Bruselius-Jensen, Pitti, and Tisdall (Editors), Young People’s Participation; Revisiting Youth and Inequalities in Europe

What does it mean to be a young person participating in the world at present? This is a pressing inquiry for many, particularly in the wake of lockdowns and isolation measures in numerous countries worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a pronounced need for research which seeks to answer questions concerning the access, privilege, inequality, and participation afforded to youth in the first half of the twenty-first century. It is to this need that the anthology Young People’s Participation: Revisiting Youth and Inequalities in Europe speaks.

The book is edited by Maria Bruselius-Jensen, Ilaria Pitti, and E. Kay M. Tisdall, each of whom occupies a position of significance within the fields of youth, participation, education, and global studies. Bruselius-Jensen is an associate professor at the Centre for Youth Research within the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University, whose work focuses on social communities and young people’s facilitated participation. Pitti is a senior assistant professor at the University of Bologna in Italy who works at the crossroads between youth and social movement studies and within young people’s individual and collective reactions to precariousness. Tisdall is a professor of childhood policy at the University of Edinburgh. The anthology itself comes out of the work of the European Network of Multi-Disciplinary Research in Youth and Participation, an academic network established in 2017, which facilitates transnational dialogue on the academic and practice-based approaches to the participation of young people in change and decision-making processes.

Young People’s Participation responds to a particularly tumultuous time in European history and the influence that upheaval has had on perceptions of and attention to young people by broader political, social, and educational institutions. This collection of research from across the spectrum of childhood and youth studies aims to address how and where young people exercise participation in current decision-making processes at local or policy levels. The book further identifies how and where young people are involved in the manifestation of changes that affect them and their communities. Sixteen chapters present sixteen different cases of young people’s participatory practices across a range of specific geographic, cultural, and political contexts while introducing interrelated theoretical approaches to the broader questions of participation: each chapter speaks to the complex interplay among the concepts of youth, participation, and inequality.

The chapters are organized into four sections, each addressing a notable aspect of young people’s participation and inequality. These are “Young People’s Experiences of Participation and Engagement,” “Current State and Conditions for Young People’s Participation: Critiques and Trends,” “Broadening Participation: Young People’s Own Approaches to Participation,” and “New Opportunities for Young People’s Participation: Facilitating New Forms of Youth Participation.” Each section contains research from across Europe that addresses an impressively wide array of case studies, with an emphasis on the lived experiences of young people in different contexts.

The sections move the reader through case studies that illustrate the shifting global landscapes of participatory practices available to, demonstrated by, or denied to young people. After the introductory chapter from the editors, the first section moves into a discussion of participation and engagement, opening with Alessio La Terra’s “Cultural Activism Against Inequalities: The Experience of Quaderni Urbani in Bologna,” a first-person account of practices of cultural activism among young people involved in a radical and artistic social organization in Bologna. Two studies follow that identify instances of young people playing a successful role in participatory action projects within their communities. Christina McMellon, Katherine Demspie, and Myada Eltiraifi’s “It’s Okay to Think Freely: How Participation Changed Us” examines the context of Edinburgh in Scotland, while the second—“Frontrunners Against Inequality: The Stories of Darpan and Barwaqo” by Darpan Raj Gautam and Barwago Jama Hussein—focuses on communities of young people in Denmark. This opening helps ground the...