Is It Okay to Critique Youth Activists? Notes on the Power and Danger of Complexity

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