiences of political marginalization as aged, gendered, racialized, and classed subjects in order to develop a critique of the practices and policies of the U.S. government. Building on research on the various and complex meanings of political disaffection, I argue that defining politics very narrowly and then distancing oneself from it can be part of an oppositional political project, and I address myself to the implications and mechanisms of girls' use of this strategy.The author would like to thank France Winddance Twine, Verta Taylor, Avery Gordon, Richard Flacks, Leila Rupp, and the editors and reviewers from Politics & Gender for their insightful comments and assistance in the development of this article. This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.