Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Global Youth Culture

9. Negotiating Agency: Local Youth Activism in Aotearoa–New Zealand

193 9 Negotiating Agency Local Youth Activism in Aotearoa–New Zealand fiona beals and bronwyn wood Reflecting statistics in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia , youth in Aotearoa–New Zealand are reported to have falling rates of political and social engagement. In 2005, the New Zealand Electoral Commission (2005) noted that rates of political participation in New Zealand are “trending down.” These trends have prompted two responses: a public perception that youth engagement in “citizenship” activities is low and that they are apathetic compared to previous generations as well as a range of adult-led and -controlled initiatives to promote a greater level of youth “voice,” representation, and participation in prescribed areas of society (such as local government) and schooling. The adult response has been like a two-edged sword: while some young people are given an opportunity to have a voice, what is said and how it is said tend to be restricted within the boundaries determined by the initiative. With this thought in mind, the emergence of two “activist” youth-led organizations in 2005–6 in Aotearoa–New Zealand came to our attention as a phenomenon worth noting and exploring. These organizations demonstrated that young people were engaging in citizenship-activist activities beyond the scope of adult-led initiatives. In this chapter, we explore youth agency by examining the actions and voices of these two activist youth organizations, Radical Youth and Youth Organised and United (YOU). Radical Youth was established in 2005 by a network of anticapitalist Auckland students and young people. The group gained media prominence in March 2006 for its involvement in a protest march to increase youth wages that occurred during school hours, called “Supersize My Pay.” YOU was formed in 2007 by a number of students who attended the national Youth Parliament event that year. 194 | agency and refining youth identities Both groups have a presence in Aotearoa–New Zealand’s mass and middle media. The organizations both make press statements on issues and participate in online and social networking communities. We consider how and where young people in these groups “perform” agency and examine the gendered middle- and mass-media responses to their actions. We draw on this analysis to build toward a conceptualization of youth agency as “performative,” in a complex state of negotiation between the liminal position in which adolescents find themselves, the actions of resistance that they take, and the boundaries imposed on them by adult society. Conceptualizing Agency and Situating It in Aotearoa–New Zealand A clear definition of agency can be found in the work of Rob White and Johanna Wyn (1998, 315), who argue that agency is something that is “done.” It is a verb rather than a noun, an activity not a state of being (Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995). In this sense, young people do not “have” agency; they “perform” agency. To White and Wyn (1998), effective agency involves three dimensions—the personal, the collective, and the transformative .Personalagencyislinkedtoachievingprivategoalswithinpersonal circumstances; collective agency concerns the young person involved with others in small, but limited, changes to society; and the third dimension is transformative agency, where young people work together on collective projects to bring about positive fundamental change in the overall social order. White and Wyn stress the “contextual” nature of agency, as constrained or made possible through the social and structural contexts in which the young person is situated. White and Wyn’s (1998) concept of agency is closely connected to the concept of cultural agency found within anthropological literature (Wulff 1995b; Bucholtz 2002). The concept of cultural agency acknowledges that actions of agency may not necessarily be “positive” in nature, but they are, following Judith Butler (1999), “performative,” as they bring the subject into being. They may not challenge and change structural and social conditions, but in any action of agency, they rewrite and reconstruct culture . The concept of cultural agency therefore moves beyond the notion of agency necessarily leading to positive structural change and acknowledges that agency may involve actions and voices of resistance exercised Negotiating Agency | 195 by young people in an attempt to find a space and identity in their culture and world. Hence, some acts of agency may seem irrational, and some acts of resistance may not be conscious choices made by the individual actor. Framing agency in such a way acknowledges that some youth do not have access to the resources needed to...