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- Author or Editor: Lotta Junnilainen x
This chapter discusses how underprivileged youth ‘do society’. Building on ethnographic work among stigmatized youth, we show how the youth experience lack of recognition as the main characteristic and problem of society. We show, first, how institutional politics and other conventional means of influence was not the go-to strategy for most of our informants. Instead, we identify three ways in which the youth navigate unrecognition: (1) self-transformation – changing oneself into ‘a respectable citizen’; (2) opting out – flipping the finger to ‘the system’; and (3) subversion – critiquing the valuation schemes of society. We argue that all strategies operate with individualistic tools of public action, and instead of collective mobilization, the politically active youth adopted individualistic means of activism to achieve their goals for being recognized as valuable.
How do young people participate in democratic societies? This book introduces the concept of ‘doing society’ as a new theory of political action. Focused on Finnish youth, it innovatively blends cutting-edge empirical research with agenda-setting theoretical development. Redefining political action, the authors expand beyond traditional public-sphere, scaling from formal to informal and unconventional modes of engaging.
The book captures diverse engagement from memes to social movements, from participatory budgeting to street parties and from sleek politicians to detached people in the margins. In doing so, it provides a holistic view of the ways in which young people participate (or do not participate) in society, and their role in cultural change.
