Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement 9781474248037, 9781474248068, 9781474248051

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Introduction
1. Citizenship beyond Membership
2. Citizenship without Belonging
3. Citizenship, Social Mobility and Economic Stasis
4. Self-Made Citizenship
5. Citizenship Close to Home
6. Schooling the Citizen
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

Also available from Bloomsbury Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth, Caroline Sarojini Hart, Mario Biggeri and Bernhard Babic Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia, edited by Andrew Peterson and Libby Tudball England’s Citizenship Education Experiment, Lee Jerome

Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement Lucas Walsh and Rosalyn Black

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Lucas Walsh and Rosalyn Black, 2018 Lucas Walsh and Rosalyn Black have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4803-7 PB: 978-1-3501-3104-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4805-1 ePub: 978-1-4742-4804-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

From Lucas: This book is in part about belonging, and is therefore dedicated to Vera, Pete, Miro, Nada, Sonia, Mirko and Emma for welcoming the stranger and enabling him to belong. From Rosalyn: This book is dedicated to Tony, for being there always.

Contents Acknowledgements About the Authors Introduction 1 Citizenship beyond Membership 2 Citizenship without Belonging 3 Citizenship, Social Mobility and Economic Stasis 4 Self-Made Citizenship 5 Citizenship Close to Home 6 Schooling the Citizen Conclusion Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 21 41 63 83 107 127 149 173 208

Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Misol Kim, Howard Prosser, Melissa Wolfe and Rachel Tallon for their research assistance. The authors are also grateful to fellow chief investigators on a Linkage Project funded by the Australian Research Council: the Young People, Technology and Wellbeing Research Facility (LP100100837), Amanda Third and Philippa Collin, for allowing them to draw on some of the research findings. We would also like to thank Emma Rujevic for her editorial feedback.

About the Authors Associate Professor Lucas Walsh is Deputy Dean (acting) of the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. He was previously Director of Research and Evaluation at The Foundation for Young Australians. His previous book, Educating Generation Next: Young People, Teachers and Schooling in Transition, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.  Dr Rosalyn Black is Senior Lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia.  Her research interests and her previous publications meet at the intersection of the sociologies of education and youth. They include young people’s experience of citizenship in socially unequal contexts. Rosalyn and Lucas have collaborated for nearly ten years, and this book is a reflection of much of that work. Among numerous books, articles, chapters and reports, they have previously co-authored In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?

Introduction

This book seeks to rethink citizenship in relation to young people by examining it from civic and political, cultural and economic perspectives. It illustrates how young people are enacting their citizenship in ways that do not necessarily register on the radars typically used to identify citizenship. In particular, it explores some of the tensions that emerge from a key phase of young people’s development as citizens: schooling. These tensions include the fact that while schooling in numerous nations including Australia seeks to develop active global citizens, the very structures, policies and practices of schooling constrain the recognition and realization of many young people’s citizenship. Indeed, one of our central concerns throughout this book is that policy – whether directly or indirectly – serves to restrict young people to certain forms and conceptualizations of what it means to be a citizen. Tensions between globalization and the local, belonging and exclusion, and the pervasiveness of neoliberalism within young people’s citizenship experiences, are also recurring themes in this book, as is our argument that considering the geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of young people’s citizenship can enable a more nuanced and critical rethinking of that citizenship. Throughout our discussion and particularly in the Conclusion, we seek to locate these tensions and dimensions within the wider global context of continuing change and precarity. This context provides the impetus for this book, as we discuss in the next section of our Introduction. We believe that this context has had – and continues to have – implications and effects for vast populations of young people across multiple nations. For this reason, we sometimes describe young people as a global cohort who are subject to similar forces and discourses, reflecting on the meaning of these global forces and discourses for young people as a group. At other times, we locate our discussion in particular places and locations, drawing on circumstances, reported statistics, anecdotes and narrated stories that relate to the experiences and perceptions of specific groups of young people in those places. These serve as illustrations or manifestations of the wider themes and issues which we consider across the book.

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The context of this discussion The year in which we began writing this book, 2016, was characterized by social, political and economic upheaval, intense flows of human mobility and economic uncertainty, including fresh global debates about the issue of what constitutes appropriate types and levels of immigration and citizenship. Political orthodoxies were upended in the face of growing political uncertainties in many governments throughout the world. Heightened awareness of mass migratory flows intensified fault-lines of nationalism, racism and xenophobia. Many refugees fleeing war, ethnic persecution and economic deprivation, such as the ones making their way along the train track from Serbia to Hungary, were met with resentment by ultranationalists (McLaughlin 2015). In the United Kingdom and the United States, specific groups, such as those from the Middle East, became targets of potential rejection and actual hostility. Public perceptions of these various migrations (both in economic and ethnic terms) also played a role in the UK’s 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union (EU). The so-called ‘Brexit’ (British exit from the EU) campaign featured anti-immigrant sentiments, with an emphasis on European migrant workers in the UK. Following the advisory referendum held in June, in which 52 per cent of votes were cast in favour of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, the then prime minister, David Cameron, resigned almost immediately. The perception that the UK’s departure from the EU would restore border (and economic) control appeared to be significant, while potentially fragmenting the UK in the process (Castle 2016). Shortly after these events, the United States also experienced a change of leadership following the election of Republican nominee Donald Trump as president. Trump, who had promised that his election would be ‘Brexit plus plus plus’, campaigned against illegal migration of Mexicans and proposed antiMuslim policies. Though his election campaign featured an unclear and often contradictory narrative, it included creating a register of Muslims in the United States, building a wall between Mexico and the United States to deter illegal immigrants, and a new protectionist role of the United States in matters of global economy and security. Commentary observed at the time: ‘Like the Brexiteers, Trump was promising a period of upheaval and of change. But to what end?’ (Honeyman 2016). Nationalism also gained momentum in Australia, in which the authors are based. Echoing the rise of far-right movements and parties in France, the

Introduction

3

United Kingdom and United States, the 2016 Australian Federal election saw the return of the One Nation Party (One Nation 2016), a pro-nationalist extremist minor party that explicitly campaigned on tighter regulation of immigration, while inferring anti-Muslim sentiment (Norman 2016). All of these countries experienced varying degrees of race-based protest, inflaming debates over the legitimacy of certain migrant groups seeking citizenship in the process. These changes suggest a renewed role of nation-states in the face of uncertainty. The rejection of EU membership by the UK, Trump’s isolationism and Australia’s border controls share an interest in reaffirming and redefining national boundaries and identities. Accompanying these are debates about who belongs and who should be excluded, be they refugees, foreign workers or those of particular ethnicities. These debates are bound up with social, cultural and economic forms of mobility. At the root of them is a question of who should be entitled to membership of a given polity. It is therefore a question of citizenship. All of these developments have the potential to influence the citizenship status and experience of large numbers of young people already affected by sweeping impacts on their mobility, membership and feelings of belonging (and not belonging). They also challenge the notions and effects of globalization. Globalization is another thread running throughout this book, and the literature outlining its recognition and growth during the 1990s provides a salient basis for discussing how it has fundamentally challenged the idea of citizenship. Globalization is perhaps most visible in the interdependence of national economies (Liemt 1998) through integration of markets and labour. It has also been characterized as a social process whereby there is greater recognition of receding geographical and cultural arrangements (Waters 1995). As Giddens (1998: 31) suggests, globalization is more than economic interdependence, ‘but about the transformation of time and space in our lives’. Most evident in the transnational reach of information and communications technology, localities and identities are enmeshed in the global. But rather than being assimilated, this cultural dimension of globalization is ‘filled with ironies and resistances’ (Appadurai 1996: 29). Such ironies and resistances are highlighted by Poppi (2003: 285), who defines globalization as ‘the condition whereby localizing strategies become systematically connected to global concerns. Thus, globalization appears as a dialectical (and therefore contradictory) process: what is being globalized is the tendency to stress “locality” and “difference”, yet “locality” and “difference” presuppose the very development of worldwide dynamics of institutional

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communication and legitimation.’ Our empirical research with young Australians, which we explore later in the book, highlights one particular resistance: young people may be aware of the global and are themselves enmeshed in its social processes and cultural arrangements (e.g. through social media), but they feel most influential at the local level. This reflects one consequence of globalization that has implications for the experiences of citizenship by young people. The classic idea of citizenship bounded to legal and cultural arrangements within nation-states is being transformed by the forces and conditions of globalization described above. T. H. Marshall (1964) captured this conventional definition of citizenship. He described the civil, political and social rights and responsibilities or duties, which he argued were the prerequisite for full citizenship status and membership of the community. Indeed, Marshall’s (1964: 84) definition of citizenship describes it as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’. For Marshall, as Hoxsey explains, ‘the promise of citizenship rests on a balance between rights and duties’ (2011: 917). Writing from the context of post-war UK, Marshall’s vision was that citizens would contribute their labour and other forms of civil, political and social responsibility while the state provided such rights as the minimum wage. Marshall’s work did much to highlight the way in which citizenship could be used to either include or exclude, but it was also predicated on a view that, harking back to Hoxsey’s summary again, ‘as social rights are advanced and society evolves, individual inequalities will disappear’ (2011: 918). Marshall’s ideas of citizenship remain an important starting point for our discussion in this book because of the promises and assumptions that they imply: part of our argument, which we will introduce later in this Introduction, is that the notion of citizenship rights and entitlements remains an important one. At the same time, as citizenship theorists such as Turner have made clear (2001), Marshall’s ideas predate the intensification of globalization during the later twentieth century and the changes that this has brought to notions of citizenship rights and responsibilities, including the shift from citizenship’s dependence on established institutions to an understanding of citizenship that is far more relational and conditional on fluid circumstances and settings. Citizenship is now understood to incorporate more than a formal status and the laws and rules governing this status. The advancement and enhancement of Marshall’s notion has also been expanded to incorporate a greater range of individual and collective rights, entitlements and responsibilities associated

Introduction

5

with membership across the legal, social, economic, cultural, political and environmental dimensions of contemporary life. As Isin enumerates them, these include civil rights, political rights, economic rights, social rights and participation rights as well as, potentially, sexual rights, technological rights, ecological rights and ethnic or cultural rights (2013). To these, we would add the right or entitlement to express and enact one’s citizenship in ways that have meaning for the individual citizen. As we shall see in the first half of this book, however, the experiences of many young people across political, cultural and economic domains of life suggest that their experiences of these citizenship rights and entitlements, and the membership they suggest, are far from measuring up to this ideal. These experiences need, in turn, to be understood within distinctive contextual demographic and closely related economic factors, such as the ageing of the population, which is affecting the dynamics of the labour market, placing new demands on national welfare systems and arguably working against young people’s efforts to attain security in areas such as home ownership. In advanced Western economies such as Australia and the UK, the so-called ‘baby boomer generation’ is living and working longer, with the latter taking place both by choice and necessity. Some older people bring experience and skills to the workforce that young people do not yet have, and are intensifying competition for work. Echoing the Japanese experience, an ageing population in Australia, for example, appears to be increasing labour force competition domestically. Researchers found that between 2003 and 2013, the share of those aged 60–64 participating in the workforce increased from 39 per cent to 54 per cent (Birrell and Healy 2013b). This has been an ongoing source of anger and resentment for young people (Jericho 2016), an anger that flared up in Australia following what has become known as the ‘smashed avo’ controversy. The renowned Australian demographer Bernard Salt penned a presumably tongue-in-cheek article in a leading broadsheet which began by spoofing the fashions of ‘hipster cafes’ but ended with the following homily: I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on fivegrain toasted bread at [AUD]$22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house. (Salt 2016)

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A wave of furious responses and rebuttals about its inherent assumptions and constructions of youth followed, including some quick calculations about the true nature of property affordability for most young people. As one young person tweeted, ‘@BernardSalt is right of course, just give up [AUD]$22 a week and you’ll have a deposit on a median priced house in Sydney in … 175 years’ (see Ryan 2016). Many young people – even in wealthier economies such as Australia  – are aware of growing disparities between themselves and the opportunities of previous generations in relation to issues such as access to home ownership and the social safety net (Walsh 2016a), a trend that permeates some youth attitudes throughout many contemporary advanced economies. Like the United Kingdom and United States, the nature and direction of Australia’s economy has in turn come under political scrutiny as the effects of economic globalization, such as the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007–8, and other changes such as the demographic one mentioned above, continue to heighten uncertainty as to future prosperity, with direct implications for young people. Austerity measures that accompanied the GFC have further intensified these conditions of precarity (Howker and Malik 2010). In 2010, for example, the British Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government valorized ‘strivers’, while condemning ‘scroungers’ as part of its austerity drive (Jowit 2013). The conservative Liberal-National Party (LNP) coalition government in Australia echoed this narrative of austerity, with the then treasurer Joe Hockey declaring that Australia needed ‘lifters, not leaners’ (Hockey 2014). In the same speech, Hockey announced that ‘the age of entitlement is over’ and that ‘the age of opportunity’ had begun.

Interpretations of entitlement This proclamation of an end to the age of entitlement was one of the inspirations for the title of this book. It prompted us to question what entitlement means and to whom it applies. Because young people were often the direct targets of the policy interventions that followed this proclamation, we began to think about these questions in relation to youth citizenship. This book focuses on a shift that arises from the decline of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism, during which time certain rights, resources and entitlements traditionally associated with citizenship have been called into question. These include the entitlements described by Marshall and the rights

Introduction

7

that we have discussed earlier. This book mounts an argument for the continued importance of these rights and entitlements. It also argues that these entitlements are in danger. Hockey’s announcement about the end of the age of entitlement suggests that citizens can – and should – no longer depend on the largesse of the state and on the use of social and economic welfare as a means of economic distribution to facilitate social equity. Instead, the implication is that it is the individual responsibility of Australians and their families to lift their way out of austerity without reliance on these social and economic ‘entitlements’. At the same time, the government signalled greater focus on community-level responses emphasizing greater individual responsibility, particularly in communities characterized by an alleged citizenship deficit (Black 2012). In low socio-economic communities, in particular, citizens are simultaneously characterized as subjects of risk and expected to be socially and personally responsible for managing that risk. For example, when flagging the possibility of withdrawing government funding for remote Indigenous communities in Western Australia – communities experiencing persistently poor health and economic outcomes – previous prime minister Tony Abbott characterized the residence of Indigenous citizens in those communities as a ‘life-style choice’ (The Guardian 2015). The implication of this narrative is that individual citizens should make their own way out of poverty by relocation or other means despite persistent structural constraints to their mobility. This recalls something that we frequently see in youth policy discourses, where young people are characterized simultaneously as part of ‘the problem’ and as agents who should deliver the solution to that problem. Later in the book, we identify specific examples of policy proposals that frame young people in this way. There is a scepticism of youth in these government narratives, a scepticism of which young people in our empirical studies to follow are keenly aware. Hockey’s choice of words is arguably significant within the context of his government’s wider pronouncement of a budget ‘deficit emergency’ that necessitated draconian cuts to public services (Cassidy 2013). Such measures feature the hallmarks of austerity measures adopted in the UK, while the ‘age of opportunity’ is inescapably neoliberal in tone, which leads to another key theme of this book. Neoliberalism is ‘a philosophy in which social policy is dominated by market principles, privatization, free trade and deregulation, and individualism (individual responsibility)’ (Bagnall 2013: 284). Neoliberalism is, of course, an extensive topic

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that exerts enormous influence. As Turner suggests, its pervasiveness spans three key fields or agendas – ‘economic, social and cultural, and political’ (2015: 8) – all of which have tremendous influence on our lives as citizens. Rosalyn Black and her colleagues have, for example, previously noted that ‘in contemporary times, education policy is awash with the tenets of neo-liberalism’ (2016: 159). The same can be said about other aspects of social and youth policy. Responsibility for active citizenship continues to be projected onto young people in Australia, with both local governments and community organizations seeking to support them to ‘do something great in their community based on their choice’. This individualization of responsibility, valorization of choice and the self-making citizen are central tenets of neoliberalism. These expectations of neoliberalism, we argue, work against many young people – particularly those experiencing marginalization and disadvantage. We will argue that this neoliberal valorization of choice and opportunity is largely enjoyed by the privileged and stacked against the disenfranchised. A critique of neoliberalism runs throughout this book that both recognizes its effects on young people’s lives and challenges its apparent omnipotence within the global polity. As we shall see in Chapters 1–3, there is powerful evidence to suggest that young people, in particular, face entrenched and systemic barriers and forms of exclusion that cut across political, economic, cultural and social life. Politicians have struggled with, ignored, or failed to grapple with these barriers and have appeared increasingly remote from the interests and needs of young people. This growing distance between young people and political representatives provides another important context for this book. It is a relationship that is also characterized by volatility. Political instability has been evident even in nation-states that are comparatively prosperous and secure. Between 2007 and 2016, there were five changes of prime minister in Australia; in three instances, these changes were at the hands of the political parties to which these leaders belonged. Similarly, the major parties in the UK have themselves experienced internal leadership instability, while recent US politics has been characterized by highly divisive and non-consensual political decision-making paralysis in Washington. In all three countries, there is evidence to suggest that young people feel at distance from their electoral representatives, and in some instances, appear to be turning away from untrustworthy politicians and possibly democracy in general, as we shall discuss in Chapter 1. While this book reflects on the experience of citizenship in Western parliamentary representative democracies, some

Introduction

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comparative illustrations are drawn from other forms of democracy. At the same time, we explore the contours and disjunctures of the geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of citizenship as a means of rethinking citizenship beyond the conventional Western model grounded in an identification of citizenship as a legal status in terms of the membership described by Marshall.

The burdens of youth as risky citizens It would appear that in many parts of the world, young people are often left behind in the debates and wider changes outlined above. Exit polls in the United States suggest that a significant majority of young people aged 18–29 voted Democrat rather than Republican (55 per cent for Clinton against 37 per cent for Trump) (New York Times 2016). In the UK, it was reported that polls showed only around 19 per cent of people aged 18–24 supported the exit of the UK from the EU (Shuster 2016). Concerns by young people about the effects of these changes on their mobility, education and other benefits have been widely reported (e.g. Stefanou 2016). On the flipside, young people are sometimes the object of concern as ‘risky citizens’ (through, for example, protest and disengagement from conventional political participation). This means that young people face a complex and heavy burden. On the one hand, it is not uncommon to see them characterized either as risky subjects who are a potential danger to themselves and to others, or else as subject to forces that may harm them. On the other hand, they are often portrayed by education and other social policies as globally active citizens who are a source of democratic hope, possibility and even reform. Sometimes, young people experience all of these portrayals simultaneously. As sources of hope and risk, young people are often caught in fields of ambiguity. One example relates to a certain young man from the UK. In 2016, 20-year-old Jack Letts from Oxford travelled abroad ‘searching for the truth, and people of the truth’. He was also reportedly suspected of being the first white British man to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS – something he denies (Rawlinson 2016). At first glance, Jack reflects certain characteristics of the kind of global citizen which education and youth policy seeks to create, as we discuss at greater length in Chapters 5 and 6. He is rendered highly mobile through his education and through access to technology and international travel. He demonstrates a moral purpose and seeks to work for what he perhaps sees as a greater good. He has arguably

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sought a feeling of belonging to a higher purpose and like-minded people. He has actively and literally sought this moral purpose at great personal risk. Jack reflects one example of young people throughout the world who have become motivated by political and religious causes that compel them to act – however repugnantly to some – in pursuit of those causes. Other young people have enlisted to fight on foreign soils as part of what they perceive to be a global jihad. Their motivations are complex and perhaps not fully understood, but they are driven by intense feelings and complex relationships with those in authority, their parents, and local and global communities. At second glance, they are seen by the West to be radicalized and antithetical to Western democracy. Their actions run counter to aspirations of global citizenship in which citizens aspire to a different type(s) of ‘common good’. While radicalized youth is not the focus of this book, this extreme example highlights some of the complex dimensions of youth citizenship (and non-citizenship) that challenge conventional understandings and conceptions. They require a more nuanced view of citizenship, one that needs to account for the impact of globalization, the heterogeneity of young people’s identities, and their feelings of belonging and exclusion. This book draws upon recent research to rethink youth citizenship in ways which take account of these forces and factors. It mounts an argument for a rethinking of citizenship which takes account of young people’s abiding rights as citizens – politically, civically, culturally, locally and within the key institutions with which they interact and which play a role in shaping their lives. It also argues for a rethinking of youth citizenship that fully recognizes the complexity of young people’s lived experiences. It seeks to provide insight into the different dimensions of citizenship which we introduce below while providing empirical examples from throughout the world, but with a particular focus on Australia. Australia provides a useful test case of young people’s citizenship: it is a unique example of a country that has fared well economically in recent years, and yet is currently mimicking the austerity measures witnessed within the UK and Europe. It is also a country in which the nature of certain rights is the subject of fierce debate.

Reinserting rights into youth citizenship Earlier conceptualizations of citizenship, including that of Marshall which we have described earlier, were deeply associated with citizen rights. Indeed, it

Introduction

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is one of the key premises of the democratic nation-state that citizens within that nation-state have inalienable rights. But the specific nature and universality of these rights changes with time and context, and continues to be the stuff of public and policy debate. It is also a touchstone for much of our discussion in this book. Where we highlight the porous nature of boundaries between the local and the global elsewhere in the book, we are also aware of the porous nature of the grounds upon which public and private and their associated rights are constituted. Some of the most intimate of these rights are also those most debated at present, such as the right to marriage equality by same-sex couples. In Australia at the time of writing, for example, the question of whether citizens should have the right to marriage equality was hotly debated, as was the question of whether this issue should be put to the vote or be decided through a public plebiscite. One real fear was that a public debate about this proposed citizen right could further marginalize and demonize the very citizens whom it is intended to enable, including young citizens. The opposition government was initially successful in blocking the plebiscite on this basis, because of concerns that it may ‘cause harm to gay and lesbian people – particularly, but not exclusively, young people’ (Alexander 2016). Notably, the Australian parliament is able to seek amendment of the Marriage Act 1961 at any time, but this course of action instead became subject to political posturing that is forestalling recognition of this right despite significant public support for ‘a law to permit people of the same sex to marry’ (Essential Report 2016). The political context of Australia is salient here to understanding citizenship, both locally as a nation-state and from a global perspective. The form of neoliberalism prevalent in Australia described in this book emerges from a long-standing pragmatism that can challenge the moral and legal power of rights as key components of citizenship. Australia has a distinctive form of democracy informed by a fusion of political institutions and ideas from England, the United States and Switzerland. It is a liberal democracy featuring a federal system of government comprising six states and two self-governing territories that have their own parliaments, governments, constitutions and laws. Where the Constitution of Australia establishes the federal government by providing for the Parliament, the executive government and the judiciary, certain key central features of the system of responsible government are not articulated in the Constitution but are instead based on convention. Its system of responsible government is a Westminster-style government derived from the UK model

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(Parliament of Australia no date). Like the UK, Australia has two major parties and a range of smaller parties and independent representatives. But unlike the UK, voting is compulsory. The development of Australian democracy that followed colonization was also marked by the dispossession of Indigenous people, a legacy based on the declaration ‘terra nullius’ as a basis for European settlement, meaning the land belonged to no one. This ‘legal fiction’ was overturned by the High Court in 1992 (McQuire and O’Shea 2017). The formation of Australian democracy has been influenced by other political philosophies such as democratic socialism (Kukathas, Lovell and Maley 1990). Above all else, it has been argued that the liberal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham profoundly shaped Australia’s political institutions and consciousness, characterized by the ‘self-government by men educated up to a common low level, and trained by the habit of self-government under institutions which secure power to the majority’ (Collins 1985: 151). Collins sees Bentham’s influence in the way that Australians make decisions, characteristically drawing from ‘twin utilitarian standards’ of efficacy (will it work?) and plurality (have you got the numbers?). In contrast to normatively grounded and legally rights-based federal structures of democracies such as the United States, the constitutional framework adopted in Australia was more of a practical response to circumstances (Collins 1985: 156–7). During the formation of Australian democracy, for example, small communities separated by great distance but already endowed with political institutions found the federal scheme expedient where matters of defence, trade and immigration were concerned. Collins, who was writing about this before the rise of neoliberalism in Australia, contends that in the later twentieth century Australia’s ideology had ‘exhausted its capacity to cope with Australia’s serious political predicaments’ (Collins 1985: 162–3). But arguably neoliberalism emerged from that pragmatism to become the prevailing ideology of governance of the last two decades, drawing on approaches from the United States and United Kingdom to deregulate markets and wind back parts of the welfare state, which had developed during the twentieth century driven by a Keynesian approach to economic management. Within this approach, the welfare state enabled the development of universal entitlements such as public education and universal health care. A Keynesian approach is still evident in Australia, though far less so in recent decades. The viability of universal health care and the funding of public education, for example, have been subjected to significant debate in recent years.

Introduction

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The combination of these developments has produced the distinctive manifestation of neoliberalism in Australia. Framing citizenship in terms of rights is consequently fraught in the Australian federal context because rights are not enshrined formally in a particular Bill, such as in the US Bill of Rights. Some rights are explicit in Australia's Constitution: the right to vote; protection against acquisition of property on unjust terms; the right to a trial by jury; freedom of religion; and prohibition of discrimination on the basis of State of residency. Other rights are implied in the Constitution, such as a degree of freedom for individuals to discuss and debate political issues (Australian Human Rights Commission 2006). Nevertheless, as one former chief justice of the High Court of Australia has observed, ‘The Australian Constitution, as a plan of government for a federal union, is largely concerned with pragmatism’ (Gleeson, cited in Australian Human Rights Commission 2006). But even in Western countries where rights are more explicitly and extensively recognized, there has arguably been a weakening of the state’s capacity to arbitrate, enact and protect them. Despite the continued role of the state in defining and determining the rights of citizens, globalization has had the effect of weakening the degree to which the state is seen to be the arbiter of those rights. This book begins with, and interrogates, a Western conceptualization of citizenship based on a rights-based framework. In the wider literature beyond Australia, citizenship is now widely seen as a social rather than a purely legal process (e.g. Dean 2013; Isin 2013), a process through which ‘individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding or losing rights’ (Isin 2013: 5). Much of this book is concerned with this social process as it affects young people, and with the struggles of particular groups of young people, to claim or shape citizenship rights in the face of shifting or intransigent social and community views of what those rights could or should be. The neoliberal contract has done much to weaken the idea of citizenship rights. Within the neoliberal polity, rights are seen as the prerogative of those citizens who fulfil their individual responsibilities to the state and to society: ‘No rights without responsibilities’ is the mantra of this polity (Cogan 2012: 31). Under the influence of neoliberalism, we have seen the dissolution or disappearance of numerous forms of social provision and protection that were previously seen as the rights of the citizen. As Staeheli notes, globalization has ‘eroded the ability (and willingness) of nation-states to guarantee the substantive rights of citizenship’ (2016: 60). The continuing wave of austerity policies, and

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the draconian legislation introduced in many states in the name of interests such as counterterrorism and border protection, have further shaken the stability of citizenship rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, speech, protest and congregation. These concerns and the massive global movement of populations are also seeing the entrenchment of stratified rights within particular nationstates, where some citizens have greater rights, and greater access to measures to protect those rights, than others (Joppke 2007). This withdrawal or weakening of citizenship rights (to some) by the nationstate has led some to call for a different set of expectations about where such rights should reside. Staeheli’s recent argument is an example: ‘If these rights are to be met, then it is important to look beyond the nation-state as a location for citizenship’ (2016: 60). Hence our attention is further directed to local and global locations in the second half of this book. At the same time, the nationstate remains an important context or locus for the realization or the denial of young people’s citizenship rights. What we argue in this book is that young people’s rights continue to be an essential part of any discussion about their citizenship, and should be an intrinsic aspect of any strategy to foster or support their citizenship acts and experiences. As a corollary of this, understanding young people’s acts of citizenship, particularly those that fall under the radar of conventional measures of ‘participation’, is also significant. As we shall see in coming chapters, some are seeking ways to influence and shape their worlds through forms of self-made citizenship, which include traditional avenues such as volunteering, as well as new models of change-making such as social enterprises. Our direct research involving nearly hundred young people from diverse backgrounds indicates an appetite for participation, but in ways that do not register on conventional radars of participation. Importantly, this research also indicates a strong orientation towards the local. Experiences of citizenship in the local community, as discussed in Chapter 5, highlight certain tensions and possibilities of this orientation to the local.

Rethinking citizenship: The structure and approach of this book The idea of citizenship rights remains central to our argument, but we also argue for a more nuanced understanding of how citizenship is conceived beyond its

Introduction

15

formal legal status. In particular, we argue for a better understanding of the relational, temporal and affective dimensions of young people’s citizenship as well as for greater recognition of the situated or geographical nature of that citizenship and the conditions in which they can meaningfully experience (or not experience) citizenship (Biesta, Lawy and Kelly 2009). Throughout the book we also look at educational responses to our rethinking of citizenship. It critically reflects on the role of schools and schooling in constituting young people as citizens and how they shape their citizenship practices. These include the revival of civics and citizenship education as a policy strategy across the UK, Europe and Australia to foster young people’s active citizenship. All of our analyses in this book are informed by our particular perspective as educators. Like educators throughout the world, we are motivated by the moral purposes of education (e.g. Hopkins 2008) and the possibilities and challenges that are represented by our schools and other places of learning. As suggested above, we are also motivated by a deep concern about the implications for young people’s citizenship and social justice of the dominance of neoliberalism and other geopolitical changes and challenges. This book is not an attempt to comprehensively discuss every possible aspect of young people’s citizenship. We are well aware, for example, of the debates that surround young people’s digital citizenship. While we acknowledge at times the impact of technology on young people’s citizenship acts and engagement (see Third et al. forthcoming), these specific modalities of citizenship are not our central interest here. Our interest, rather, is in the complexities and contradictions that attend those acts and engagements, regardless of the media through which they are expressed. The scholarship on citizenship is rich and vast, and this book does not pretend to fully encompass this literature, but instead explores the geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of citizenship to provide a kind of primer for rethinking youth citizenship. It does this by focusing on youth in one context, the Australian liberal democracy, and provides different perspectives of that context. These include political, cultural, economic and educational examples, as concrete launch points from which we analyse youth citizenship. As suggested above, examples from other countries are drawn to provide comparisons and contrasts, but we acknowledge the limited ways in which generalizations can be made. The experiences of young people in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, for example, are worlds apart from the experiences of many young people in Australia. At the same time, we are explicitly seeking

16

Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

to locate the discussion of Australian youth in a wider global context. We believe that our analysis of the Australian context can inform a wider reflection about youth citizenship more globally and after the age of entitlement. The nature of Australian democracy, for example, has its own distinctive qualities, as we discussed above. But we do see common threads and themes emerging from the Australian experience that echo those in other parts of the world. The economic challenges outlined in Chapter 3, for example, are by no means confined to Australia, and are felt in other developed economies, such as Europe and the UK. The role of rights is another question central to Western democratic manifestations of citizenship that is not confined to Australia. We also acknowledge that some of the key terms and concepts that inform this book are subject to ongoing scholarly debate. The notion of what constitutes ‘young people’, for example, is contested and changing over time (Walsh 2016a). Another theme of this book therefore concerns young people as a social and political category. What it means to be young is in a state of flux, with changing distinctions between youth and adulthood (Wyn 2009) and international variations in what is understood to constitute youth. The United Nations, which uses the widely accepted range of 15 to 24 years, notes that ‘youth is more fluid than other fixed age-groups’ (UN 2014: 1). Given this, we have deliberately sought to incorporate perspectives from children as young as 12 to young people as old as 30. Our discussion in this book is also influenced by a number of emerging sociological and theoretical frameworks which shed light on the geographical, temporal, relational and affective aspects of young people’s citizenship and which we believe offer rich opportunities for a necessary rethinking of young people’s citizenship in an era when citizenship, like so much else in the social, political and economic landscape, is in flux. One way in which we seek to do this is by considering what constitutes young people’s ‘actual citizenship practices’ (Geboers et al. 2013: 160). The recent performative turn in the scholarship of citizenship suggests that contemporary citizenship is something that is best understood in terms of the practices or ‘performative acts’ through which it is expressed (Lepofsky and Fraser 2003: 131) and through which citizens ‘act as political and moral agents’ (Isin and Wood 1999: 117). Isin’s work has been particularly useful in focusing attention on the acts of citizenship, arguing that ‘by theorizing acts we shift focus from what people say (opinion, perception, attitudinal surveys) to what people do’

Introduction

17

(Isin 2008: 371). As Wood and Black have noted (2014), Isin’s re-theorizing of citizenship as enactment rather than as status or membership requires us to pay greater attention to the acts that constitute young people as citizens and the circumstances and conditions that support, promote, inspire or hinder those acts. As we consider in Chapter 6, it also focuses attention on the educational conditions under which active young citizens may be either ‘made’ (Isin 2009) or ‘unmade’ (Nyers 2006). Yarwood writes that ‘people only attain full citizenship when they mobilise, use and perform their rights and duties’ (2014: 70). This raises numerous questions, including what constitute the rights and duties of young people’s citizenship, and for what purposes their acts of citizenship are fostered by policy. It also raises the question that we consider in Chapter 5 of what acts constitute young people’s daily citizenship in the local sites and spaces of their everyday lives. The performative turn has also done much to shift the debate about the nature of citizenship from something that is chiefly constituted as a formal status and membership to something that is ‘part of daily life, something we enact’ (Staeheli et al. 2012: 631). Antipodean scholars, in particular, are refocusing attention on young people’s ordinary or everyday experiences of citizenship (e.g. Harris and Wyn 2009; Harris, Wyn and Younes 2010; Harris and Roose 2013; Johns, Mansouri and Lobo 2015; Wood 2015). Important contributions have also been made by Kallio and her colleagues (Kallio and Häkli 2013) and by Staeheli and her colleagues (Staeheli et al. 2012), among others. This book is strongly informed by this performative turn and, as we have already indicated, by the accompanying interest in the geographic, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of young people’s experience of citizenship. Much work has already been done to explore these aspects of young people’s lives and citizenship experiences. Wood and Black (forthcoming), for example, have built on the recent work of a number of other scholars (e.g. Abu El-Haj 2015; Harris 2010; Isin 2008; Kallio and Mitchell 2016; Youkhana 2015; YuvalDavis, Anthias and Kofman 2005), to propose a conceptual framework which recognizes the ‘ensemble experience’ that young people’s citizenship can be, and to examine the relationship between the geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of that citizenship. This book is informed by this framework, as well as by the scholarship on which it builds, including the growing scholarly interest in the relationship between citizenship and belonging (see, for example, Halse, Black and Charles forthcoming; Harris, 2016; Wood and Black forthcoming; Yuval-Davis, 2006).

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Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

The specific structure of this book is as follows. Chapter 1 starts by examining young people’s democratic participation and citizenship in light of decreasing membership of political parties and low youth participation in voting, as well as civic unrest and inequalities that destabilize democratic governments (and which are sometimes perpetuated by them) in the Australian context. It seeks to interrogate the political and civic dimensions of young people’s citizenship with a focus on the enactment of young people’s citizenship through forms of volunteering as a way of understanding the nuances of their participation. Part of this discussion highlights ways in which young people’s citizenship are bound up with notions of belonging (Abu El-Haj et al. 2011). In Chapter 2, we delve deeper into the link between citizenship and belonging by exploring examples of those young Australians who do not feel that they belong. Where the legal status of citizenship does not ensure feelings of belonging, particular insights can be gained by looking at certain young people whose cultural identities locate them at the margins of mainstream society, such as migrants, who are routinely told that they do not belong, and thus do not experience the qualities of full citizenship and membership, as suggested by Marshall (1964). Notions of cultural citizenship and its associated rights are outlined in relation to the documented experiences of young Australians. In our examination of recent data on the experiences of racism by certain young Australians, it is argued that young people’s citizenship in Australia is shaped by tensions related to race, ethnicity and geography that stand in contrast to aspirations (e.g. of Australian education policy) of young people as global citizens. Chapter 3 examines an important economic dimension of citizenship: that of young people’s transitions to post-school life. Where the transition from school to work is associated with what perceived to be an independent ‘adult’ citizen, the greater fluidity of life courses and careers and the shifting and erosion of markers of adulthood such as financial independence are challenging what citizenship is or should be. In many nations, economic insecurity is troubling young people’s transition to the workforce and impacting upon them in disproportionate ways. The promise or ‘opportunity bargain’ that education will lead to a secure life is also challenged by changing and insecure global labour markets and other socioeconomic developments. One such development, the GFC, is another important contextual factor in this book, and one that is in part a product of globalization. As we have written elsewhere (Walsh 2016a; Walsh and Black 2015), this downturn had both immediate and longer term effects on young people throughout

Introduction

19

the world. Conditions of youth unemployment and underemployment have intensified as workforces become more competitive, casualized and insecure. Compounding the volatility, fluidity and uncertainty of their working lives, the GFC also led to large migrations of young people across Europe and the world in search of work. But while some were compelled to migrate because of the drying up of local employment and education opportunities, others remained anchored in place to precarious conditions, marginalization and lack of social and physical mobility with limited resources and possibilities for work. The implications of these experiences of exclusion from economic participation, listlessness and immobility for citizenship are significant, as they have direct implications for the value and experiences of economic participation by young people. They become socio-economic refugees, and yet expected within neoliberal forms of governance to be self-made citizens capable of navigating their way through these wider labour market conditions. The nature of self-made citizenship is further explored in Chapter 4. Revisiting the broader reorientation of young people away from conventional politics outlined in Chapter 1, this chapter draws on focus group discussions with a group of young social entrepreneurs in Australia to explore new ways in which some young people are seeking to influence their worlds. We suggest that the emerging Do It Yourself (DIY) practices of youth citizenship illustrate possibilities for rethinking youth citizenship beyond the binaries of political participation, such formal versus informal and big ‘P’ versus small ‘p’ politics. The testimonies of another group of young DIY Australian volunteers will also be discussed in Chapter 5 to further interrogate conceptions of youth citizenship as it is experienced – or not experienced – in the context of the community. This chapter critically investigates the everyday experiences of young people as citizens within their local communities. The community is a key site in which some young Australians see themselves as being able exert influence, but it is also a site in which many young people are locked into place due to factors such as socio-economic disadvantage, as we suggested above. The notion of community itself is being reshaped as a neoliberal construct that responsibilizes young people as actors charged with improving their communities while at the same time experiencing tangible structural and systemic constraints. In low socioeconomic communities, for example, the construction of young people as active and socially responsible citizens is accompanied by dissonant discourses that can ‘unmake’ them as citizens by characterizing them as untrustworthy sources and subjects of risk.

20

Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

In Chapter 6, we unpack this dissonance between the ideas of active citizenship expressed in Australian policy and everyday life. We document the conflicting messages sent to young people about the value of their citizenship, particularly in relation to their experiences within schools. While schools can provide them with their first encounters with citizenship, schools can also affirm these conflicting messages about what citizenship means and entails. Education is understood here as a project of democracy, but one that is arguably flawed and whose limitations and possibilities speak to the challenges of realizing active citizenship as an aspiration of democratic societies in general. We conclude the book by exploring the unique way that young people’s citizenship is imbued with hope and futurity (in contrast to older members of the population). Young people carry a mantle of responsibility for a raft of political, economic and cultural challenges. For example, the traditional nexus between citizenship and the nation-state is being remade by global factors such as migration and competitive labour markets, while reinforcing the relationship between citizenship and geography. Where the geographical, affective, relational and temporal dimensions of young people’s citizenship are used as bases for rethinking youth citizenship throughout the book, in the Conclusion we return to these dimensions and what they may mean for rethinking young people’s citizenship after the age of entitlement. It is our contention that young people have the right to play a greater role shaping the key structures, processes and institutions that affect their lives: they are, after all, the inheritors of the biggest challenges of our time.

1

Citizenship beyond Membership

Introduction During the last few decades, democracies such as Australia have come to routinely promote the notion that young people should be educated as citizens capable of reflexively navigating and negotiating social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of contemporary life. It has also become a commonplace for democratic systems to express concern about young people’s democratic engagement as citizens. A vast international policy-inspired or -funded literature has articulated a concern about young people’s democratic participation and citizenship as part of a wider concern about the status of democracy within contemporary societies (e.g. Crick 1998; Flanagan et al. 1998; Mellor, Kennedy and Greenwood 2001; Torney-Purta et al. 2001). This concern has been steadily amplifying since the late 1980s in response to a constellation of factors that include dwindling membership of political parties and low voter turnout, particularly among young people; the decline of longstanding regimes and the emergence of new and often unstable political systems; widespread civic unrest; terrorism; the erosion across many nations of the material resources on which social, economic and political security and stability rely; and the resultant emergence or aggravation of structural and systemic inequalities that threaten the operation of democratic governments. In recent years, this concern has undergone a resurgence in response to events such as widespread changes in Middle Eastern governments, civic and political upheaval in Europe and the UK, the growth of formal protest and social movements such as Occupy and the continued threat of economic destabilization across numerous nations, including the nations of the EU. The active role of young people in some of these events or phenomena has done nothing to assuage policy concerns about young people’s democratic involvement. In fact, somewhat ironically, it may in many instances have exacerbated the policy discourse about their disengagement.

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Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

In Australia, government-funded and independent analyses have found evidence of young people’s insufficient engagement in certain formal or established democratic processes. In 2009, for example, an Australian government review of data on the attitudes and circumstances of young people of voting age reported that they were less likely to be enrolled to vote, volunteer or engage in civic activities than older people (Muir et al. 2009). We begin our discussion with an examination of the political and civic dimensions of young people’s citizenship in Australia before moving on to consider the growing trend for young people to express and enact their citizenship through various forms of volunteering.

Youth electoral participation in Australia In Australia, young people’s civic engagement tends to occur through community participation, electoral activity (participating in political campaigns and elections) and through the expression of opinion on issues of concern. By conventional measures, participation by young people in these civic activities is comparatively low and irregular compared to older members of the population (Martin 2014). A 2012 review of four Newspoll surveys of voter intentions, which were designed to assess which political parties would gain and which would lose if all people eligible to vote did so, highlighted an enduring disengagement among young people from the electoral process (Brooker 2013). Another Newspoll review of 4,857 respondents found that young people are over-represented in the 1.5 million eligible voters not enrolled. Combined with a persistent reduction in turnout for elections during the period measured, in which people aged in their 20s often numbered approximately half of that of older citizens, the study suggests just how uninterested many young people are in electoral politics. The evidence suggests that this lack of civic engagement starts early. McAllister (2012) suggests that, given voting habits are formed young and usually remain constant throughout one’s lifetime, a decreasing turnout for future elections can be anticipated. A consequence of this, he argues, is that ‘in the past decade increasing under-enrolment among the young has undermined the compulsion that once made [the Australian] electoral system predictable’ (McAllister 2012).

Citizenship beyond Membership

23

That a significant proportion of young people experience disaffection, indifference and ambivalence towards political participation and exercising their right to vote is by no means confined to Australia. These trends are also evident internationally. In the UK, for example, the numbers of young people participating in elections has declined from an average of about 60 per cent two decades ago to just 40 per cent at the 2015 general election (GrahamHarrison 2016). But within these figures are variations. Where about one in five eligible Australian voters aged 18 to 25 were not enrolled to vote in 2008 (Australian Government 2009), there have been increases in certain subgroups. For the 2016 federal election, for example, 71 per cent of 18-year-olds and 83 per cent of 19-year-olds were on the electoral roll (AEC 2016). Young people’s electoral participation is characterized by fluidity, ambivalence and disengagement. Research over the last 20 years into youth attitudes towards, and participation in, electoral voting has found fairly consistent results. The Youth Electoral Study (YES) sought to investigate the reasons why young people between 18 and 25 years of age are less likely to vote than any other group and from this assess what motivates Australia’s young people to participate. The study used three data collection strategies: researchers conducted a literature review of youth participation in democracy and voting they selected schools from 16 electoral divisions in Australia from which students aged 16–17 in first instance were interviewed about their political behaviours and attitudes; and they conducted national cross-sectional surveys of Year 12 senior secondary schools using a questionnaire on enrolment and voting, administered to over 4,600 students. It found that most young people enrolled to vote because it is considered the right thing to do; however, only half reported that they would vote if it was not compulsory. They did not feel confident in their understanding of political issues and parties to make a decision about voting (Print, Saha and Edwards 2004). Young voters are more fluid in their electoral orientations. The study of voter intentions which we mention earlier also provides insight into the shifting role and influence of young people’s participation in contemporary Australian electoral politics. The study showed that in contrast to the more stable voting habits of older members of the population, younger people vote according to ‘political moments’, specific issues and values, rather than along specific ideological or party-based lines. This affirms the findings of other studies conducted throughout the last 15 years (Brooker 2013). In an earlier iteration

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Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

of the study, Ron Brooker (2011: iii) found that ‘throughout this 14 year, five-election period younger voters were consistently at the extremes in terms of their frequency and scale of varying voter intentions: as a group they are not so much “swinging” but rather in a state of constant electoral motion’. There are some patterns. Brooker’s analysis suggests that in recent elections young people have continued to favour ‘progressive’ parties over their conservative counterparts, especially among females aged 18–24. Males aged 25–34 have shown a more conservative orientation. Their overall support has echoed the trends of middle-aged voters. Nevertheless, young people’s support is more variable.

Influences of and variations in young people’s participation Variations in young people’s political participation also occur across other subcategories. Young Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) Australians, those residing in low socio-economic locations, or have a disability, for example, tend to be less engaged in processes of decision-making (Muir et al. 2009). The international literature also shows other differences among specific groups of young people. In considering factors such as socio-economic status (SES), ethnicity and migrant status for both political and civic engagement, Barrett and Brunton-Smith (2014) found that minority and migrant youth are more likely to discuss news and world events with their parents than other young people, but less likely to express political views or take part in political activities. While this changes over generations as second-generation migrants become more likely to be involved in the democratic process, variations remain nonetheless. They conclude that lower SES and ethnicity, combined with a lower educational attainment, lead to lower levels of both political and civic engagement, stressing that the educational attainment is a significant factor. Family also plays a major role in influencing young people’s voting behaviour, and provides the foundation for their voting choices later in life (Edwards, Saha and Print 2006; Warwick et al. 2012). Parents are seen by young people as a significant source of information about politics and voting (AEC 2006, cited in Muir et al. 2009). Mothers are more active than any other family member in guiding their children through the process of enrolment to vote (Edwards, Saha and Print 2006). Nevertheless, many young people suggest that their parents

Citizenship beyond Membership

25

lack adequate resources to inform them or assist them to enrol.1 Evidence of the nature and degree of parental influence varies across countries. In a longitudinal study of Belgian youth, Quintelier (2015) found that the influence of peers on young people’s democratic involvement is greater than that of parents and that schools appear to have the least effect. In terms of what enhances young people’s political engagement over time, increasing internet usage is a strong factor as well as membership in new social movements. The age at which one can vote in a federal election in Australia is 18. This means that the first time that many young people will first ‘feel’ like citizens is also the time at which they are expected to demonstrate or enact that citizenship. Discussions about how better to engage young people in Australian elections have included lowering the voting age. But often within discussions such as these, young people are viewed with suspicion, as their capability of assuming responsibility for their political right to vote is called into question. Former member of Australian Parliament, Lindsay Tanner, provides a good illustration. Reflecting on potential political reform in Australia, Tanner suggests that ‘changing the voting age to 16 would grant political rights to an age group that has less connection with the world of adult responsibility than any previous generation of that age, as people enter full-time employment, purchase homes and establish families a good deal later than in earlier times’ (Tanner 2011: 38). This echoes sentiments in a resource provided the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) website, which posits that people at this age do not have the maturity to vote. They are ‘too distracted by adolescent interests to become responsible and informed voters. They are still growing up and need more time to learn about the world before they take on the responsibility of voting. Such learning must come from life experience, not formal education’ (AEC 2007: 72). Tanner’s opinion has some basis of validity. The average age at which women become mothers for the first time has steadily increased to around 29 years. For first time fathers, the age is slightly older (ABS 2011e). And as we shall discuss in Chapter 3, during the last few decades full-employment opportunities for teenagers have steadily decreased, with the age at which people enter fulltime employment happening later in life. Employment has become more fluid, with some marked differences in comparison to the working population as a whole. For example, ‘an average of nearly one in five teenagers and one in six

1

A 2013 survey also found that 32 per cent of young Australians did not know how their parents vote (The Australia Institute 2013).

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Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

young adults changed their labour force status every month … compared with one in ten older workers’ (Robinson, Long and Lamb 2011: 6). Young people able to afford it are typically purchasing their first home aged in their early 30s. But to equate these conventional stages of life with adulthood is decreasingly relevant given the greater fluidity of young people’s lives compared to previous generations. The conventional markers of maturity, as we shall see throughout this book, are less relevant. Tanner and the AEC resource share a problematic assumption about ‘the world of adult responsibility’. The AEC’s deficit approach to young people’s capacity to vote is founded on a familiar notion of maturity that characterizes teenagers as being in transition, ‘still growing up’ to an adult entitlement to vote and its associated ‘responsibility’. Presuming young people to be ‘distracted’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘uninformed’ homogenizes them into a single category that is patronizing while underestimating their agency. It infantilizes them and devalues their capacities to participate by relegating them to the margins until they reach an arbitrary age at which they ‘become’ adults. Following Tanner’s problematic logic, according to which conventional markers of adult responsibility are happening later in life, the capacity of young people to vote should arguably be delayed until they reach their late 20s. His argument, reminiscent of nineteenth-century critics of universal suffrage, reflects a wider a deficit view of young people and provides insight into why many young people feel such distance from political representatives (Walsh and Black 2011). As we shall argue in the second half of this book, this view fails to capture that changing nature of young people’s relation to politics, democracy and making change. It is also particularly problematic at a time when governments are announcing ‘the end of the age of entitlement’, as we discussed in the Introduction. The neoliberal expectation that young people should ensure their own economic, political and social membership, even in circumstances where austerity and socio-economic inequity are affecting young people disproportionately, sits jarringly with the deficit policy view of youth that we describe above. Standing as counter to deficit discourses of young people’s citizenship is an alternate discourse which suggests that, far from being democratically disengaged, young people are creating new and preferable modes of democratic participation. There is a case to be made that this discourse is also a limited one, celebrating young people as ‘the authors of sophisticated new forms of politics’ (Farthing 2010: 181) and, in so doing, encouraging what may be

Citizenship beyond Membership

27

romantic, overly agentic images of them and their citizenship (Walsh, Black and Berman 2013). As we shall see in Chapter 4, there is nevertheless merit to this discourse, the fostering of which has the potential to do important work in ameliorating or challenging the distrust of young people fostered by so many institutions, including governments, educational institutions and the fourth (though fragmenting) estate of the news media. Our argument is that in between these deficit and romantic views of young people lies a more nuanced picture of citizenship, one that has the potential to reframe conventional definitions. In mounting this argument, we build on the work of a number of citizenship scholars who have called for a more sophisticated theorization of citizenship, one that has the potential to reveal the complexity and ambiguity of young people’s experience. These include Farthing, who has argued that ‘a more helpful conceptualization requires moving beyond the claim that young people are either politically engaged or disengaged, to acknowledge that both engagement and disengagement are simultaneously occurring’ (Farthing 2010: 181). Inherent in deficit discourses is distrust as to the capability of young people to become full members of their community in the manner described by T. H. Marshall (1964) and which we discussed in the Introduction. This lack of trust, as shall see later in this chapter, runs both ways. Politicians are seen by many young people to be remote and party politics to be unappealing. Over the last two decades, research into young people’s attitudes to politics has consistently shown frustration with governments’ efforts to engage with youth that have been seen by young people as tokenistic, old, closed, controlled and irrelevant (Collin 2008b; Walsh and Black 2011). The YES cited above found that ‘career politicians’ make it difficult for young people to differentiate political parties from their members, and possibly due to this, that party identification among Australian youth is low (Saha, Edwards and Print 2007). Importantly, the investigators of the study suggest that this does not mean young people are apathetic, but rather that they do not consider political parties as representative of issues that impact them (Saha, Print and Edwards 2011). Many young people are turning away from formal institutions and processes like voting and party membership. Commentator Michael Short observes, Young people are simply not joining political parties. Most AFL [Australian Football League] football teams have more members than the ALP [Australian Labor Party], which reportedly has a national membership of about 35,000. That’s less than half that of the Australian Youth Climate Commission, a political

28

Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement movement mobilising young people to advocate for policies to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change. The Liberal Party [the other major party in Australia] does not publish membership figures, but numbers are reported to have been dropping steadily from about 80,000 in 2005. (Short 2013)

Young people’s feelings of trust in the political process emerge as a persistent theme in other youth research over the last 20 years (e.g. start with Mellor 1998). The YES found that young people are disinclined to participate because they see political leaders as dishonest and untrustworthy (Print, Saha and Edwards 2004). A more recent survey found that trust was the most important factor influencing young people’s vote in the 2013 federal election (The Australia Institute 2013). Another 2013 survey found that when young people were asked ‘can people be trusted?’ among the lowest level of trust was in the federal parliament and political parties (Markus 2013). This lack of trust is not confined to young people. Where 48 per cent of Australians in general surveyed in 2009 thought government could be trusted ‘almost always’ or ‘most of the time’, by 2016 it had declined to 29 per cent (Markus 2016). According to the survey, ‘There was an expectation that following the electoral victory of the Coalition government in 2013 there would be significant increase in trust, on the pattern of the increase following the change of government in 2007. This expectation was not realised’ (Markus 2016: 3). Other research into the broader population similarly affirms that levels of trust are on the decline; an Essential Media report in 2012 found overall trust in government to be decreasing (Alcorn 2014).

A turning away from democracy by Australian youth? Some evidence suggests that young people are possibly turning away from democracy in general; or at the very least, that their attitudes to democracy are characterized by ambivalence. In 2012, a Lowy Institute nationally representative opinion survey concluded that ‘some Australians are quite blasé about democracy’ (Hanson 2012: 13), with cited figures indicating that such attitudes are concentrated in the young. Only 39 per cent of 18 to 29 year olds polled by that survey agreed that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government compared to 60 per cent of all adult Australians polled. Fifteen per cent of all adults who responded to the survey stated that they had no preferences about the kind of government Australia had, where nearly a quarter

Citizenship beyond Membership

29

of young people (23 per cent) held this view. In the 2016 iteration of the poll, 54 per cent of 18–29-year-olds said that ‘democracy is preferable to any other kind of government’ compared to 61 per cent of the adult population (Oliver 2016). While this represents an improvement in favour of democracy, where the proportion of all adults polled remained fairly constant over the five-year period (2012–16), 18–29-year-olds consistently polled higher than all adult responses in response to the statements: ‘In some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable’ and ‘For someone like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have’ (Oliver 2016). These findings are troubling. The same Lowy poll of young people in 2014 found a significant proportion turning away from democracy because it ‘is not working because there is no real difference between the policies of the major parties’, and because ‘democracy only serves the interests of a few and not the majority’ (Oliver 2014). Understanding these findings is complex, requiring a deeper analysis of how young people understand democracy and other forms of government. Interpreting these data raises several questions: how do young people define democracy? Is this different to how others define it? Has the increasingly divisive and intensely personal politics from politicians of all political stripes during the past decade shaped young people’s perceptions of democracy? Are young people turning away from untrustworthy politicians rather than democracy, or conflating democracy with corrupt politics? The evidence suggests that a perceived distance between political representatives and young people in Australia is extended by the barriers faced by young people when they do seek to have their voices heard through activism or protest. These barriers frequently stem from policy, reflecting the way in which policy seeks to restrict young people to certain expressions of citizenship. It was telling, for example, that student protests against proposed federal funding cuts and other changes to higher education in 2014 were met with disdain by politicians and the media (Berents 2014). One student protest, which briefly interrupted a popular Australia television show involving former education minister Christopher Pyne, was labelled by the show’s host as ‘unruly’. When the protesters unfurled a banner, the host argued that actions such as these ‘[are] not what democracy is all about and those students should understand that’ (ABC 2014). And yet peaceful protest is arguably a healthy expression of democracy. The validity of other channels for young people’s political expression, debate and protest, such as ‘ethical consumption’ through consumer boycotts,

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Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement

has also been challenged by political representatives. In 2013, one Australian senator, Richard Colbeck, mooted the possibility that the government might ban consumer and environmental activists from launching secondary boycotts (Denholm 2013). Rather than directly target a company, a secondary boycott targets consumers and those the company relies upon such as its suppliers. In 2011, for example, Australian activist group GetUp threatened to boycott grocery companies who opposed the carbon tax to curb toxic emissions (News. com.au 2011). Commentators from both the left and right condemned Colbeck’s proposal, with one suggesting that such boycotts are ‘a completely legitimate way to express political views’ (Berg 2013). Attitudes to youth protest also need to be understood alongside efforts to curtail the right to protest in general. In the Australian state of Victoria, for example, the right to public protest was outlawed when the Legislative Council of Victoria passed the Summary Offence Act 2013. Police were granted the power to ‘move on’ groups of people at their will, including those involved in peaceful protests and pickets. Refusal to comply could result in fines, exclusion orders or being locked up in prison (Australasian Legal Information Institute 2016).

Volunteering as civic participation in Australia The restrictions which policy places on the ways in which some young people choose to perform or demonstrate their citizenship, together with young people’s feelings of distance and distrust from political representatives and the political process, may be two of the reasons why some seek other means by which to enact their citizenship – means that tend to slip under the radar of policymakers. Many political and other civic activities undertaken by young people, such as volunteering in formal as well as informal settings, are not captured by current measures or analyses of participation. As with voting, conventional official measures of participation in Australia suggest that younger people engage in civic activities such as volunteering significantly less than older Australians (General Social Survey 2006, cited in Muir et al. 2009). Yet other findings during the last several years suggest that volunteering is an important vehicle for young people’s civic participation. Volunteering was identified by 15–19-year-olds as one of their three top activities in 2011, 2012 and 2013, according to Mission Australia’s annual survey of nearly

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14,500 young people (Mission Australia 2013). The survey did not specify or categorize the nature of this volunteering, but it did capture a large sample of young people who identified themselves as having engaged in volunteering activities. It also showed a marked escalation in rates of youth volunteering over recent years. In 2011, 33.5 per cent of surveyed young people identified themselves as participating in volunteer work. In 2012, that figure jumped to 60.5 per cent. While the 2013 figure showed a decline to 55.6 per cent, it still suggests a growth overall in youth volunteering in Australia. These figures echo trends elsewhere in the world. Young people volunteer for a range of reasons. One US report suggests that young people volunteer because they are ‘creative, passionate, and frustrated by the problems grown-ups have created and/or been unable to fix’ (DoSomething. Org 2012: 2). At first glance, this would seem a rather romantic depiction, one that overlooks some of the issues and complexities which attend young people’s volunteering, which we discuss below. At the same time, it may have some basis in young people’s lived experience. In Chapters 4 and 5, we draw on a series of discussions which we have held with various groups of young people over the past few years. One of these was a group of young people working as volunteers and youth leaders through their local council. Our discussions with these young volunteers found that they felt empowered by being considered ‘experts’. They could nominate the area of need on which they could focus, which they found to be empowering. This reflects wider observations about young people’s increasing engagement in ‘politics of choice’. It also reflects an opportunity for them to make an active contribution as young people, and for their voice to be taken seriously. Not too surprisingly, this seems to create a virtuous circle of civic engagement and contribution. One large US survey found that more than 70 per cent of young people who had volunteered in the previous 12 months strongly believed in their ability to make a difference in their community. Only 24 per cent of those who strongly disagreed with this proposition had volunteered. As the survey report concluded, ‘people who believe they can make a difference, do’ (DoSomething.Org 2012: 20). Young people’s experiences of volunteering are frequently more complex than this, however. In the Introduction, we suggested that young people’s citizenship includes geographical, relational, temporal and affective dimensions. The range of young people’s experiences, motivations and perspectives of volunteering illustrate some of these different dimensions of citizenship.

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Volunteering as an affective and relational experience The role of affect in shaping young people’s citizenship acts and dispositions is significant (Arnot and Swartz 2012; Black 2015; Bondi and Davidson 2011). It is intrinsically related to feelings of belonging that serve as a foundation for citizenship, which can in turn serve a wider range of social functions and benefits. For many young people, the decision to volunteer is motivated by a feeling of belonging – a desire to work together with others and to ‘give back’ to society. This feeling is more than a merely theoretical desire for connection. As with electoral participation, social networks and relationships have a strong effect on the volunteering behaviour of young people: in fact, having friends who volunteer regularly has been found to be a primary factor influencing a young person’s volunteering choices and habits. In the large US survey mentioned above, almost 76 per cent of young volunteers had friends who also volunteered on a regular basis: by comparison, only 42 per cent of those whose friends did not regularly volunteer chose to volunteer themselves. The same study found that other relational influences are also a factor in shaping young people’s choice to volunteer: only 19 per cent of those who volunteered indicated that they had done so purely at their own instigation: by contrast, more than half (57 per cent) were engaged in volunteering because they had been invited to do so, often by a trusted person such as a friend or family member (DoSomething. Org 2012). This relational dimension of young people’s volunteering is pivotal. Young people’s experiences of citizenship and belonging ‘are constituted at the intersection with others’ (Wood and Black 2016: 3). Particularly salient here are the relationships to adults, be they political representatives, parents and carers, teachers or employers: those who define what it means to be ‘young’ and ‘adult’ and how they measure young people’s citizenship. It is via the adult gaze that adults ‘regulate and control the citizenship actions and sense of belonging of young people’ (Wood and Black 2016: 8). A good example of this relational dimension arises from the issue of how young people’s volunteering is defined and, as importantly, who defines it. The standard definition of volunteering provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is ‘the provision of unpaid help willingly undertaken in the form of time, service or skills, to an organisation or group’ (ABS 2007). This definition is commonly accepted by peak volunteering bodies and reappears frequently

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within the volunteering literature (Walsh and Black 2015). Other, related definitions describe volunteering as ‘a citizen’s intentional, organized efforts to address matters of public concern’ (Hill and den Dulk 2013: 180). Volunteering seems to be understood by young people themselves in ways that differ from these conventional definitions. A UK study (Roker and Player 2000) found that a significant proportion of young men involved in voluntary work do not consider themselves to be volunteers because they see their volunteering as serving personal purposes and interests. Similar trends appear in Australia, where one government report has found that many young volunteers do not recognize their own activities as volunteering (HOR Standing Committee 2008). This may be because the term ‘volunteer’ has little meaning for some young people (Geale et al. 2010). It may also be because the persistently negative discourses that attend young people’s political and civic engagement conceal the scope of their actual voluntary contribution (Roker and Player 2000). Many young volunteers may also be volunteering through activities that are ‘hidden’ because they not publicized or included in public measures of volunteering. For example, while people aged 16–24 in the UK less likely than any other age group to engage in formal volunteer activities, they are more likely than other age groups to volunteer informally (41 per cent in comparison to an average of 35 per cent) (Hill, Russell and Brewis 2009). Young people may also be less likely than other cohorts to volunteer through a formal voluntary organization (Bittman 2006). This may mean that they and their civic contributions are excluded from formal measures of volunteering. This is most likely to be the case in Australia as well, where informal modes of volunteering are not recorded by the ABS. In Australia ‘informal’ volunteering has been defined as volunteering that takes place outside non-profit organizations and without a volunteer position description (Volunteering Australia 2006). But the means by which volunteering is measured in Australia are extremely limited. In the 2016 national Census of Population and Housing, for example, there was only a single question about the scope or nature of the voluntary work undertaken by Australians (ABS 2016a). Even so, this question seemed less concerned with ideas of civic engagement than with the quantification of the contribution that various forms of unpaid work – including volunteering – to the Australian economy and society. Youth participation through volunteering is arguably devalued or underrecognized by the predominant adult gaze over democratic institutions and the

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voluntary sector. There is a lack of empirical data about the nature and extent of volunteering in non-traditional ways, which may include many activities undertaken by young people. These include reciprocal arrangements such as timebanks, alternative monetary systems through which members contribute units of their time in exchange for a time credit that can be used or redeemed in various ways, as well as other local exchange and trading schemes and informal arrangements. Other fast-growing phenomena include young people’s online social action, e-volunteering and volunteer tourism undertaken between school and post-school work, study and training; but again, very little data are available about these newer organizational contexts or locations for young people’s civic work (Jones 2011; Lyons et al. 2012). Traditional definitions of volunteering may also exclude or overlook emerging forms of social action and social participation among young people such as through youth-led social enterprises (Black, Walsh and Taylor 2011). Even where such activities are specifically directed at fostering young people’s volunteering, as in the case of the Student Volunteer Army created by a young New Zealander following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, definitional issues continue to be a challenge (Lewis 2013). We shall return to these in Chapter 4. There is also the very large question of whether some volunteering by young people is indeed voluntary. At the foundation of volunteering is the notion that it is undertaken freely, but there are many examples in which young people are compelled to ‘volunteer’ (Brown, Lipsig-Mumme and Zajdow 2003). In some schooling contexts, for example, volunteering or service learning is included in the compulsory curriculum. In higher education, students may be given academic credit for volunteering or allowed to reduce their higher education fee debt, an idea that has been proposed for some time in Australia (Left Right ThinkTank 2011). Mutual obligation programmes such as Work for the Dole are often promoted as youth volunteering opportunities, even where the voluntary aspect is almost entirely absent (Bessant 2000). Such contexts conflate the voluntary nature of young people’s civic contribution with other, more instrumental goals and purposes. These instrumental purposes may in fact be gaining ground within the landscape of youth volunteering. While many young people’s motivation to volunteer is driven by more idealistic reasons, which we have discussed earlier, many also see volunteering as a useful pathway to gaining educational opportunities (Australian Youth Forum 2012). At least one study has suggested that young people from low socio-economic circumstances may be more

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motivated to volunteer in order to gain work experience than their more affluent peers (Spring, Dietz and Grimm 2007). While there is a real dearth of research on the actual relationship between youth volunteering and successful trajectories to employment, the increasingly constrained, insecure and competitive nature of the youth labour market may mean that such young people’s efforts are becoming less and less successful. The displacement or substitution of voluntary internships for paid work (e.g. in the form of job placements) in the name of what Holdsworth calls the ‘cult of experience’ (2015: 1) can potentially aggravate existing inequalities between young people. This ‘fetishizing of experience’ (Holdsworth 2015: 1) is a direct product of the neoliberal environment which we described in the Introduction. This is an environment that promotes the individualization of responsibility and that valorizes the self-making citizen, an environment in which young people are not only encouraged but also expected to engage in a care of the self that includes preparation and positioning themselves for the greatest possible success in the workplace. The intended product or outcome of this neoliberal care of the self is what Kelly, Campbell and Harrison have termed an ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’ (2015: 560): the creation of a flexible, ambitious, self-motivated and strategic young person who is self-equipped to survive and succeed in the precarious labour markets of the current era. The ability to gain marketable workplace experience is a critical component of this entrepreneurial young self. As Holdsworth notes, ‘The mantra of the accumulation of experiences, to be distinctive from everyone else in an increasingly crowded labour market, has become the rallying call for young people under the assumed logic of employability’ (2015: 1). Volunteering, alongside internships, travel and paid work where young people can get it, is seen as a way of accumulating these experiences. In fact, as Mills suggests, ‘it is almost impossible to discuss volunteering by adults or young people today without reference to labour market dynamics’ (2015: 524). At least one young volunteer has mounted the same argument. Referring to his completion of the UK Charity Works trainee programme, he notes: The feeling amongst many of us in the cohort is that volunteering is quite often about much more than the donation of our time for the benefit of others. In a country where 764,000 young people between the ages of 16-24 are unemployed, people often have no choice but to seek out opportunities to volunteer in order to develop their own skillset, gain firsthand experience of a sector in which they aspire to work, and to discover that elusive ‘way in’ that offers a route to their Elysium of future employment. (Charity Works 2016)

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Youth volunteering as an expression of citizenship located in time and space The geographical dimensions of citizenship and belonging are also significant. Young people’s experiences of citizenship are often linked to specific places, forming a kind of affective geography (Wood and Black forthcoming). As YuvalDavis (2011a: 10) describes, the politics of belonging constructs as something that is defined by ‘boundaries [that] are often spatial and relate to a specific locality/territoriality’. The pattern and nature of young people’s volunteering in Australia, for example, is strongly related to the immediate geographical location in which they live. While rates of volunteering amongst young people vary across different states and territories (Mission Australia 2013), young people from non-metropolitan communities appear to volunteer more (more frequently and for more hours) than young people from metropolitan communities (Brown, Lipsig-Mumme and Zajdow 2003; Muir et al. 2009), suggesting that young people may be more likely to volunteer where the community is smaller, more immediate or more familiar. The geographies of young people’s volunteering may also include the space of the school. These include not only opportunities to volunteer as part of school life, but also the ways by which peers and teachers shape young attitudes to civic and political participation. Relational dimensions intersect these geographies. In her ethnography of student voice at a comprehensive coeducational public high school in Sydney, Mayes (2016) found that teachers played a key role in either supporting or restricting young people’s awareness of social issues and in turn, the nature of the social action that those young people took to address that issue. They did this through controlling and sometimes disregarding or diminishing students’ displays of their affective and political attachments within school spaces. In Chapter 6, we discuss other examples of the ways in which schools act as geographical and relational contexts for young people’s citizenship. The issues of what constitutes youth volunteering, which we discussed earlier, also have socio-geographical dimensions. In CALD communities, for example, young people’s civic contribution may be viewed as a family or community obligation rather than as volunteering. ‘Volunteering’ is not necessarily a word or concept used by CALD cultural contexts, which means that voluntary contributions within those contexts often go unrecognized and unreported (HOR 2008). This is an issue that has also been raised in relation to both CALD and Indigenous communities, in which the term ‘volunteering’

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may have little meaning (Kerr et al. 2001). This may be reflected in the fact that reported rates of volunteering among people born outside Australia are lower than those born in the country: in 2006, the reported rates of volunteering among people born outside Australia were 29 per cent compared to 36 per cent of Australian-born people (Australian Government 2008). The invisibility of some young people’s voluntary contributions outlined above is exacerbated by a lack of quality research into what constitutes volunteering in both CALD and low socio-economic communities (Hill, Russell and Brewis 2009). This means that policy proposals with regard to boosting volunteering by young people may be made without real knowledge or data about the volunteering values, activities and attitudes of marginalized groups of young people (Bassett et al. 2011). Without such knowledge, the risk is that efforts to promote the volunteering of such young people may restrict it to certain forms, without recognition of the priorities and actual experience of the young people in question. There is also a temporal aspect to volunteering as an enactment of citizenship in that its experience can often change across time. As we have seen above, the political orientation towards voting for political parties shifts as young men, for example, get older. Motivations to volunteer also shift. Some research findings suggest that where some young people initially volunteer more for reasons of personal or professional gain than reasons of altruism, this often evolves into to a lifelong commitment to voluntary activity (Nicol 2012). Wynne (2011) makes a useful distinction when she found that young volunteers may begin by working in what she calls ‘standard-cause service roles’, or roles that engage them in volunteering but that ‘do not challenge their belief systems’. As young people progress in confidence and experience, they may begin to take on what Wynne calls ‘social-cause service roles’, roles which may connect them to deeper values and issues. As she notes, ‘standard-cause volunteering developed the personal and professional skills of young people. Social-cause volunteering strengthened their connection to community. Both are important in the volunteering journey’ (2011: 3).

Conclusion This chapter has explored what Yuval-Davis has described as ‘the participatory dimension of belonging to a political community’ (2011a: 201). It is through

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activities such as voting and volunteering that many young people will first experience citizenship as a feeling – a feeling of belonging (Osler and Starkey 2005). Such feelings of belonging are closely associated with feelings of being a citizen (Wood and Black forthcoming; Mitchell and Parker 2008). At the same time, the relationship between the promise inherent in many youth volunteering programmes and organizations – that the young volunteer will feel embedded and connected to a specific community and be able to make a valuable contribution to that community – has been very little explored by research. As Nenga notes, ‘Little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways that youth actively experience community while volunteering’ (2012: 1065). In addition, this discussion suggests a need to interrogate the ideas of membership and belonging as a basis for citizenship. Returning to the seminal definition of citizenship provided by Marshall (1964) in the Introduction to this book, the quality and extent of a citizen’s participation in the decision-making of a community are related to the nature and quality of that person’s membership within it. But as we have seen and will explore in the following two chapters, young people’s experiences of membership are uneven, fluid and sometimes nonexistent. These chapters will look at how young people experience uncertainty, exclusion and marginalization in political, cultural and economic domains of life. We will also argue that the framing notion of membership inadequately captures the many dimensions of citizenship that may or may not arise in young people’s lives. We will critically examine these dimensions throughout this book. This chapter has consequently sought to explore dimensions of young people’s citizenship beyond the conventionally accepted notions of legal status and membership. These include the suggestion that young people’s citizenship is best understood in terms of the practices or acts through which it is expressed. They also include the suggestion that young people’s citizenship has important geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions. These concepts will also be recurring themes throughout this book. Temporal dimensions of citizenship are significant because they are often very much tied to experiences of, and adult attitudes to, being young. As we shall touch upon throughout this book, the definition of what constitutes being young and the transition to adulthood are fluid and shift across contexts (Walsh 2016a). As suggested above, maturity is also contested and normative. Debates around the appropriate age to vote highlight this. As with the metaphor of transition to adulthood, markers of the transition to citizenship as a legal status, with associated entitlements and responsibilities such as voting, are on

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one level signposted by the legal frameworks associated with that status, and yet on other levels, are fraught with ambiguity. As illustrated above, young adults who are entitled to vote are also mocked for peaceful protest as being ‘undemocratic’. Their opinion is frequently dismissed because they are young. In the following chapter, we will also describe citizens from migrant backgrounds who do not belong. Another theme to emerge in this discussion to which we will return later in this book is the continued need to move beyond binary projections of youth in either deficit or romantic ways. A more nuanced and flexible approach is required. Despite the distance young people feel from institutions of democracy such as voting, the evidence also suggests that interest in politics is still strong among some young people, just not in the conventional contexts and institutions in which they are played out. Conventional political institutions seen to inhibit their capacity to engage, participate and influence are eschewed. In addition, research has shown that many young people report an orientation towards activities that ‘deliver shortterm, visible and efficacious outcomes that eschew traditional hierarchies, operate through transparent processes and afford agency’ (Arvanitakis and Marren 2009: 6). Notably, some young people seeking to influence and make change do not characterize this activity as being ‘political’ in nature. On the flip side of this is growing evidence that young people are participating in ways that do not register on conventional radars of engagement and participation; for example, through ‘ethical consumption’ (i.e. boycotting certain commercial brands on moral grounds) and social media campaigns to raise awareness and galvanize action. Young people seek to engage in change-making that often does not register on conventional measures of participation. In Australia, official measures of youth participation (such as those collected by the ABS) fail to capture forms of volunteering and other forms of engagement in changemaking such as through social enterprises (Walsh and Black 2015; Walsh and Owen 2015; Walsh and Black forthcoming). A more expansive definition has recently been proposed by Volunteering Australia (2016): ‘Volunteering is time willingly given for the common good and without financial gain.’ This better definition takes into account activities such as activism. Some of these forms of citizenship will be explored in Chapter 4. Before doing so, we shall examine how these dimensions of citizenship are evident in, and absent from, the cultural and economic lives of young people.

2

Citizenship without Belonging

Introduction In the previous chapter, we introduced our argument, drawing on recent scholarship, that any discussion of young people’s citizenship must necessarily be bound up with ‘questions of belonging’ (Abu El-Haj et al. 2011: 31), including questions about the forces and factors that mediate young people’s ability to belong as citizens, and to feel that they belong. The relationship between citizenship and belonging is becoming increasingly linked within the scholarship of citizenship: indeed, as Wood and Black have noted, ‘citizenship and belonging are often used in interchangeable ways’ (2016: 2). It has even been argued that belonging could be used to replace citizenship in discussions and investigations of young people’s experiences and places within democratic systems and imaginaries: Crowley’s suggestion that ‘belonging is a thicker concept than that of citizenship’ (1999: 526) is being taken up by a growing number of scholars, including Yuval-Davis and her colleagues (2005) and Abu El-Haj and hers (2011). This theoretical link between citizenship and belonging is particularly useful for considering the experience of those who do not belong, or do not feel that they belong. Belonging, as Yuval-Davis notes, ‘is about emotional attachment, about feeling “at home”’ (2011b: 4), but citizenship does not necessarily confer such attachments. The status of formal or legal citizenship does not necessarily ensure feelings of belonging: as Harris argues, ‘while legal citizenship status is conferred by the state, it is in people’s everyday deployments and contestations of claims to belonging that the practical work of social cohesion, nation-making and enactment of rights occurs’ (2016: 359). The claims and contestations associated with citizenship and belonging are experienced with particular strength by young people whose cultural identity locates them at the fringes of mainstream society, such as young people with migrant backgrounds living in Australia. As we shall see in the discussion to follow, many such young people are told on a

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daily basis that they do not belong, and do not experience the qualities of full citizenship and membership, as we have described them in the Introduction and Chapter 1. In extreme cases, such as those of the young asylum seekers who are marooned in the infamous Australian offshore detention camps on Manus Island and Nauru,1 the very idea of citizenship can signify a state of almost permanent exclusion and marginalization as much as one of membership and belonging. For those with the legal status of membership and the entitlements that membership should (in theory) confer, a nuanced, dynamic and sometimes fluid picture emerges. As we began to discuss in the Introduction and will expand on further in Chapter 3, contemporary experiences of citizenship – or its absence and denial – are shaped by globalization. Globalization and the recognition of its intensification during the 1990s transformed the ways that citizenship and belonging are experienced – and not experienced. These transformations present a fundamental challenge to the traditional coupling of the notions of citizenship and membership – particularly where belonging is concerned. As Wood and Black note, ‘the shifting configurations of time, space and mobility as a result of globalisation have significant implications for how we conceptualise belonging and citizenship today and hold particular implications for young people whose identities are forged in such contexts’ (2016: 2). This chapter provides an overview of the thinking about globalization to set the context for how one particular aspect of contemporary experience – migration – has impacted on the citizenship and belonging of many young people. It looks in particular at the experiences of racism by young Australians and touches on research over the last 15 years into young Australians’ attitudes towards those who find themselves at what is arguably the most marginalized end of the global flows of people: certain migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. The complex and varied processes of globalization that we will describe in Chapter 3 and elsewhere in this book have led many to write of the need for young people to be prepared as citizens not just of their local and national communities, but of global communities. Responses to globalization, alongside a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of citizenship, have throughout the previous

1

Seeking to discourage people-smuggling and the deaths of those seeking asylum at sea, the Australian Labor Party government reintroduced a policy that led to the transfer of those seeking asylum in Australia to Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

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two decades also led to various efforts to construct notions of citizenship that include but also move beyond the classic link of citizenship to rights, nationality and the state (Sassen 2002). A brief and by no means exhaustive list of these conceptualizations have included post-national citizenship, supranational citizenship, cultural and intercultural citizenship, multi-dimensional citizenship, ecological citizenship, transnational citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, citizenship as acts and practices, and everyday citizenship. Our interest in this chapter is in ideas of cultural citizenship and the citizenship rights that attend these ideas. Drawing on these empirical data, we argue that young people’s citizenship in Australia is characterized by tensions related to race, ethnicity and geography.

The rise and provocation of cultural citizenship in Australia In recent decades, the discourse of cultural citizenship and the recognition of the cultural dimensions of citizenship have flowed on from the greater recognition of multicultural and environmental rights and the needs of Aboriginal peoples (Delanty 2000; Walsh 2012). Miller (2001: 2) writes that ‘this discourse developed in response to the great waves of cross-class migration of the past 50 years and an increasingly mobile middle-class culture-industry workforce that has been generated by a new international division of cultural labor’. In its broadest sense, cultural citizenship encompasses the ‘rights and obligations, civic spaces of participation, respect, identity and difference and individualization’ (Stevenson 2003: 33). Cultural citizenship includes those rights that are associated with protecting and maintaining cultural heritage and associated freedoms for people to express their own culture and live without discrimination. These freedoms include ‘the maintenance and development of cultural lineage via education, custom, language and religion, and the positive acknowledgement of difference in and by the mainstream’ (Miller 2001: 2). Cultural citizenship is also recognized as a basis for ‘cultural empowerment’, which allows citizens ‘to participate effectively, creatively and successfully within a national culture’ (Turner, in Stevenson 2003: 12) and without the threat of being subsumed into that culture. This in turn requires the full and equal access of citizens to educational institutions, the freedom of people to use any living language, and the right of parents to identify with and socialize their children into a culture.

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As we discuss later in this chapter, government recognition of cultural diversity and associated rights has perhaps been most visible in the policies and programmes of multiculturalism (Walsh and Leach 2007). But in contexts such as Australia, this recognition has historically been uneven. As we also discuss later, it is being increasingly challenged by tensions and challenges arising from culturally diverse societies and global shifts and movements of populations described in the Introduction. It now appears to be tipping in a direction that has major implications for the citizenship experience and identities of many young people in Australia and elsewhere, many of whom already feel their recognition and rights as citizens to be on shaky ground. In the next section of this chapter, we consider the role of racism in shaping young people’s feelings of citizenship and belonging.

Australian young people and racism The cultural composition of Australia is defined by migration, creating one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. From the arrival of the first Australians 65 to 75,000 years ago to the mass migration of peoples from all over the world during the twentieth century, Australia now consists of at least 62 birthplace groups comprising over 10,000 members (Hugo 2012). Over 10 per cent of the population now identifies themselves as Asian – twice the proportion of a decade earlier (Beech 2013). Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Hindi and Tagalog make up half of the top ten languages spoken in the home (ABS 2011b). The impact of migratory flows is particularly visible in the make-up of young people. As Harris notes, drawing on recent research, ‘young people are the most culturally diverse grouping in Australia’ (2016: 361). According to census data from 2006, just under 12 per cent of young Australians aged 15–24 were born overseas, with just over one in five young people aged 15–19 and 27.58 per cent of young people aged 20–24 speaking a language other than English at home (ABS 2011a; 2011b,c). The same data suggest that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people make up 4.2 per cent of all Australian children and young people (294,000) (ABS 2011d). Within this multicultural make-up, the lives of young Australians are often marked by racial exclusion. A 2016 national survey found that 20 per cent of Australian respondents had experienced discrimination because of their skin

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colour, ethnic origin or religious beliefs (Markus 2016). Up from 12 per cent in 2012, it was the highest level since the annual survey began in 2007. In an earlier iteration of the survey, two-fifths of migrants who arrived in Australia in the past decade reported being discriminated against because of their race (Markus 2013), with over 40 per cent of recent arrivals from a number of Asian countries reporting experiences of discrimination. Other research identifies a deep racism among about one in ten Australians (Dunn et al. 2014). Mikola and Mansouri argue that ‘experiences of racism in contemporary Australia do not exist in a historical vacuum’ (2015: 502). ‘Racism’, Castles (1996: 31) writes, ‘is not an aberration or a result of individual pathology. It is a set of practices and discourses, which are deeply rooted in the history, traditions and culture of modernity. Racism exists in a variety of forms in all modern societies, and plays a crucial role in consolidating nation-states, by providing an instrument for defining belonging or exclusion’. Racism ‘can be expressed through beliefs, prejudices or behaviours/practices and can be based on race, ethnicity, culture or religion’ (Paradies et al. 2009: 7). It can threaten personal and cultural identity and lead to withdrawal from active participation in everyday life (Francis and Cornfoot 2007). These affects and effects are evident in the lives of young Australians, as borne out by numerous studies. In 2009, for example, a study of Australian students aged between 12 and 19 years drawn from 60 different countries of birth, including recent migrants, refugees and Indigenous Australians, found that more than 70 per cent of participants reported experiencing racism. Young migrants who had been in Australia less than five years were six times more likely to report racist incidents, with young women from migrant backgrounds among the worst affected. Second- or third-generation migrants were four times more likely to report a racist experience than other young people participating in the study (Mansouri et al. 2009). Another survey of school students in the southern Australian state of Victoria found that 45.3 per cent of children born in nonEnglish-speaking countries reported experiencing racism, with just under a quarter (22.5 per cent) of the baseline sample experiencing at least one form of direct racism on a daily basis. Just over a third (33.2 per cent) of all 264 students surveyed cited direct experiences of racism. Students gave examples of peers excluding them or not wanting to play with them due to their race (Priest et al. 2014). A third series of surveys of people aged 18 to 24 residing in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, found that while respondents are

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more supportive of multiculturalism compared to older Australians (52 per cent compared to 43 per cent) and less likely to define ‘out groups’ (69 per cent compared to 54 per cent), 27.1 per cent of respondents suggested that certain groups do not ‘fit’ into Australian society (although this was still lower than the population average of 40.2 per cent) (Forrest 2008). Young Indigenous Australians report a more pervasive and persistent experience of racism (Mansouri et al. 2009). While they tend to report fewer isolated racist incidents, interview data collected as part of Mansouri and his colleagues’ study found that respondents experienced racism on such a regular basis specific occurrences might not stand out. These empirical studies shed light on the emerging understandings of young people’s citizenship outlined in the previous chapter. First, both belonging and not belonging feature strongly in the experiences of the students in these studies. For example, the most common form of direct racism reported in the Victorian study was accusations such as ‘you don’t belong in Australia’. Just under one-fifth (19.5 per cent) of students reported hearing this at least every month (Priest et al. 2014). Mansouri and colleagues’ also found underlying manifestations of racism in the way that respondents described other groups. For example, Anglo-Australian respondents frequently evoked notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, while exhibiting a tendency to view other groups homogenously. People from Asian countries were collectively labelled as ‘Asians’, for example, without recognition of specific countries of heritage or particular cultural and linguistic differences between them. This racial stereotyping or ‘othering’ was not confined to Anglo-Australians. Young participants in the study from nonAnglo-Saxon backgrounds grouped young people with lighter coloured skin as ‘white’ or ‘Aussie’ (Mansouri et al. 2009). Geographical dimensions of exclusion are also notable. Feelings of belonging and membership differ across contexts. One might feel ‘at home’ in school, but alien at home, or the other way around. Wood and Black (2016: 10) write that ‘many transnational young people feel included as citizens – recognised and capable of action – within one aspect of a place or period of time but not another’. Wood’s 2013 study, which we discuss shortly, shows how some young culturally diverse people feel recognized within their own communities but excluded at school. For others, the geographies of citizenship, recognition and belonging are more complex than this. As Farrugia (2015: 619) observes in the Australian context,

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the places in which young people live ‘are sites at which multiple and sometimes contradictory identities are constructed and negotiated, and this has become all the more significant under conditions of globalization’, conditions in which some ‘children and young people may be exposed to many diverse cultural influences or may have experienced substantial mobility and migration themselves’. The boundaries of these sites can intersect in complex ways, as is documented elsewhere in the world. Citing Rutherford’s descriptions of the experiences of belonging in a culturally diverse suburb of London, Bauman describes the porous nature of boundaries, making it ‘difficult to ascertain who legally belongs and who is a stranger, who is at home, and who is an intruder’ (Bauman 2011: 36). At the same time, those boundaries can also retain a residue of geographical territoriality. Returning to Mansouri and his team’s research cited above, one young person at the receiving end of racism from ‘white’ girls characterized the experience as one related to territory: ‘They want to state a claim on their country. We are supposed to stick to our own area … they think [the city] is just for them’ (Mansouri et al. 2009: 71). Identity and belonging are intimately tied here to territory. The same study showed that the territories of exclusion can extend well beyond public locations and geographies. Mansouri and his colleagues observed that young people who had been the target of racist behaviours described a diminished sense of belonging in a range of contexts, from their local community to their school, or even in some instances, their family. The family features in much of the research as a key affective refuge from racism and other types of exclusion. But even familial relations can be challenged. One young migrant girl described how her relationship with her parents, with whom she was reluctant to discuss her experiences, was eroded: If I am going home and I am feeling upset and I don’t want to talk to anyone … and [my parents] come up to me and say ‘do you want to talk about it’ and if I don’t feel comfortable and I say no, they will know something’s wrong and then they will feel that I am not letting them know what is wrong. It kind of decreases my relationship with them. (Mansouri et al. 2009: 93)

The consequences of exclusion As this anecdote shows, the affective consequences of racial and related forms of exclusion can be pronounced. Racism has been shown to erode individuals’

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self-esteem and their sense of belonging as citizens to the broader community (Francis and Cornfoot 2007; Mansouri and Percival Wood 2008; Mansouri, Jenkins and Walsh 2012). This emerges strongly from studies such as Mikola and Mansouri’s 2015 work with migrant youth from Arabic-speaking, Pacific Islander and African backgrounds. These young people are arguably among the most vulnerable and marginalized young people in contemporary Australia. They are frequently linked in the media and the legal system to experiences and manifestations of ‘prejudice, stigmatisation, racism, public disorder and inter-communal conflict’ (501). The researchers defined racism as something that operates on two levels: first, as ‘a distinctly affective experience that most often takes place in a shared, public space, where negotiating race, ethnicity and cultural difference occurs on a daily basis’ and secondly as ‘a structural, systemic and institutionally engrained force that underlies these everyday experiences’ (502). They examined the ways in which these experiences challenged or precluded young people’s sense of belonging as citizens. Highlighting the affective and everyday nature of young migrants’ experiences of racism in the local geographies of the school, the shopping mall and the street, they found that ‘racism and racist stereotypes create an everyday condition for many young people in [the Australian city of] Melbourne and that interpersonal and systemic racism often invoke feelings of anger and frustration’ (507). Similar findings come from the work of other antipodean scholars such as Wood (2013). Her discussions with groups of New Zealand young people, including Maori young people and young people from Pacific Island and Asian backgrounds, highlight the link between their feelings and experiences of citizenship, as well as their citizenship participation, and their ‘lived emotional and relational experiences of belonging in communities’ (50). While many of these young people felt at home in their own multicultural communities, this experience did not extend to ‘white’ or dominant culture spaces such as the school. For one young Maori woman, for example, the school and the classroom were theatres for ‘a sense of alienation, dislocation and “not quite belonging” in her place’ (56). As Wood notes (50), many young people’s ‘emotive, affective and embodied citizenship responses … are intricately tied to spatial and cultural landscapes’. In Mansouri and colleagues’ (2009) study, young people’s feeling ‘out-of-place’, whether on the street or in school, caused a build-up not only of anger and frustration but also a feeling of not being ‘fully Australian’. Despite this, the young people concerned did not see these everyday negative feelings as symptomatic of a wider structural or societal problem. Instead, they internalized

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their experiences. When they did discuss their feelings, this was usually done only with people of their own cultural group. This may have offered important affective resources and sources of support, but it did little to show young people whether their experiences were shared by other social groups or to shed light on what might be wider social patterns of discrimination and exclusion. The same study also revealed that feelings and experiences of being either insiders or outsiders were not confined to young people of migrant or Indigenous backgrounds. While 80 per cent of students from non-Anglo-Australian backgrounds reported that they had been subjected to some form of racism, 55 per cent of young people from Anglo-Australian backgrounds reported similar experiences. There were also incidents in which Indigenous young people were identified as the perpetrators of racial abuse. Shelley, an Anglo-Australian girl, described an incident in which she and her sister were abused as they passed a group of Indigenous girls on the street, who called them ‘fucking white cunt[s]’. Shelley went on to explain that they ‘accused two of us of calling their little cousin a slut. When we asked for proof, it was us they said, it was two white girls, and she recognised them as you two’ (Mansouri et al. 2009: 71, italics added). The effects of this were severe, as Shelley suggests: I will look at a darker skinned person and think, are they gonna bash me? I don’t trust anyone that has a dark skin. I became anxious and had eating problems and saw a psychiatrist. (Mansouri et al. 2009: 71)

The erosion of trust is a significant consequence of racism. One participant in the 2009 study, Ekta, said that she stayed close to her friends at school because her racist perpetrators targeted her when she was alone. Ekta’s friendship group provided her with security, while her trust in other people was diminished. In her words, ‘you can‘t trust everyone, but as long as you have your friends, you know they are always there for you’ (Mansouri et al. 2009: 92). More widely, Mansouri and his colleagues found that a general sense of fear, distrust and suspicion is prevalent in the Australian community. This is relevant to all racial groups, including mainstream Australians. It ranges from the belief that one is being talked about when out in the community, through to a fear of going certain places for fear of attack and a general distrust of some people. (Mansouri et al. 2009: 111)

Young people’s experiences of citizenship are therefore played out within a complex dynamic of identity, culture, demography, gender and family, as well

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as sites and institutions, such as the school, which resist simple categorizations of what is constitutes inclusion or exclusion. It has been suggested that such experiences are part of life in a culturally diverse society. Distinctions between who belongs or fits in (the ‘us’ or the ‘in-group’) and those from other backgrounds and cultural practices (‘them’ or the ‘out-group’) are seen by some as important for emotional security and the self-identity of the in-group. Bauman suggests that ‘there must be an “out” for the “in” to be truly appreciated’ (1990: 42). The difference between the ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ is ‘the distinction between two totally different attitudes – between emotional attachment and antipathy, trust and suspicion, security and fear, cooperativeness and pugnacity’ (Bauman 1990: 40).

A right to be racist? This does not obviate the need for political, structural and institutional responses to racism as it affects young people’s experiences of citizenship and belonging. Mikola and Mansouri’s (2015) study concludes with an argument that racism is not just a problem for migrant youth, but a problem for all of society. They argue that any initiative to address this problem should be directed at the wider Australian public and not limited to youth organizations. As an example of what can be done to combat institutional racism, they cite a legal case brought against the Victorian police after young migrants had been unfairly targeted by police. In this historic case, the police were forced to scrutinize their practices and their wider attitudes towards people of different cultural backgrounds. The wider historical context of responses to racism is worth noting here. As we indicated earlier in this chapter, the history of governments’ recognition of cultural diversity and its associated citizenship rights, such as the freedom to express one’s own culture and freedom from discrimination, is most visible in the policies and programmes of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism in Australia was built on principles such as the right of all citizens to express their own culture and beliefs and the obligation for them to accept the right of others to do the same, and the right to equality of treatment and opportunity free from discrimination on the grounds of race, culture, religion, language, location, gender or place of birth (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2009). This recognition was mainly sparked by a need for new policy in response to the challenges of post–Second World War migration, rather than as an enduring

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principle of citizenship in Australia. Lacking the formal weight of constitutional recognition, the acknowledgement of these rights depends on the attitudes of the government of the day, which as we outlined in the Introduction to this book is historically characterized by a pragmatism on the part of government policymakers. They are further conditional on the basis that citizens can enjoy these rights provided they uphold existing democratic values and traditions (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2009). What some elsewhere in the world have called ‘the death of multiculturalism’ (see, for example, Allen 2007) highlights this conditionality. This phrase is most often used to describe the retreat from political commitments to cultural diversity that has marked UK and European politics since the mid-2000s (see Back and Sinha 2012) and that is rapidly escalating under the influence of the factors and events that we described in the Introduction. In Germany, for example, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced in 2010 that multicultural policies had ‘failed, and failed utterly’ (The Guardian 2010). Similar statements by former UK leader David Cameron and also former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy followed in quick succession, with Cameron arguing that multiculturalism had ‘encouraged different cultures to live separate lives’ (Kuenssberg 2011). Together with the flux and flows of mobility that we note elsewhere in this chapter and book, these political shifts are rapidly rendering modern multicultural societies ‘more complex and seemingly more fragile than ever before’ (Harris 2016: 359). A similar movement away from the ideas and ideals of multiculturalism as an active pursuit of public policy has also arguably taken place in Australia, with potential effects on young people in particular. Harris argues that young people have been among the greatest beneficiaries of the strong Australian policy commitment to multiculturalism that we described earlier, a commitment that has supported ‘forms of productive everyday mix and social cohesion’ (2016: 361). The recent withdrawal from this commitment at the federal government level has been accompanied by a movement away from the notion of cultural citizenship and its attendant rights. In 2014, in an ironic reversal of this notion, the attorney general of Australia, George Brandis, argued that ‘people do have a right to be bigots. In a free country people do have rights to say things that other people find offensive or insulting or bigoted’ (Griffiths 2014). Brandis was evoking the right to freedom of expression in response to the successful prosecution in 2011 of a prominent conservative media figure, Andrew Bolt, who had been found to have broken the law when

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he authored two articles in 2009 in which he suggested that some light-skinned people identified as Aboriginal for personal gain. When Bolt’s commentary was deemed by a federal court judge to have been of possible offence to members of the Aboriginal community (ABC 2011), Bolt decried the decision as ‘a terrible day for free speech in this country’. Brandis proposed the amendment to ensure that apparent curtailments of free speech like Bolt’s ‘can never happen in Australia again’ (Griffiths 2014). He announced plans to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Vilification Act. These proposed changes included diluted measures to outlaw racial vilification ‘while at the same time removing provisions which unreasonably limit freedom of speech’ (SBS 2014). Efforts like this to detach issues of racism from the rule of law are not new. In the United States, Angela Davis (2012: 169) has highlighted ‘the neoliberalist discourse of “color-blindness” and the assertion that equality can only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race’. In the case of Brandis, such a proposal (though unsuccessful) was arguably possible because of the domination of a neoliberal view that privileged some freedoms over others and an absence of an embedded rights framework. This view also privileges who is seen to be entitled to belong.

Neoliberalism as a force of exclusion There are particular ways in which neoliberalism influences or even exacerbates the experiences of exclusion by young migrants and asylum seekers. Neoliberal ideas can also be found in the ways in which young people themselves define who belongs and does not – or should not – belong as citizens. This is particularly evident in the ways in which some young people respond to the regulation of refugee and asylum seeker intake through border control, an issue that has been the subject of divisive community and media debate within Australia, as elsewhere. Halse and her colleagues (2016) have described the varied responses of Australian school students to this debate, drawing on a series of focus groups conducted in 2013 and 2014 with primary and secondary students from ethnically and socio-economically diverse groups to consider how young people constitute asylum seekers and their entitlement to belong – or not belong – in Australia. Echoing the findings of Mansouri and his colleagues above, some of these young people regarded asylum seekers as individuals with the same desires and aspirations as all other people, people who were entitled to belong

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because ‘they’re human beings’ (Halse et al. 2016: 14). Others saw them as an undifferentiated, homogenous and unknown group of risky interlopers, as ‘stranger[s] and outsider[s] to the nation’s normative social, legal, racial and cultural order’ (2016: 3) who warranted the scrutiny and control to which Australian border control policy and much of the popular and media opinion currently subjects them. It constitutes refugees and asylum seekers not as vulnerable citizens in flight from danger, but as ‘shadowy, unknowable strangers who carry within themselves the threat of unspecified, unknown dangers’ (Halse et al. 2016: 4). As one young person told the researchers, ‘they say they are fleeing war but they have no background; no passport; how does Australia have any idea whether they are going to come in and shoot?’ (Halse et al. 2016: 4). Bridging these two polarized views was, however, something else; a view and a zeitgeist that is also gaining ground across numerous nations and that may constitute as great a threat to potential citizens as the suspicion and vilification with which we are already so familiar. There was a strong consensus across all of the students that refugees and asylum seekers hoping for acceptance into Australian society should first prove themselves worthy of, and compliant with, its legal and social mores and norms. This is neoliberalism writ large: that those who are among the most vulnerable people on the planet should be seen as responsible for stage-managing ‘their own integration into the Australian “community”’ (Mikola and Mansouri 2015: 502), for crafting their own acceptable public identities, for presenting themselves as desirable members of the society which is seemingly doing all it can to keep them at bay, locked into camps on island detention centres with no legal recourse and little or no hope of ever gaining the citizenship for which they have risked so much. As we argue later in this chapter, it is a discourse that is being propagated by some young people themselves. It is also a growing part of recent policy discourse that, as we argue in the next section, frames and influences young people’s own experiences of citizenship inclusion or exclusion, especially where cultural diversity is evident.

Recognizing and enacting the citizenship of culturally diverse young people Culturally diverse young people’s experiences as citizens are not limited to the kind of overt experiences of racism and exclusion that we described

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earlier: they are also subject to multiple interpretations, assumptions and normative impositions that are poorly recognized by education, youth or other social policy. A number of recent Australian studies have addressed this by interrogating young migrants’ experiences and understandings of citizenship: their findings shed light not only on what citizenship might mean for such young people, but also on possible new definitions and interpretations of citizenship and how it might (or might not) be enacted. In their study of migrant youth in Australia, Mansouri and Mikola (2014) have critiqued the narrowness of the many policy directives and youth participation programmes that are designed to engage young migrants in their communities and decision-making processes, arguing that they underestimate what migrant youth have to offer. These policies and programmes can also have a homogenizing effect on the ways in which the citizenship of culturally diverse young people is constructed and understood. First, they tend to treat such young people as a homogenous group that share common citizenship and participation opportunities and desires. Secondly, like many other youth citizenship initiatives (e.g. Walsh, Black and Berman 2013), they tend to romanticize the citizenship acts of culturally diverse young people, concentrating only on the positive contribution that such young people can make to their own communities or to the broader society, while overlooking or effectively marginalizing any dissenting voices. As Mansouri and Mikola note, ‘young people who voice their opinions against their treatment by authorities or disagree with existing laws and regulations, such as being regularly stopped and searched by police …, do not get much coverage’ (2014: 29–30). Drawing upon theoretical notions of ‘everyday makers’ (Bang 2005), the researchers found that migrant young people adopted flexible approaches to participate in society, which were much more fluid and circular than those promoted or recognized by youth policy or programmes. In this sense, the young people migrated in to the dominant Australian society and then back to their ethnic communities and back out again, occupying different subjectivities in different places: Migrant youth often form a tenuous bridge between two worlds underpinned by an inherent tension that is at once insoluble, yet is also, by its nature, a cause for constructive dialogues. (Bang 2005: 33–4)

Despite this cause for dialogue, national or state policies are often aimed at encouraging young people to ‘step out’ of their immediate communities to ‘get involved’. Mansouri and Mikola argue that these directives fail to acknowledge

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that migrant youth often desire to bring their ‘acts of citizenship’ back home to their communities. They found that migrant youth occupied spaces of citizenship hybridity: instead of conforming to the norms and expected forms of ‘good citizenship’, they often asserted their voices through different media that allowed them to redefine what it meant to be ‘Australian’. Mansouri and Mikola (2014) conclude by arguing that this form of agency allows migrant youth to become political agents, challenging their popular image as disempowered young people who are seen (by adults) to be suspect and should be assimilated. This study also does much to highlight the affective dimensions of citizenship for migrant young people, who may feel a mix of indebtedness and guilt towards the different civic spheres between which they move. They may feel that they owe their host communities something and yet also have to live up to the high expectations of their families and cultural communities. This can affect how they feel about participating in society at large. As Mansouri and Mikola (2014: 35) note, these situations can create ‘a complicated and jumbled situation for migrant youth who are often endowed with the family expectation to deliver promises of a better future in the country of settlement, as well as act as good “guests” and “good citizens” in the country of arrival’. A related study by Harris and Roose (2013: 3) examined the experience of young Muslim people in Australia. Like Mansouri and Mikola, the researchers are critical of the plethora of reports and government initiatives that have been launched in Australia to support the civic inclusion of such young people. They argue that despite intense official efforts, many programmes and policies continue to ignore the ways in which Muslim youth do engage and contribute to the civic good. The study found that such young people practised three types of civic engagement: consuming and producing youth cultures and media in order to be heard; informal civic-network building in everyday spaces; and developing a politics of working on the self. Social media and blogging were popular ways of expressing young people’s views, alongside developing music videos and extending artistic forms of communicating with others. Discussing politics in everyday spaces is also ranked highly as a form of active civic engagement. Examining these ‘everyday’ acts of citizenship, Harris and Roose ask whether Muslim youth are any different from mainstream youth in terms of their informal civic engagement. As with Mansouri and Mikola above, they argue that young Muslims call upon a religious understanding of civic engagement as a foundation or guide to their conceptualization of citizenship. Seeing Islam as a ‘way of life’ enables young people to internalize the idea that being a Muslim

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means giving to the community. This means that instead of following the popular or public ideas of Islam being reactive, exclusive and inward-looking, as is so often portrayed in the media, their religious practices had the effect of calling young people out of their marginal status and encouraging and enabling them to make a contribution to the wider community.

Being the ‘good citizen’ These acts of citizenship do not necessarily derive from simple altruism, however. Mansouri and Mikola also found that young Muslims felt social pressure to be ‘good citizens’ (2014). For these young people, being ‘a good citizen’ entailed behaving properly and acceptably at all times that they were within the public gaze. This was especially the case for young women who wore the hijab and were therefore particularly visible to that gaze. These young people felt that since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, they faced a certain public scrutiny which meant that they represented not just themselves in public, but the wider Muslim community in Australia. Their acts of citizenship and contribution were, at least in part, motivated by the need to promote positive public notions of Islam and of Muslims as a community. This highlights, once again, the affective nature of young people’s citizenship experience: being a citizen also entails being seen to be a citizen, as well as the feelings of responsibility that attend this. Harris and Roose conclude that conceptualizations of minority Muslim youth should include ways in which ‘pietisation interlinks with the post-traditional lifestyles’ (2013: 16): thus Islam becomes an important aspect of social capital that young people can call upon to form their understanding of being an Australian citizen. They also argue for the need for more ‘normal’ or ‘everyday’ conceptualizations and representations of young Muslims within the policy and public gaze, as well as for the need to ‘shift focus away from a dichotomous model of Muslim youth as either troublemakers or leaders in regard to civic behaviour’ (Harris and Roose 2013: 16). This need is arguably even greater now than when Harris and Roose first made their statement. In the years since the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), the citizenship of young Muslims, in particular, has been the subject of evergrowing policy anxieties and of strategies to alleviate those anxieties. These strategies have been accused of perpetuating some fairly crass generalizations about Islam in general and of overlooking the potential of young Muslims to

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contribute in meaningful ways to a more socially just society (Johns, Mansouri and Lobo 2015). They also perpetuate erroneous and unhelpful generalizations about young people from minority cultures, including young recent arrivals who have become a ‘target of anxiety about national security, social cohesion and the future of culturally diverse nations’ (Harris 2013: 141). In Australia, numerous events have cemented the association within the public discourse between young Arab and/or Muslim people and anti-social or anti-democratic behaviours. The 2005 Cronulla riots, which saw a violent explosion of racially motivated mob violence stemming from tensions between young people from Sydney’s Lebanese and white populations, were among the earliest of these events. They remain seminal in shaping public and policy attitudes towards Arab and/or Muslim migrant youth. As Harris notes, they also serve as the rationale for a vast range of policies and programmes – including educational programmes – that seek to ensure such young people’s ‘appropriate engagement in civic life’ (2013: 141). What the studies we have just discussed suggest is that these policies and programmes overlook the ways in which culturally diverse young people are already acting as citizens, as well as the diversity of their experiences. Redressing this cultural blindness requires attention to how young people are expressing their citizenship, including the ‘everyday’ ways in which they do this. As Abu El-Haj and her colleagues have argued, ‘we … need to pay attention to how youth position themselves, produce cultural forms, engage in civic action, and so on’ (2011: 54). Particularly when it comes to the citizenship acts and positions of migrant or transnational young people, they have called for ‘more research that pays careful attention to how young people are engaged in everyday practices through which they interact with local, national and global forces’ (54).

Conclusion The impact of human flows has made ‘“the art of living with difference” an everyday problem’ (Bauman 2011: 36). Bauman writes that ‘unlike in the past, the reality of living in close proximity with strangers seems to be here to stay, and so it demands that skills in daily coexistence with ways of life other than our own must be worked out or acquired; a coexistence, what is more, which will prove not only bearable but mutually beneficial – not just despite, but because of the differences dividing us’ (2011: 37). In the diminution or absence of meaningful

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state-based protective measures such as cultural rights, developing these skills for coexistence becomes all the more urgent. We will return to these themes in Chapters 5 and 6, but one example is worth highlighting here. In 2013, a television journalist, Jeremy Fernandez, and his daughter were travelling on a bus when they allegedly received a tirade of racist abuse from a Caucasian woman after Fernandez commented that her daughter was poking him from the seat behind. Fernandez grew up in Malaysia before his family migrated to Australia when he was 13 years of age. He called the episode as his ‘Rosa Parks moment’, referring to the incident in the United States during 1955 when the African American Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the coloured section of a bus to a white person. This refusal became a symbolic catalyst for change that was propelled by the civil rights movement in the United States. Notably in Fernandez’s case, the bus driver failed to intervene, allegedly telling him ‘It’s your fault mate. You could have moved’ (Bryant 2013). There are some important implications here. An attitude persists in which those at the receiving end of racism are expected to manage the problem by moving to another place – perhaps to a place where they ‘fit in’. In Jeremy Fernandez’s case, this is presumably somewhere out of the way of the Caucasian responsible for the racist abuse. The issue of racism is literally and metaphorically one of exclusion, and one which must be managed by the recipient of abuse: But where is that this man and his daughter should sit? A second implication concerns the inaction of the bus driver. One of the important dimensions of this incident is the ‘bystander effect’. What is it that makes some people not intervene in these situations in which someone is experiencing racism and intolerance in the forms of violence or abuse? Mansouri and his colleagues’ 2009 study found that in schools, just over half the young people would report an experience of racism to a teacher, while less than a third would approach their school counsellor. 12 per cent would report it to police, with an even smaller number seeking the advice of a health professional. Many young people do not act in response to racism. Some find it difficult to stand up for themselves when they are unsure if those around them will assist. And those in a position to assist someone experiencing racism may be too frightened for the same reason. This is the bystander effect. Organizations such as the Australian Human Rights Commission (2016) have developed strategies to address this by targeting those present in these kinds of incidents who are neither the direct perpetrator nor the recipient of abuse. At the foundation of these strategies is a belief in the idea that in as

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much as we all have rights, such as travelling on a bus and feeling safe and secure while doing so, all citizens also have a duty to respect and protect the rights of others. These strategies represent only one type of response to racism. The cultural and attitudinal contexts in which racism takes place are complex, persistent and deeply rooted in how identity and belonging are defined and in the public imaginaries of what a ‘good citizen’ looks like. The evidence of young people’s attitudes outlined in this chapter suggests that racism is not only pervasive in the places where young people live, such as schools and local neighbourhoods, but is also related to how young people perceive and define who ‘fits’ in society and who does or should not. It also suggests that the policy climate in nations such as Australia is shifting in ways that seem likely to close down or restrict these ideas of who belongs and who does not. Bauman notes that migration is ‘an integral part of modernity’, but also argues that contemporary migration is a fluid phenomenon: ‘No longer unequivocally predetermined by the heritage of the imperial / colonial past, the pathways of migration are formed and re-formed ad hoc’ (2011: 35–7). This is to some extent evident in Australia, a country profoundly shaped by its historical legacies of migration, from its Indigenous origins through colonization to the White Australia Policy and multicultural policy of the twentieth century. In contemporary Australia, patterns of exclusion are not confined to any one group. Instead, as the research cited in this chapter suggests, the boundaries of ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ are permeable and interchangeable, and heightened and reconfigured by different mobilities. Rizvi (2012) rightly suggests that the mobility of people is complexly tied up with other mobilities of technology, information, images and capital that are interdependent and often transnationalized. We shall explore this further later in the book. While the development of contemporary Australia – and much of the world in recent history – has been profoundly shaped by globalization through the flows of people, technology, goods, services and ideas, the empirical research discussed in this chapter also provides insights into world views that are anything but global: they exhibit insular, territorial and bounded but relational delineations of who belongs and who does not. Hearkening back to the ideas which we have rehearsed in the Introduction, these world views have particular implications for young people at a time when many governments are withdrawing the kind of social and economic supports and entitlements which promote young people’s social, economic and political membership and ability to participate fully as

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citizens, both locally and beyond the nation-state. Thinking about citizenship after the so-called ‘age of entitlement’ needs to account for the complex and contradictory ways that such views and relations play out in young people’s lives. Such thinking could help us to respond to Bauman’s question of ‘not how to give the stranger a temporary residence, but how to live with strangers daily and permanently’ (1993: 399). The need to do so becomes more pronounced in light of US president Trump’s proposed border policies in relation to Mexico and Muslim migration, alongside the UK’s departure from the EU as we outlined in the Introduction to this book. Within the divisive politics of belonging that have intensified in recent years, Halse and her colleagues (2016: 4) rightly warn that Australia’s ‘common destiny is increasingly being constructed in ways that preclude the belonging of those who do not meet its social and legal prescriptions as well as its cultural mores’. Even young people, they argue, are buying into and perpetuating the construction of asylum seekers ‘as strangers who stand outside the legal and social frameworks that constitute belonging within Australia’ (Halse et al. 2016: 4). This raises difficult questions about young people’s understandings of citizenship, and of who should be entitled to that citizenship. It raises even more difficult questions about the public and political climate of nations such as Australia, with its growing wariness of those who are seen as strangers. European, UK and US readers will recognize these questions: at the time of writing, as we discussed in our Introduction, strategies to close down borders – culturally, politically and physically – are proliferating across the world. Young people, particularly those from migrant and refugee backgrounds, are not immune to these developments. They may be at the receiving end of policies and discourses that promote increasingly restrictive and homogenized images of the good or acceptable citizen. They may also be complicit in the propagation of such discourses. As Halse and her colleagues have noted, Young people in Australia are not passive actors in the politics of belonging. Rather, their attitudes, values and consequent behaviours play into how asylum seekers and the future of asylum seekers are configured and experienced. (2016: 11)

Young people in general also have an active role in shaping how difference and diversity are understood, a role that will do much to determine the degree to which other young people feel that they are not only recognized and respected as citizens, but also able to act and contribute as citizens in the ways and places that are meaningful to them and their communities.

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Perhaps, as Markus (2016) suggests, the outlook for multiculturalism is not as troubled as other parts of the world such as Europe. A national survey shows that Australians have a consistently ‘high level of agreement with the proposition that “multiculturalism has been good for Australia”: in the range 83%–86% in the 2013–2016 surveys’. A corollary of this is that while 66 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that ‘we should do more to learn about the customs and heritage of different ethnic and cultural groups in this country’, 60 per cent also agreed that ‘people who come to Australia should change their behaviour to be more like Australians’ (Markus 2016: 2). While the language of policy around multiculturalism and cultural rights are contested, we have yet to articulate another means of describing how we live with difference in Australia and similar nations today. There is some evidence that young people may be able to assist in this articulation. Harris’s conversations with young people living in some of Australia’s most culturally diverse communities suggest that new ideas of difference are being fostered which offer some hope for addressing the kind of widespread racism and the resultant feelings of exclusion that we described earlier in this chapter. She suggests that some young people are re-imagining civic life ‘as competent intercultural engagement amongst equally different social actors whose diversity is rightfully present and who are open to productive exchange and new forms of shared identities’ (Harris 2016: 371). Within this re-imagining, difference becomes not a barrier between individual citizens or groups of citizens but ‘unremarkable, positive and subject to a shared constitution and a respectful contestation of meanings’ (367). YuvalDavis suggests that ‘the politics of belonging has come to occupy the heart of the political agenda almost everywhere on the globe’ (2006: 213). A re-imagining of difference and diversity has the potential to disrupt the current politics of belonging and the tensions that they engender in relation to race, ethnicity and geography. It has the potential to be an essential ‘project of belonging’ (YuvalDavis 2006: 213). In light of the pervasive racism that we have discussed in this chapter, young people experience a kind of exclusion that impacts on their trust in society and its structures, including schools, and on their sense of security within those structures. That young Indigenous Australians, migrant youth and asylum seekers are most likely to be subject to racism illustrates the complex and, at times, contradictory cultural dynamics of a country formed in a crucible of globalized flows of people. Many young people find themselves at a nexus of physical mobility and apparently intractable forms of cultural and socio-economic exclusion of the ‘other’ from feeling belonging and at ‘home’.

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In the following chapter, we will look at another dimension of young people’s experience of citizenship and belonging when we consider the nature of their social and economic mobility as mediated by the insecure labour markets of the contemporary workforce and related global developments. We will also come back to our argument that institutional settings such as schools and workplaces are failing to provide young people with the security and belonging that are necessary for them to feel like citizens.

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Introduction In a previous discussion (Walsh and Black 2014), we highlighted the case of Aaron, the son of a Vietnamese migrant who moved to a Melbourne suburb to enable him to participate in a gifted learning programme to improve his educational outcomes and opportunities for desirable employment. Aaron’s ambition to become a corporate lawyer was tied to attaining some form of security (Pung 2013). His example is consistent with a desire for security that emerges among young people in general. It also highlights the significance of physical and social mobility for young people, and the perceived flow-on effects of education to young people’s transitions to adulthood and independence. These economic aspects of young people’s citizenship are significant because they underpin their capacities to experience and enact citizenship and belonging in an economic sense, which have flow-on effects to other domains of citizenship and life. For many young people, however, opportunities to achieve degrees of economic security have been eroded by recent developments in the global workforce. The same developments have also affected young people’s mobility in complex ways. The GFC has, for example, compelled large numbers of young people to move internationally in search of work. For some, the opportunity for social and economic mobility associated with getting an education, and therefore desirable and secure work, has been challenged by global labour market competition in which more young people with higher qualifications are competing for the same jobs. In addition, conventional notions and markers of careers and security, such as home ownership, have become replaced by greater fluidity across the life course. On the other hand, as we shall discuss below, others marginalized from opportunities to work and study are locked firmly in

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place. These changes have profound implications for young people’s experience of citizenship. Where we have previously explored the civic, political and cultural dimensions of youth citizenship, this chapter looks at economic dimensions of young people’s citizenship. It considers the ways in which large numbers of young people throughout the world are being reshaped, constrained and excluded as citizens through changing and sometimes precarious access to employment. We start by exploring the dimensions of fluidity and precarity experienced by young people as they enter (and exit) working life. We situate these within the wider context of globalization, particularly in relation to its impact on youth labour markets. The widespread influence of neoliberalism is particularly salient here as both a political exacerbation of, and response to, the challenges arising from contemporary youth transitions. As suggested in our Introduction to the book, while global in influence, neoliberalism has distinctive manifestations in different parts of the world: the Australian context is explored as one example. In the final part of the discussion, we examine some of the deeper affective and material implications of these combined economic and political phenomena in relation to youth citizenship, such as the prolongation of youth. We also explore the geographical, temporal and affective aspects of young people’s experiences of the worlds of work, and of their exclusion from them.

Youth experiences of fluidity and precarity in the contemporary globalized workforce For young people, getting a job is the first step towards attaining independence and is a key part of identity formation. As we shall see below, along with financial security, it ranks highly among the concerns of young people. It is also another way by which citizenship is first experienced: a first marker of membership and belonging. But for many young people globally, working life is characterized by fluidity, insecurity and – for growing numbers – precarity. Contemporary labour markets in advanced economies are characterized by persistent unemployment and temporary work. In developing economies, informal and subsistence jobs prevail (International Labour Organization [ILO] 2013). In both contexts, as we will discuss in greater detail below, precarity arises in relation to conditions ranging from the unavailability of work, low wage levels, lack of control over hours, and diminished employment

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protections in general (Rodgers 1989). For example, Standing (2012) describes the emergence in the UK of a precariat locked into casual, shortterm or temporary work that is relatively low paid and lacking the security and protections previously attained and held in the labour markets of the welfare-state era. A corollary of this is declining opportunities for teenagers in particular to get full-time work; a proliferation of part-time and casual positions in general; and underemployment and underutilization in which part-time work is taken involuntarily, meaning that many young people want more work but cannot get it. These effects are strongly felt by those young people who are already economically vulnerable. Certain aspects of these trends in the contemporary youth workforce are worth examining in greater detail. First, the growth and prevalence of temporary forms of employment is particularly notable among young people in Europe (Eurostat 2015), although temporary contracts are being used more widely in advanced economies in general. One estimate has suggested that more than a third of young people in wealthier countries are on temporary contracts (The Economist 2013c). Secondly, young people’s involvement in casual or part-time work is increasing within a wider proliferation of these kinds of jobs. The majority of jobs created across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in recent years have been in the form of casual work (OECD 2015a). In Australia, an estimated one in five casual workers is aged between 15 and 19 (Australian Council of Trade Unions [ACTU] 2012). Part-time work has also become more widespread globally. In Europe, the percentage of those working part-time in the overall population has grown over the last 30 years (Eurostat 2015). As suggested above, a significant proportion of part-time work is also involuntary (Walsh 2016a). The growth of this kind of work is associated with insecurity and lack of the economic, social and political entitlements which we have discussed in previous chapters and in the Introduction. In Australia, for example, a quarter of the working population receive no sick or paid leave (ACTU 2012). In other economies, in which service-based work is a major dimension of the workforce, ‘non-standard employment relationships’ have grown significantly. In Germany, for example, non-standard employment relationships in casual, contract and labour hire work arrangements have grown to 20 per cent of the total workforce (Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs [FMLSA] 2015). While the full social impacts of insecure work are still being understood (ILO 2015a), it has potentially long-term effects for young people, as we explore below.

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Thirdly, while levels of unemployment experienced by young people vary significantly across different countries, they have a tendency to be higher than those of older working populations. In the UK and Australia, for example, youth unemployment tends to be three times that of the ‘adult’ population (Furlong 2016). Australia shares with Europe similar trends. Young people become marginalized from work for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of relevant experience and skills, training opportunities and effective labour market programmes (European Commission 2011). Data published in 2016 placed the Australian rate of youth unemployment at 12.1 per cent, with more males (13.8 per cent) than females (10.5 per cent) unemployed (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2016b). Rates of unemployment differ by location, and rise as high as 28.4 per cent in regions such as outback Queensland (Brotherhood of St Laurence 2016). While the number of Australians aged 15–24 years who were unemployed as a proportion of total unemployed has been steadily declining over the last three decades (Vandenbroek 2015), a large number of these can be accounted for by increasing rates of participation in education and training (Walsh 2016a). Some young people may not be showing up in the labour market figures because they are temporarily out of the market. Although different measures of unemployment are used in Europe and the UK (Walsh 2016a), trends are notable not only for their similarity to Australia but also for their relative severity after the GFC. In the UK, youth unemployment peaked in 2011 at 21.3 per cent, before receding to 14.6 per cent in 2015. Unemployment rates in countries such as Spain continued to grow significantly after the GFC, with Spain’s peaking in 2013 at 55.5 per cent before declining to 48.3 per cent in 2015 (Eurostat 2016). In the United States, youth unemployment has also started to fall, with the number of unemployed young people decreasing from 3.4 million in 2014 to 2.8 million the following year (from 14.3 per cent in 2014 to 12.2 per cent in July 2015) (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015). These falls in youth unemployment may be encouraging, although rates remain significant, particularly in countries such as Australia that have sustained economic growth in recent decades (Walsh 2016a). Since the GFC, Australia has fared well compared to many other parts of the world; nevertheless, unemployment rates remain significant and disproportionately high for young people aged 15–24 (although there have been modest gains in recent years). Of those not in full-time education nearly 30 per cent of young people are unemployed or underemployed (Skujins and Lim 2015).

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Youth unemployment remains far more severe in developing economies. Young people deemed to be ‘inactive’ in such economies in 2013 outnumbered the overall working population by a factor of ten to one (The Economist 2013b). Persistent youth unemployment is a global issue. Youth unemployment is concentrated in certain parts of Asia. It is estimated that one-tenth of economically active youth in South Asia, for example, were unemployed in 2013. Those in work also fare poorly, ‘as employment is often taken up due to the necessity to make a living, even among the young. South Asia has one of the highest regional working poverty rates, and almost one in four workers are counted among the working poor, while working poverty rates are often higher for youth’ (ILO 2013: 13). Of the 700 million young people in the Asia-Pacific, where people aged 15–24 make up 20 per cent of the region’s workers, they also make up nearly 50 per cent of all unemployed (ILO undated). Lastly, at the extreme end of precarity are those young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). Among OECD economies, the number of those aged 16–29 in the NEET category was in 2015 estimated to be over 35 million (OECD 2015b). This number is increasing. The 2016 OECD report, ‘Investing in Youth – Australia’, highlighted that in 2015, 11.8 per cent of all 15–29-year-olds, totalling around 580,000 young people, were NEET. One in five Australians aged between 16 and 24 spent at least a year out of employment, education or training (OECD 2016). This figure was more than 100,000 persons higher than that in 2008. Nearly two-thirds of these young people were not even seeking work. This precarious status is particularly prevalent among young people who: leave school early; are female; live in remote areas (particularly Indigenous youth); and are migrants from non-English-speaking countries (OECD 2016).

The impact of globalized contemporary global labour markets on social mobility In Chapter 2, we argued that young people’s experiences of citizenship are strongly shaped by globalization, with some of its effects most visible in relation to their economic participation. In contemporary history, globalization has been closely associated with ‘the rapid integration of economies worldwide through trade, financial flows, technology spillovers, information networks and crosscultural currents’ (IMF 1997). It is also associated with international movements of young people. These range from immigrants, guest workers and refugees, to

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tourists and students, among others. Although a more complex understanding of globalization and its impact has developed over the last three decades (Walsh 2017a), these flows continue to have particular implications for the economic mobility of young people especially given global economic downturns, the effects of transnational labour market flows and competition on local youth labour markets, and technology-driven upheavals of certain labour markets (e.g. manufacturing) and ways of working. From a labour market perspective, tensions at the intersection of these aspects of globalization became particularly visible during the GFC arising in 2007–8. Kahn and colleagues (2012: 5) observe that with the global economic downturn, young people ‘enter a world of unparalleled uncertainty … with the most marginalized and vulnerable facing the greatest threat’. As with previous downturns, the GFC had a disproportionate effect on youth compared to older age groups (OECD 2010). It intensified conditions leading to precarious employment throughout the world – particularly unemployment – in the years immediately following the GFC (UNRIC 2012a,b). As the OECD (2010) found, young people bore a significant brunt of job losses during the GFC. By 2010, the OECD-average youth unemployment rate equated to 18.5 per cent of the labour force aged 15/16–24. More than three million more young people were unemployed in comparison to the same time in 2007. But as the OECD also suggested at the time, unemployment is only one dimension of ‘the full hardship for youth’, as many young people who left education and training at the time were not accounted for in workforce statistics (OECD 2010: 1). Before the GFC, unemployment for people aged 15–24 was at the lowest rate since the 1970s (OECD 2009). As with some parts of Europe, in Australia this low level of unemployment was in part due to a growth in young people choosing to undertake study or training before entering the workforce, as suggested above (Robinson and Lamb 2012). In the wake of the GFC, the number of young people looking for work increased globally by nearly three and a half million. According to one estimate, the figure grew to nearly 74 million by the end of 2014 (ILO 2015b). The long-term effects are still being felt, even though the extreme levels of unemployment experienced following the GFC in parts of Europe, such as Spain, have improved in recent years (Eurostat 2016). Economic downturns can have deep and long-term effects on young people’s transitions from school to working life and their experience of social mobility and membership. They are, as a 2012 UN World Youth Report observed at

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the time, ‘the last to be hired, and the first to be dismissed’ (UNRIC 2012a). Recessions of the 1990s were also acutely felt by young people throughout the world. This can be seen in countries such as Indonesia, Japan and Australia (Vickers 2013). Following Indonesia’s financial downturn in 1997, young people made unemployed were less likely to be in work a decade later. Those in jobs were often informal in nature (The Economist 2013b). Japan’s youth unemployment levels never fully recovered from its economic downturn of the 1990s (The Economist 2013b). Jobs were instead taken up by older members of its ageing population, whose experience of the financial crisis was to some extent buffered by its deleterious impact young people’s employment (Genda 2005; see also Cuervo, Crofts and Wyn 2013). Global markets also produce flows of people and competition for work that can negatively impact on local youth labour markets. Australia, for example, has experienced a growth in migrants seeking work such as Working Holiday Makers from Asia and Europe. These young Working Holiday Makers (the name of a type of visa) from places such as Taiwan compete with local young people for low-skilled employment, particularly those without post-school study or training looking for entry-level work (Birrell and Healy 2013a,b). This intensification of migration also has implications for the young people from overseas seeking work in Australia. For example, in 2015 there were reports of abuse by Australian employers of young workers from Asia and Europe, including underpayment of wages, personal abuse, harassment and physical assaults at work (Meldrum-Hanna, Russell and Christodoulo 2015). These flows are sometimes exacerbated by economic downturns, forcing young people to move as a consequence. Lack of opportunities to work after the GFC, for example, led to migrations of young people numbering in the tens of thousands from Spain, Greece, Romania and Poland across Europe seeking job opportunities in relatively more prosperous places such as Germany (The Economist 2013a). Job insecurity has rendered them economic nomads, forcibly dislocated from home in search of a better life. On the other hand, some young people are voluntarily geographically mobile because of the benefits of working internationally. Rizvi (2012: 198) provides the example of Hong Kong immigrants in the United States who ‘live and work in transnational spaces, taking advantage of the emerging patterns of global trade, which are shaped not only by neoliberal markets but also by ethnic solidarities across the Chinese diaspora. Hong Kong immigrants are constantly “on the move” between their homes in Hong Kong and in the United States.’ In doing

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so, they develop ‘multiple senses of belonging and citizenship’. However, as Rizvi suggests, ‘this negotiation of meaning is never straight forward, and is often accompanied by various dilemmas that young people face, which pulls them in the direction of “flexible citizenship”, on the one hand, and a desire for a clearer and more rooted form of identity, on the other.’ The effects of mobility, voluntary and otherwise, are seldom straight forward. At a global level, technological change is also impacting on the workforce. A report by The Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) suggests that 60 per cent of Australian students are being trained in areas that will be radically affected by automation (FYA 2015). Technology is driving increased demands for digital literacy, with one estimation suggesting that during the next few years more than half of the overall workforce as a whole will need to be able ‘use, configure and or build digital systems’ (FYA 2015). The same review argues that 70 per cent of young people currently entering the workforce will be affected by the automation of jobs (FYA 2015). According to another report, two-fifths of jobs in the eastern Australian state of New South Wales ‘are at high risk of being lost to computerisation and low- to middle-skilled workers across the state are expected to bear the brunt of pain brought by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things and big data’ (Dumas 2016). Global technological transformations are shifting the needs for skills or transforming labour market sectors entirely through automation. Automation is making redundant whole fields of labour, creating uncertainty as to what the future of the workforce will look like globally. The impact of technology highlights the ways in which the economic fates of young people are intertwined with the global.

Neoliberalism and its impact on young people’s work Neoliberalism is another dimension of globalization, and one that has captured the attention of governments throughout the world in recent decades. In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the kinds of responses by policymakers arising from the trends outlined above have share a predominantly neoliberal view. Neoliberal responses typically focus on individualized responses to the contemporary labour market. The classic definition of neoliberalism by Harvey is that according to this view, ‘human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms

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and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). With labour force uncertainty and change, it is argued that young people need to be flexible and adaptive to labour market change (Walsh 2016a,b). The pervasiveness of this view is significant because it promotes a particular political economy of youth that has reshaped the contours of how citizenship is lived (and denied) through labour force participation. Here are some examples of neoliberal governance. In 2010, the UK’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government explicitly sought to promote ‘strivers’, while discouraging people they labelled ‘shirkers’ and ‘scroungers’ as part of its austerity measures to address the economic downturn (Jowit 2013). Young people were the target of a raft of policy measures that implied they were among the ‘shirkers’. In 2014, as we discussed in the Introduction, the former Australian government treasurer, Joe Hockey, followed a similar pathway, announcing that Australia needed 'lifters, not leaners' (Hockey 2014). In both countries, government responses to youth employment were imbued with a deficit view of young people that was expressed through punitive proposed measures such as Work for the Dole, reductions to the social safety net and an inherently suspicious view of young people (Walsh 2016a,b; forthcoming). These measures were consistent with a neoliberal view that unless young people contribute in specific, regulated and often-impossible requirements, they could become outcasts, strangers or dangerous anti-citizens incapable of self-government (Rose 1999). Sometimes, the measures involved the threat of both. One example is the AUD$840.3 million Youth Jobs PaTH (Prepare, Trial, Hire) programme. Announced by the Australian federal government in 2016, the aim of the programme was to get 120,000 people aged 17–24 on income support into jobs. A core part of the scheme was to place as many as 30,000 young people each year in a voluntary internship programme. This would require completing six weeks of training and working 15–25 hours per week. Interns could earn an extra AUD$200 each fortnight in addition to their existing income support. Businesses providing the internships could receive an AUD$1,000 bonus, as well as a potential additional Youth Bonus wage subsidy of between AUD$6,500 and AUD$10,000. On the face of it, opportunities for young people to be exposed to working life have potential benefits, ranging from work experience, developing networks, self-confidence and skills on the job that, ideally, lead to a job at the end. However, unions were quick to criticize the proposal, arguing that it amounts to ‘unpaid labour which is actually going to be subsidised by the

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taxpayer’ (ABC 2016). An intern could, for example, be seen by an unscrupulous employer as cheap labour, with the taxpayer footing the bill for the training and incentives to the employer. On the other hand, if the internship led to successful and secure work, this could save taxpayer expense on welfare payments – as well as being beneficial to the successful intern. Nevertheless, imbued within this policy is a message to young people about the value of their labour as well as – indirectly – the value of their contribution as citizens. One commentator pointed out that when factoring in the combined payment of the programme and Newstart allowance: ‘jobseekers on these internships will be working up to 25 hours a week while earning just [AUD]$363.80. The poverty line in Australia for a single person is [AUD]$422.06 a week’ (Eltham 2016). Another challenge for Youth Jobs PaTH was to ensure that measures were in place to maximize the possibility of young people getting into secure, meaningful work – and keeping it. The exact nature of such measures was, at the time of writing, unclear. This is not an isolated policy. Following the 2014 election, the same Liberal National Party government announced that welfare recipients aged 18–29 years would be required to complete 25 hours per week of Work for the Dole as their main activity, or another approved activity for six months per year. But the evidence suggests that such mandatory programmes may have a ‘chilling effect’ that deters participants from seeking work; perhaps because they are too preoccupied by their enforced workload (Borland and Tseng 2003). The same could also possibly occur for those young people undertaking an internship. A corollary of these punitive responses is a valorization of the view that young people should be more ‘agile’ and entrepreneurial and use start-ups in response to contemporary labour conditions. The evidence suggests only a minority in fact aspire to do so in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. In Australia, only 4 per cent of Australian young people agree that they want to launch a start-up (Infosys 2016; Davey 2016). The interrelated combination of labour market uncertainty and the neoliberal view espoused by Hockey suggests an increased burden on individual young people (and, for some, their families). The steady erosion of social and educational safety nets, combined with market-driven workforce fluidity, has resulted in a generation that has to accept that it is their individual (and their family’s) responsibility to invest in education and to traverse seas of workforce insecurity (Wyn and Cuervo 2014) – even though the ‘opportunity bargain’ that study and training will lead to satisfying work might not be realized.

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In the UK, as in Australia, social policy ‘seeks to individualise responsibility for personal well-being by promoting a self-reliant, entrepreneurial citizenship that is counterposed to the expectation that the state will provide a welfare safety net to support those who lose out from persistent social inequalities’ (Brown 2011: 8). Attached to these notions is a ‘politics of aspiration’ that shifts discourses of responsibility onto young people and away from persistent and wider factors impacting on social mobility. As Roberts and Evans (2013) suggest, this politics promotes the view that ‘low aspirations’ are to blame for the reproduction of social inequality. ‘Despite enormous evidence to the contrary’, they argue, ‘the “aspirations” discourse espouses that it is low aspirations themselves which limit social mobility for working-class people, rather than multiple cultural, social and economic factors which reproduce social inequality across generations’ (72). One aspiration that predates this discourse, but which is challenged in contemporary history, is home ownership, which itself is a foundation of the kind of economic security that is a precondition for full economic and social membership and citizenship. Surveys by the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition (AYAC 2010) and The Australia Institute (2013) have shown that many young people are frustrated by their inability to enter the housing market. As we discussed in the Introduction, such frustrations are born from empirical trends. Where the average home loan was 23 per cent of the average disposable household income in 1988, by 2015 the proportion had swelled to 134 per cent (Reserve Bank of Australia, cited in FYA 2016a). Wage levels have not grown at levels to match this increase in house prices. A 2016 survey highlighted ‘that those under 35 have largely missed out on the increase in wealth households have experienced over the past 15 years’ (Jericho 2016). This is not confined to Australia, and is just one material dimension of a wider changing landscape that young people must navigate; one in which previous assumptions about stable career pathways to work and personal security are increasingly redundant. Neoliberalism thus has a demographic dimension that has profound implications for young people and their experiences of citizenship. In the UK, Howker and Malik (2010) argue that there has been an emergence of an ‘age apartheid’ characterized by demographic forms of discrimination. Stark divisions are emerging between the steady erosion of benefits enjoyed by the post–Second World War generation, such as greater job security, affordable housing, free tertiary education and a welfare safety net, and the uncertainty,

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precarity and rising costs of studying and living faced by young people in the UK today. These expressions of neoliberalism also have direct implications for the way in which they young people are constructed as citizens. They reflect a policy shift of responsibility onto individual young people. Wyn (2015: 56) rightly suggests that the focus of policy on individualized responses to broader social and economic problems ‘tends to be one-sided because it focuses on individual youth at the expense of recognising societal and economic change’. This individualization of youth policy transitions is a pathological by-product of neoliberalism, and one which has become normalized. It is this normalization that is one of the greatest challenges to young people’s economic and wider citizenship. The pervasiveness of neoliberalism seems omniscient. Sayer (2007: 263) argues that once ‘economic institutions and practices have become established … a shift takes place from the normative to the normalised or naturalised. Indeed, legitimations of the arrangements may scarcely be needed.’ This policy focus is not new, and emerged in the wake of a significant deregulation of the Australian economy in the later twentieth century (which itself followed the currents set in motion by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States). But as we suggested in the Introduction to this book, this repositioning of citizens in relation to the state and economy has its roots in the formation of Australian democracy. Deregulation of parts of the Australian economy was a pragmatic response to changing global markets and its longtime effects on economic dimensions of young people’s citizenship continue to be felt.

Geographical and temporal dimensions of workforce mobility The combined effects of neoliberalism on young people, and the associated fluidity and uncertainty of young people’s working lives, have both geographical and temporal dimensions. As Wood and Black have noted, citizenship and belonging are ‘both spatially and temporally precarious and subject to change depending on the context in which the individual finds him or herself ’ (Wood and Black 2014: 63). This context can include the geographical location in which young people live and seek to learn and work.

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Location figures prominently in the data related to youth transitions to work and post-school life in general. For example, attainment of qualifications postschool varies according to where young people live in Australia. In 2006, those living in the most disadvantaged areas had the lowest rates of attainment of post-school qualifications by age 24 (55 per cent) in contrast to the wealthiest areas where only 30 per cent had no post-school qualifications by the same age (Robinson and Lamb 2009). The type of qualification also varies according to where the young person resides. In 2006, 46 per cent of young people residing in the most socio-economically well-off areas had a university-level qualification by 24 in contrast to 14 per cent in the poorest locales (Robinson and Lamb 2009). Hence, where a young person lives is related to their experience of social mobility. Young people living in remote areas are less likely to have the networks that provide opportunities for them to connect to jobs and social mobility more widely (Tennant et al. 2005). In contrast to the voluntary mobilization of young people described by Rizvi earlier in this chapter, others are subject to structural constraints and challenges and locked into a stasis of disadvantage within their own suburbs (e.g. see Black 2007). Certain groups of young people, such as Australian Indigenous youth, are particularly affected by an intersection of socio-economic, cultural and geographical factors. Levels of Indigenous young people not in employment, education and training are disproportionately high compared to the working population as a whole. While more Indigenous young people are completing secondary schooling, there has been a persistent and significant drop in their engagement in learning or earning post-school, while the school completion rate (or equivalent) has been about half that of non-Indigenous young people in Australia (Long and North 2009) during the last decade. 2006 census data show that the proportion of Indigenous teenagers not learning or earning full-time was more than double that of non-Indigenous teenagers (Robinson and Lamb 2009). Only 38 per cent of young Indigenous adults were fully engaged in work or training, compared with 75 per cent of non-Indigenous young people in the 20–24 age group. Across Australia, the proportion of non-Indigenous youth with a degree (30 per cent) was six times higher than for Indigenous Australians. Between 2001 and 2006, the rate of Indigenous participation at university and technical and further education (TAFE) was almost unchanged despite government efforts to increase participation (Long and North 2009). While the percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders aged 17–24 participating in post-school education, training or employment increased from 32 per cent in 2002 to 40 per cent in

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the years 2012–13, the non-Indigenous rate was nearly double at 75 per cent in 2011–12 (Productivity Commission 2014). In the decade since that 2006 census data were collected, Indigenous students continue to be among those young people most at risk of not completing university (ACER 2016). In summary, gains have been favourable for the educational and economic participation of Indigenous young people, but remain low when compared to the overall youth population (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet 2015). On top of their poorer participation in education and the labour market overall, young Indigenous Australians are also less likely to be in full-time work. Participation in full-time work remained unchanged for Indigenous teenagers between 1996 and 2006, while increasing modestly for young Indigenous adults (Long and North 2009). Differences emerge within localities. The same data published in 2009 indicated that 26.7 per cent of outer regional Indigenous teenagers were unemployed, compared with 10.6 per cent of non-Indigenous outer regional youth (Long and North 2009). Overall employment outcomes for Indigenous young people have also declined since 2008 (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet 2015). One result of this is that many Indigenous young people are locked in place within intergenerational cycles of poverty. For many, marginalization is related to socio-economic context and magnified by geographical location. Rural and remote Indigenous young people are among those who face the most acute disadvantage of all Australian youth. For example, remote and rural Indigenous youth significantly experience greater disadvantage and disengagement from work and study than urban young people. Long and North (2009) outline the following trends related to geography and Indigenous youth. According to 2006 census data, only 50 per cent of remote Indigenous 15–19-year olds participated in full-time study compared to 70 per cent of non-Indigenous teenagers. Over the previous decade, participation in full-time study or full-time work increased only slightly for Indigenous people aged 20–24 in capital cities and regional areas, but not in remote areas. In addition, a greater percentage of Indigenous young people in remote areas had no postschool qualifications compared to non-Indigenous young people. While those living in regional or remote areas are more likely to experience different levels of attainment and poorer transitions post-school, the experiences of young Indigenous Australians need to be located within the context of other influential factors. In a comparison of non-Indigenous and Indigenous schools in the same remote areas, Hughes and Hughes (2010) found that discrepancies in levels of attainment were linked to the quality and extent of staffing and facilities,

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shorter school hours, lower attendance, the use of separate Indigenous curricula characterized by lower standards of learning alongside lower expectations by their local communities overall. The point here is that socio-economic and geographical factors need to be contextualized in relation to localized factors. As we shall see in coming chapters, the role of local factors in shaping young people’s experiences of citizenship is significant. From an international perspective, labour market dynamics and, in particular, forms of marginalization, differ throughout the world. The relationship between youth unemployment and location of residence is one example. In contrast to Australia, youth unemployment rates in Asia and regions of Africa are higher in urban than in rural areas (Elder et al. 2015). Broader economic trends manifest differently in the lives of young people depending on their location.

The temporal chimera of youth transitions In the longer term, changes to the labour market have meant that even those who undertake further study and training are not necessarily likely to attain desirable work. For many, attaining secure work is happening later in life. Research in Australia shows that it now takes a young person, on average, 4.7 years to find full-time employment after graduating and 2.7 years to find any work, in comparison to one year respectively in 1986 (FYA 2015). The promise of desirable work following study and training is increasingly challenged, or at the very least prolonged. For example, full-time employment outcomes for university graduates in Australia declined from 84.4 per cent in 2008 to 65.2 per cent in 2014. Similarly, there was a decrease in the full-time employment outcomes of vocational education and training graduates with Certificate III or higher qualifications, falling from 69.6 per cent in 2006 to 57.6 per cent in 2014 (Skujins and Lim 2015). Employees increasingly need higher levels of qualification, with skills shortages identified across the EU, Australia and parts of Asia. Many fields of work also require higher levels of qualifications (for example, see Foster et al. 2007). A combination of technological change, global competition for jobs and a significant increase in university educated workers has, as Brown, Lauder and Ashton (2011) powerfully argue, severed the ‘opportunity bargain’ according to which efforts to attain qualifications will lead to good, secure work. Increasing numbers of middle-class citizens find themselves locked out of workforce security

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and associated benefits such as home ownership. One consequence for young people is that the transition to financial independence is extended. For some, this transition does not take place, as they tread the waters of labour market precarity. The idea of a career as a linear or stable pathway is also challenged. The notion of a lifelong career has been replaced by more fluid life trajectories featuring multiple employment pathways (FYA 2016b). With this heightened global competition for jobs is the use of the ‘Dutch’ or reverse auction by employers to source labour. Employers advertise jobs in which candidates must demonstrate that they have higher levels of qualifications and experience but who are willing to be paid lower wages to work in highly competitive global labour markets (Brown, Lauder and Ashton 2011). Some young people question the utility of education as a means of preparing for worlds of work. Trends differ internationally as to young people’s attitudes towards the degree to which their education enables them to be work-ready. Contrast the findings of a recent study which found that while 70 per cent of respondents in Brazil and Germany agreed that that their formal education is useful for their current job, this figure was only 50 per cent in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia (Infosys 2016).

Affective dimensions and the changing nature of work as identity Participation in work, and the financial security that is attached to it, is seen to be a major source of life satisfaction by young people. The 2015 National Survey of Young Australians showed a significant rise in the number of young people who place a high value on financial security and getting employment, from 16 per cent in 2010 to 40 per cent in 2015 (Cave et al. 2015). The Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth has found that young people who are fully engaged in study or work at 19 years of age report higher levels of satisfaction with their lives overall (Robinson and Lamb 2009). This is attributable to factors such as having a pathway, a sense of where they are going and enjoying the personal and social benefits of financial security. These benefits are important to belonging. That young people’s lives are characterized by fluidity in working life is associated with their social relations in general (Bauman 2000; Walsh 2016a). Sociologists such as Jay (2010: 97) have highlighted the pervasiveness of

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short-term planning and ephemeral relationships. As Bauman has observed, work is no longer a secure basis from which ‘self-definitions, identities and lifeprojects’ can be constructed (Bauman 2000: 139). Resultant feelings of insecurity are a by-product of neoliberal notions of flexible work promoting imagined benefits of personal autonomy and choice in contemporary labour markets, and which have created challenges, or at best added complexity, to the navigation of them. We have argued elsewhere that a desire for unfettered economic growth and the uncertainty accompanying it has eroded the stable foundations (such financial security and career trajectories) needed by young people to plan life projects, such as starting a family or other planning for future life. Defining the self according to one’s occupation is no longer fixed and increasingly redundant (Black and Walsh 2014). Young people will change careers more often than their parents (FYA 2015). Balancing work and life has become more challenging for many young people. One longitudinal study of Australian youth has further illustrated how some young people working in sectors such as hospitality and retail (major employers of young people in Australia) experience challenges in developing close and stable relationships because they are employed for irregular hours – often late at night (Woodman 2012a). For many, the routine of a working week has been replaced by greater fluidity in the workforce: when young people work is less important to some than having consistent, foreseeable and stable hours. Woodman’s research suggests that while young people care about the future, planning has a ‘relatively present-centred orientation to the future’ (2011: 124). With uncertainty and instability, life choices like buying a home are deferred, for example, because they do not have the income record to secure a loan. The fluidity and unpredictability of working life can affect social relations because of this focus on the short-term (Woodman 2012b). Young people rate this fluidity and resultant inability to plan as among their greatest challenges – even above career success (Woodman 2012a). Globally, the affective impacts of labour market fluidity are varied. The negative impact of unemployment on young people’s mental health and well-being is widely documented – ranging from depression, isolation and financial insecurity, among others (Hillman and McMillan 2005). Persistent unemployment, for example, has resulted in disillusionment and a loss of hope among some young people in their job futures (UNRIC 2012a; ILO 2013). The material effects of precarity can also be substantial. For those experiencing marginalization from work, such as Indigenous Australians, interrelated rates of

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low levels of educational attainment, unemployment, poor wellbeing, racism and a historical legacy of dispossession perpetuate inequity, poverty and alienation. In contrast with non-Indigenous Australians, a substantial proportion of Indigenous populations live in conditions that meet the UN definition of absolute poverty: a severe deprivation of basic human needs and rights, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information (Carson et al. 2007). Neoliberal responses have been seen to aggravate these conditions. Bottrell (2013) argues that ‘Indigenous people, people of colour, the poor and workingclass carry the burden of historical inequalities that have been exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies driving the new institutional framework of individualised resilience and responsibility’. Workforce uncertainty and neoliberal responses have a warping effect on young people’s abilities as citizens to influence their long-term futures. Temporary work, for example, makes it difficult to develop skills and experience (The Economist 2013b). In addition, provision of opportunities for those in work or study and training by employers are also declining in some parts of the world. In the United States, for example, it is argued that there is significantly less investment by employers in staff compared to four decades ago (Cappelli 2012). Staff are made redundant rather than retrained. Becoming a citizen in an economic sense is diminished in this churn. It is responsibilized in individual young people who are at the same term caught in fluid and often precarious tides of contemporary employment.

Conclusion Gifford, Mycock and Murakami (2014) and Martelli (2013) observe that late modernity, together with demographic shifts, has created a distinct environment that both melds and creates tensions between past structural aspects of citizenship with the present realities experienced by young people. They suggest that due to demographic shifts, such as ageing populations described in the Introduction to this book, globalization, technology and less surety concerning life courses and careers, ideas about what citizenship is or should be, are being fundamentally challenged. The transition from school to work is very much about ‘becoming’ what is seen to be an ‘adult’ citizen, but with the markers of that transition becoming more fluid by contemporary labour markets, the wider experience of citizenship is called into question.

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Gifford and his colleagues suggest that citizenship for young people is now less about ‘being’ and more about ‘becoming’: ‘A citizenship of becoming shifts the focus away from how young people are to be integrated into a territoriallybased society to how they are actively creating new sources of belonging and recognition in response to globalised experiences and events’ (Gifford, Mycock and Murakami 2014: 93). They are talking about the emergence of new politics among young people, which we will explore (and challenge) in the next chapter. In this discussion, we are also suggesting that the basic experience of becoming is warped by a combination of economic factors and neoliberal governance. These economic and political factors impact upon participation in work as a basis for the realization of citizenship, including the civic dimensions discussed in Chapter 1. We recognize that the relationship between socio-economic status and civic participation is debated (Mahatmya and Lohman 2012; Manganelli, Lucidi and Alivernini 2014). Lorenzini and Guigni (2012), for example, have studied the relationships between employment status, social capital and the political participation of young people by comparing the civic and political engagement of long-term unemployed and regularly employed youth. They found that levels of social capital did not significantly affect the participation rates of unemployed youth compared to their employed peers, with the exception of consumer politics. But as Martelli (2013) argues, socio-economic variables continue to flavour the extent and nature of participation. Martelli’s work suggests a better understanding is needed of the persistent relevance of socioeconomic variables, the intergenerational dimensions of citizenship and how youth participation is framed and who is doing this framing. In Chapter 1, we examined the problematic nature of conventional adult notions of volunteering as a basis of participation. In the following chapter, we will explore how this framing of active citizenship excludes emerging forms of participation. For this discussion, the trends and phenomena described in relation to young people’s economic mobility and stasis suggest a key question: if the opportunity bargain of study and training as a means of acquiring ‘better’ work is challenged, what is it that young people will become? As the markers of adulthood, such as financial independence, become chimeras, what are the implications for youth citizenship after the age of entitlement? For young people, precarity, mobility and stasis are experienced in complex and sometimes troubled ways. Through both long-term changes to the labour market and more recent instability such as the GFC, globalization has compelled tens of thousands of young people to become mobile in search of work. They

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are joining refugees, asylum seekers and forced migrants in search of security with uncertain prospects. As we have seen in this chapter, other young people are locked into geographical immobility and stasis with limited resources, social and economic connections and possibilities for work. In a very visible way, these young people are socio-economic refugees. Nevertheless, the local is enmeshed in the global. The complex forms and dynamics of mobility described throughout this chapter affirm the tendency of globalization to divide ‘as much as it unites’ (Bauman 1998b: 2). For Bauman, mobility divides people into the globalized and localized, with some inhabiting the globe while others are ‘chained to place’ (1998a: 45). This and other tensions between local and global experiences of citizenship will now be explored in the second half of this book.

4

Self-Made Citizenship

Introduction We began this book by noting the continuing impact of neoliberalism on our imaginaries and understandings of citizenship in general, and on the construction and experience of young people’s citizenship in particular. We also stated our intention to mount a critique of neoliberalism that both recognizes its effects on young people’s lives and challenges its apparent omnipotence throughout much of the world. As in so many other areas of contemporary life and policy, this seeming omnipotence has rendered neoliberal ideas, expectations and impositions almost invisible within the policy and public discourse, including those areas of policy – such as education – which sets out the expectations that attend young people’s citizenship and, in so doing, serve to restrict young people to certain forms and conceptualizations of what it means to be a citizen. As Keddie has noted, ‘neoliberal discourses have become naturalised and taken-for-granted in what counts as being a good student and a good citizen’ (2016: 108). Neoliberalism is also bound up with those conventional forms and institutions of democratic governance – such as the imagined communities of government as an ‘old boys’ network’ – and with old ways of being a citizen that are increasingly being ignored, challenged and rejected by many young people. This is particularly pronounced in the Australian context. As we discussed in Chapter 1, much attention has been focused on the perception that young people’s participation in formal democratic institutions is declining, with policy and media discourses portraying young people as civically and politically alienated and apathetic. Our own research (Walsh and Black 2011; 2018) suggests that these deficit discourses of young people’s citizenship are often at odds with how many young people see themselves. It suggests that there is a vibrant substratum of young people who are enacting

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citizenship in their own ways. These are often individualized and localized ways of making change, such as through the social enterprises, which are the main focus of this chapter. These ways do not yet register on political radars and measures, perhaps because they challenge conventional ideas, institutions and sites of citizenship. Young people are also seeking new forms of recognition and participation as citizens, often assisted by information and communication technologies which are creating new agoras for public discussion, characterized by ‘new civic virtues that privilege immanent, selfdetermined and multiple sites of engagement’ (Gifford, Mycock and Murakami 2014: 95). This is part of what has been described as a shift from ‘palace democracy’ to ‘street democracy’ (Gifford, Mycock and Murakami 2014), a shift that is rewriting the accepted norms of citizenship and changing young people’s citizenship practices and acts. For the first half of this book, we have examined the civic, political, cultural and economic dimensions of young people’s lives and experiences of citizenship. Notions of membership, belonging and mobility have been critically interrogated as a basis for rethinking youth citizenship beyond the economic, legal, political and social roles and responsibilities that are traditionally associated with citizenship. Throughout the next half of this book, we will be exploring how young people, educators and policymakers are responding to the challenges arising from this need to rethink young people’s citizenship, drawing on stories and insights provided by young people themselves. In this chapter, we briefly revisit the broader reorientation of young people away from conventional politics discussed in Chapter 1. We then draw on our discussions with a group of young people to explore the changing landscape of young people’s attitudes to contemporary politics and influence, and the new ways in which they are seeking to shape their worlds. The voices of a second group of young people will also be used in Chapter 5 to help illustrate and challenge conceptions of youth citizenship in the more specific context of the local community.

Talking to young people of influence in Australia During the last four years, we and our colleagues have conducted focus groups with a range of young people as part of a research programme into how and where young people seek to influence their worlds. During this research, we

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developed a methodology to understand young people’s attitudes to politics and change-making, including the extent to which diverse groups of young people: believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the barriers to this influence; and what they see would enable them to have greater influence. We held a series of focus group discussions with three groups of young people who were already in some way recognized as having influence: a group of young social entrepreneurs; a group of young community leaders; and a group of Indigenous young people undertaking a leadership programme (Walsh et al. 2016). The first focus group, on which we focus of this chapter, was held in 2013 and involved 18 young social entrepreneurs from around Australia. Aged from 18 to 29, they were almost evenly divided by gender. These young women and men were commencing a 12-month program, Young Social Pioneers, which is conducted by the FYA, a national not-for-profit organization seeking to improve the life opportunities of young Australians. The Young Social Pioneers programme seeks to build the capacity of young people to bring about change through start-up-style social enterprise projects aiming to make an impact on areas such as education, health, the environment, the arts, human rights and technological innovation across local, regional and global contexts (FYA 2016c; Walsh and Owen 2015). Each year, a cohort of young people is recruited through a competitive application process to take part in a series of group activities to incubate their own advocacy, community organizing or business initiatives (FYA 2016c). The programme provides young people with mentoring, peer learning, skills development, leadership inquiry and international connections in order to empower them to improve the social impact of their enterprises and initiatives. The second set of focus groups, also held in 2013, involved five young people participating in a local government civic leadership programme, the City of Casey’s Youth Action Committee (City of Casey 2015a,b). These young people were all located within a peri-urban municipality on the edges of Melbourne, a large Australian capital city, and were keen to represent and advocate for the high number of young people within their municipality. This was especially the case when it came to issues of youth mental health, a prominent issue in the area. We will explore their insights in more detail in Chapter 5. A third group comprised 58 Indigenous young people aged 14–17 participating in the Richmond Emerging Aboriginal Leadership (REAL)

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Program, which recruits young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with the aim of developing their confidence, self-belief and leadership, as well as encouraging them to become actively involved in their local and broader communities (Walsh et al. 2016). A series of focus groups conducted between April and June of 2016 were held in two Australian regional towns as well as locations in Melbourne. We shall briefly return to this group in Chapter 5 as well. During the focus groups, we and our colleagues conducted a number of exercises to explore these young people’s existing understandings of power, influence and citizenship. In each instance, we started by asking them to identify the social issues that mattered to them, drawing on Mission Australia’s proposed list of issues of concern. This list is issued each year through Mission Australia’s annual online youth survey, which encourages young Australians aged 15–19 to respond to key issues that Australia faces as well as those that are of direct concern to them. In 2012, when we commenced this research, these included alcohol and drugs; bullying, crime, safety and violence; the economy and financial matters; education and employment; the environment; equity and discrimination; young people’s physical and mental health, homelessness and housing; and the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people (Mission Australia 2012). Participants were also invited to add their own issues to this list. They were then asked to think about their experience as a young person of influence, and to locate themselves within a spectrum of influence which included local, national and global spheres. In the next exercise, we asked young people to describe the enablers and barriers that they felt affected their capacity to influence and shape their worlds as citizens. Drawing on a framework developed by James Arvanitakis (Arvanitakis and Sidoti 2011), they were asked to locate themselves within four possible combinations of influence: Engaged, meaning interested and keen to be involved; Disengaged, suggesting a lack of interest in any particular issue; Empowered, denoting a feeling of being able to participate, influence and make change as a citizen; or Disempowered, suggesting a lack of agency. Figure 1 (constructed from Arvanitakis and Sidoti 2011: 15) was displayed on posters at each venue. Participants wrote their name on post-it notes and stuck them on the posters to indicate where they saw themselves.

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Figure 1 Citizenship Framework, Arvanitakis and Sidoti 2011

Defining a social enterprise We would now like to talk about our discussions with our first group of young people: the Young Social Pioneers. In recent decades, a wider and complex reconfiguration of the relationship of government, private corporations and civil society has led to different forms of engagement by young people in change-making. This reflects a larger wave of activity that seeks entrepreneurial responses to contemporary social, economic and political challenges. Defined as a viable business with a social agenda, a social enterprise seeks to target what are seen to be unmet areas of social need. It pursues a social or political purpose while also undertaking commercial activities to sustain its operations, such as the sale of products and/or services (Battilana et al. 2015). A social enterprise typically features: (a) a social purpose that prevails over the aim of delivering profit to shareholders; (b) an organizational culture, structure, management, processes, and resources that are less centralized than those of strictly commercial enterprises; (c) imperatives to collaboratively prevail over market competition; and (d) greater complexity in the involvement and interests of stakeholders/customers. (Crawford-Spencer and Cantatore 2016: 48)

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The growth of social enterprises reflects a breaking down of the traditional barriers between the public, private and not-for-profit sectors or, at the very least, a conscious attempt to work interstitially through and between them. Social entrepreneurs reject the idea that the types of approaches adopted by governments and corporations are exclusively best at determining the most effective allocation of resources to meet social issues (Kernot 2011). Instead, they typically seek to work in between the spaces occupied by these sectors, drawing from their various resources and approaches. As Battilana et al. (2015: 1658) point out, Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of organizations that operate at the intersection of the not-for-profit, governmental and commercial sectors. These organizations … primarily pursue a social mission while also engaging in commercial activities to sustain their operations through sales of products and/or services.

Definitions of what constitutes a social enterprise differ. While some are relatively simple, others include a long list of criteria. For instance, the European research group EMES lists nine economic and social criteria including ‘autonomy, continuous economic trading of goods or services, having paid employees, having an explicit aim of community benefit, governance decision making not based on capital ownership, and limited distribution of surplus profits’ (EMES 2001). Other criteria sometimes used include ‘holding assets for community benefit, reinvesting profits for the social aim, encouraging local mutual co-operation and providing innovative solutions for local social needs’ (Bridge 2015: 1014). Social enterprises use business tools to produce dividends that are in turn reinvested back into the enterprise (Kernot 2011). Hence, they may be profit seeking, but are not driven by profit maximization (Saunders 2010). Social enterprises are typically hybrid in nature. The young social entrepreneurs whose work we describe below, for example, do not limit themselves to the practices commonly associated with the not-for-profit sector. Instead, they utilize a range of strategies, tools, resources, networks and approaches, borrowing freely from the corporate sector, to expedite the delivery of their programmes or initiatives. This hybridity also makes social enterprises challenging to categorize. For example, one question arising in relation to the definition of a social enterprise is how they differ from charities. As Battilana and Lee (2014: 399) observe, social enterprises are ‘emblematic of economywide increases in activity at the interface between business and charity, as corporations increasingly engage in social responsibility-related activities, and

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non-profits increasingly engage in commercial activities to complement their primary, philanthropic sources of funding’. Perhaps it is because of this combination of slipperiness of definition, hybridity and the relative newness of social enterprises, that there has been no comprehensive assessment of the rise of youth-led social enterprises in Australia. One study published in 2016 estimated that the second most frequent beneficiary of the estimated 20,000 social enterprises in Australia was young people (33.3 per cent of beneficiaries); however, the proportion of those actually led by young people was not identified (Barraket, Mason and Blain 2016). There is also no official or formal recognition of the nature, scope and scale of social enterprises in Australia by standard measurements of citizenship participation, although the new definition of what constitutes volunteering by Volunteering Australia (2016) outlined in Chapter 1 may provide scope for this if the definition is to be fully adopted by the ABS.

The politics of choice and the emergence of the self-made citizen For our first focus group, we gathered with the Young Social Pioneers in an open brick work-space in the Henley Club, a private social club situated above a narrow laneway café in the central business district of Melbourne. The timing of the focus group was unintentionally portentous: it took place a week before the 2013 Australian federal election. But in contrast to the formal electoral rite of citizenship, these social entrepreneurs were seeking new ways of influence beyond conventional institutions and processes such as voting. Their small ‘p’ politics – though highly engaged and active – was removed from the clamour of the electoral campaign and the big ‘P’ political jousting of political parties. As we explained earlier, each of these Young Social Pioneers was involved in establishing and running social enterprises to address diverse needs. One project, for example, researched and funded renewable energy initiatives via an international network seeking to provide electricity to socially and economically deprived communities. Another Pioneer led a not-for-profit agency supporting the funding and connecting of other social enterprises. Others had developed programmes and initiatives designed to promote and address such issues as youth mental health, homelessness and the greater inclusion of people with disabilities.

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What united these young people was the ‘do it yourself ’ or DIY attitude that drove them to explore unconventional forms of change-making. Their motivations and experiences provide some insight into wider trends and attitudes among young people, including a shift towards issue-based politics which sees young people crafting new forms of self-made citizenship. This shift needs to be understood within the ambivalence of young people towards conventional expressions of citizenship that we described in Chapter 1. This ambivalence includes a shift away from political parties as the main avenue for representation towards informal, issue-based politics through which young people perceive that they might be able to exert greater influence (Martin 2012). This ‘politics of choice’ has emerged as a key area of young people’s political and civic interests, expression and participation (Vromen and Collin 2010). This shift is not entirely new. Over a decade ago, Norris noted differences in the forms of political action taken by young people in contrast to older generations. Where political action was conventionally rooted in citizenoriented repertoires, such as voting and party activity or in association with traditional voluntary associations such as political parties, unions and churches, Norris observed the emergence of cause-oriented repertoires, such as petitions and ethical consumption via agencies such as new social movements (Norris 2003). This shift has seen more than just a change in political action, however, it has seen the development of a new concept of citizenship, one that resonates strongly with young people’s citizenship choices. John Hartley was the first to characterize this as DIY citizenship. As he argues, ‘DIY citizenship is a choice people can make for themselves’ (1999: 178). Recent years have seen plenty of scholarly interest in young people’s self-made or DIY citizenship. As Sidoti observes, young people exhibit a ‘tendency to shop around for what best fits their values and concerns is reflected in the volatility of their voting intentions’ (Sidoti 2011; see also Brooker 2011; 2013). As we discussed in Chapter 1, many are doing more than this: they are stepping away from formal political spheres altogether, absenting themselves from the electoral process and, in its place, ‘creating forms of solidarity, community and belonging and generating new kinds of social capital and civic involvement, particularly through youth cultural production and consumption, civic networks in everyday spaces, and work on the self ’ (Harris and Roose 2013: 2). DIY citizenship is often associated with democratic innovation. As Harris and Roose note, ‘this emergent citizen-type’ is associated with ‘new kinds of definitions, styles and practices of civic engagement’ (2013: 8). It would, however, be a mistake to see DIY or self-made citizenship as something that

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stands entirely outside mainstream political processes and structures. Like the youth-led social enterprises we discuss in this chapter, DIY citizenship is quintessentially interstitial. Ratto and Boler explain this as follows: ‘DIY citizenship … sits at the intersection of a series of tensions: between consumers and citizens, between experts and novices, between individuals and communities, and between politics as performed by governments and politics and DIY grassroots democracy’ (2014: 5).

Networking the self-made citizen Another integral feature of the DIY citizenship landscape in which social enterprises operate is the use of technology. This is something that was very evident in our discussions with the Young Social Pioneers. As with the vast majority of young people in Australia, the Pioneers were technologically connected. During our discussion with them, portable laptops and handheld electronic communication devices were scattered throughout the room at the Henley Club as key tools of their work. A portable digital projector was also used to present their work on a makeshift screen. In an interesting twist, this projector was perched on a stack of encyclopaedias that had come with the space. The encyclopaedias may have been left over from a time when the room had been used as a printing press. They reflected the old world of influence and knowledge: a linear, static and hard-bound world. By contrast, the tools now used by young change-makers are digital: flexible, fluid and self-made. This association between DIY citizenship and electronic and social media is a long-standing one that reflects the essential nature of this citizenship mode. As Hartley notes, DIY citizenship is, above all, ‘emergent, bottom-up, selforganising, ephemeral and reliant upon technological platforms’, and DIY actors and activists were ‘early adopters’ of the internet and its related technologies (2010: 240). These technologies have enabled citizens to take a stronger role within the conventional political process, as Australian social commentator Michael Short has observed: The decline of political parties has coincided with a technology-driven augmentation of citizens’ ability to be heard in the policy debate. This buttresses the argument for being a swinging voter; individuals can be more involved in pushing for change and can align with candidates or parties closest to their preferred position on a touchstone issue. (2013)

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Technology has also allowed young people to move in and out of the conventional political process. Through technology, young people feel as though they can engage, disengage and then re-engage freely from that process: the unstructured nature of the internet and social media supports this, while enabling them to freely participate with each other and others beyond the Henley space. They can achieve a number of goals simultaneously, identifying and exploring new causes, and taking action on issues of importance to them, generating networks of people and resources (Collin 2008a). Online and networked media provide young people with spaces to experiment with new ideas about their citizenship and to formulate their identities as citizens (Third and Strider 2011). These networks, as we suggest in the next chapter, are characterized by fluid boundaries and disruptions to how citizenship is conventionally experienced. Cyberspace, it has been argued, provides a ‘locus for the contestation of claims about citizenship’ (Coleman 2008: 202; Third and Collin 2016). One of these contestations arises in relation to the ways that technology can disrupt the conventional framings of citizenship that we introduced in our Introduction, framings that are often grounded in the nation-state, through their capacity to activate and draw from ‘networked publics’ (boyd 2014). In other research that we have conducted for the Young People, Technology and Wellbeing Research Facility (Third et al. forthcoming),1 some young participants described being able to move fluidly through these publics in ways that were not necessarily tethered to specific jurisdictions or geographical boundaries. These young people’s stories also suggest an understanding of citizenship that frames it in terms of online acts or practices, practices that enable new forms of influence (Third et al. forthcoming). Online and networked media enable young people to craft the kinds of ‘bottom-up, self-organized, self-representing’ acts of citizenship (Hartley 2010: 244), whether individually or with others, that promise them the ability to produce social and political change in relation to issues that affect them or that engage their concern. Where the environment of formal politics is seen by many young people as a controlled or ‘managed’ one (Bennett 2008: 2, original

1

For this ethnographic study, data were collected between 2011 and 2014 involving interviews and focus groups with 68 children and young people in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria, as well as a ‘future histories’ approach based on a biographical narrative methodology (Wengraf 2001), which was used to ask 16–18-year-olds to imagine how technology will affect them in the future.

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emphasis), the online environment is seen as a democratic one in which young people themselves are the authors and makers of their own political engagement and contribution. It allows young people to define and create their own acts of citizenship outside the constraints and the imaginaries of youth that characterize formal and institutional sites. In this way, online technologies mirror the trend that we have noted in Chapter 1 and above, a trend that Collin and Walsh (2016) capture here: Rather than asking why young people are not enrolling to vote, we should be asking what young people do care about and what forms of participation they engage in, and use this to inform changes in political cultures and institutions. Young people are often more interested in direct, everyday, individualised and networked forms of participation. Their everyday participatory practices (such as boycotts and sharing political content via social media), interest-based activities (such as contributing to youth mental health service design or starting their own online petition or campaign), and creative and media practices (joining a flashmob, producing a mash-up or a Tumblr account) are often framed as ‘taking action’ on issues they care about.

For the Young Social Pioneers, this creation of civic and political networks and change initiatives online came naturally, as one explained: We’re sort of the online generation. We’ll go online to be able to create change. We won’t sort of go out into the community and collect signatures. We’ll gather communities online because that’s what we know, what we’ve been brought up to do. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

As one Australian journalist notes, this use of online tools and fora may give young people a ‘broader repertoire’ of political and civic engagement (O’Neill 2014). Summarizing a number of studies of young people’s online activism, she notes that It all depends on how political engagement is defined. If traditional actions like joining political parties or streets protests or writing a letter to a member of Parliament are the only criterion, then young people are more disengaged than ever. But if online activities – such as joining advocacy groups, or engaging with campaigns or issues by sharing or commenting on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – are also measured, then youth political engagement soars.

Young people’s online activity has also been identified as a precursor to their greater political involvement. Data gathered in the United States between 2011 and 2015 from the Youth Participatory Politics Survey suggest that young people

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who are active online in non-political ways tend to become more politically active with time. It also suggests that young people who take part in online political discussions are more likely to engage in participatory politics online, such as circulating political views, posting a status update about politics, or commenting on political content or events. Both of these trends are more prevalent among young people who already have large online social networks and friendship groups. In other words, as Bowyer and Kahne note, Online communities aren’t the problem. In fact, they might be part of the solution. Online communities appear to provide pathways into political engagement. (2016)

Political parties are not, of course, oblivious to this trend. Barack Obama’s 2008 electoral campaign – the so-called Facebook election – became almost instantly famous for its extensive use of social media to engage the voting public. Obama’s campaign used a range of social media, including podcasting, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and, of course, Facebook. His ‘techno-demographic appeal’ (Dutta and Fraser 2008) had particular resonance among young Americans: exit polls showed that Obama won nearly 70 per cent of the vote of Americans under the age of 25, a record unmatched by any previous campaign since exit polling began. A turning point in the use of new media also took place in Australian politics during the 2007 election, albeit a more modest one. The use of the internet in electoral campaigning by ALP candidate Kevin Rudd in the so-called ‘Kevin 07’ campaign was more visible in party and individual candidate campaign strategies; nevertheless, the degree of political engagement with online channels was overshadowed by the then dominance of mainstream mass media channels (Chen and Walsh 2010). There continues to be concern that this ‘governance by social media’ will ‘substitut[e] hashtag activism for serious policymaking’ (Eilperin 2015)  – a concern that may be well-grounded – but the trend for politicians and political candidates to seek to engage young and other constituents through social media would also seem to be entrenched. In the United States, Donald Trump’s extensive use of Twitter has seen him referred to as the ‘Commander-In-Tweet’ (Keith 2016). Whether this particular example represents the engagement of the population in the political process or just their engagement in the personally broadcast progress of one politician remains to be seen, but the association between the political process and online communication appears enduring. In Australia, online tools such as Vote Compass have been successful in attracting and engaging young people in discussion about their political values

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and the extent to which these are reflected by party policies. Inspired by a similar tool developed for the 2011 Canadian federal election campaign, Vote Compass has been developed to promote democratic engagement during Australian campaigns. During the 2013 federal election, more than 1.3 million people logged onto the site and completed a brief survey designed to analyse how their views compared to the positions of the parties seeking election. The majority of these were young people (Martin 2014).

How young change-makers perceive and navigate contemporary politics It is from this overall context that a complex and shifting dynamic between young people and their perceptions and experiences of power and citizenship participation appears to be emerging. The Pioneers certainly expressed a feeling of distance from elected representatives that resonated with our discussion in Chapter 1 about the declining membership of Australia’s major political parties, along with other representative organizations such as trade unions. One Pioneer was also concerned about the paucity of diversity among Australian political representatives. Despite significant advances in the public and media presence of women, Indigenous people and those in same-sex relationships, political representatives, he argued, continued to be largely middle-aged white men. This lack of diversity was seen to potentially inhibit the capacity of elected representatives to appreciate, empathize with and respond to key areas of concern among their constituencies. Another part of this shift away from conventional agencies is a move away from established ideological bases. One sentiment expressed by 28-yearold Brazilian protester, Maria Vidal, illustrates this shift. During 2013, protests erupted across Brazil in response to a raft of concerns, ranging from the rising cost of public transport to the (excessive) financing of a major sporting event. Describing the protests, Vidal captured the views of many young Brazilians: This is a social movement, not a political movement. This has nothing to do with ideology. … We don’t want parties in the demonstration. (AFP 2013)

Observing the waves of youth protest elsewhere throughout the world during the last several years, UK journalist Paul Mason notes this same widespread eschewal of political ideologies. Rather than tying themselves to any one political

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stance of party, young people are increasingly seeking to ‘mix and match’ the issues that concern them and the ways that they participate and respond to those issues. This may be in part a function of the fact that many young people are increasingly well educated. They have greater access to knowledge and a better understanding of how power operates. Mason’s analysis is helpful here: Young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various ‘revolutions’ in their own lives as part of an ‘exodus’ from oppression, not – as previous generations did – as a ‘diversion into the personal’. (2011)

This ‘mix and match’ approach to political engagement and action was reflected in our focus group with the Young Social Pioneers. During a discussion about the current state of Australian politics, one Pioneer asked: ‘What is left and right?’ This was not asked rhetorically, but rather reflected a view of change-making and citizenship engagement that is divorced from conventional political ideologies. The Pioneers then discussed the pragmatism of political representatives. The integrity of politicians was called into question, specifically their propensity to ‘flip-flop’ on issues. The integrity of political parties and representatives is a major concern among many young people. As cited in Chapter 1, a survey around the time of our focus group found that young people in Australia rated trust as the single most important factor influencing their vote in the 2013 federal election (The Australia Institute 2013). Again, this is not a new theme. The perception that political leaders are dishonest and untrustworthy has been identified as a factor in discouraging young people’s participation for more than a decade (Print, Saha and Edwards 2004). Young people’s lack of trust in formal political institutions echoes that of the wider Australian population. In Chapter 1, we noted a 2012 Essential Media report that found public trust in government to be in decline (Alcorn 2014), as well as another survey published a year later that also found an erosion of public trust in government (Markus 2013). In 2009, 48 per cent of those surveyed thought that government could be trusted ‘almost always’ or ‘most of the time’, but by 2013 this percentage had declined to 27 per cent. When asked ‘can people be trusted?’, the federal parliament and political parties were ranked among the least trustworthy (Markus 2013). During our conversations with the Young Social Pioneers, many also expressed a frustration with the sluggishness of government in responding to key issues of concern, such as the environment, education, human rights and

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health.  Social  enterprises were seen to be a more dynamic, responsive and efficient way of addressing these issues (Walsh and Owen 2015). At the same time, this desire to drive a shift in power away from conventional politics goes beyond concerns about government and other actors such as powerful corporations: it speaks to the growing global view that the large institutions and established power processes of the past need to give way to new modes of change. For the Young Social Pioneers, these new modes were clearly more inclusive, more democratic and more grassroots, as one Pioneer observed: We’re ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard. There’s a collective movement happening … there’s going to be a shift of power from big business not really being able to manipulate the economy anymore. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

The jury is out, however, as to whether this reflects the views of wider groups of young people. In the wake of the 2016 American election, the lead-up to the 2017 French election and the growth of populist parties, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Australia and Nigel Farage’s Independence Party in the UK, there are real concerns that young people’s political tastes are tipping towards far more centralized and dictatorial modes than have previously been associated with young people en masse. A recent study by academics at the University of Melbourne  and Harvard University warns that young people globally ‘are increasingly rejecting democratic institutions and becoming drawn towards authoritarianism’ (O’Malley 2016). The study found that while 72 per cent of older Americans still believe that democracy is an essential system, this is true of only 30 per cent of young people. With similar patterns emerging in Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, the UK and Europe, it is rapidly becoming difficult to assess or predict the kind of governments that may win young people’s future vote, or what the place may be of independent youth change-making strategies such as the social enterprises we discuss in this chapter.

Barriers to young social entrepreneurs’ change-making in Australia In the meantime, as with the youth volunteering which we discussed in Chapter 1, there are a number of barriers to young people’s emerging engagement in the DIY or self-made citizenship practices of social enterprise. Some of these barriers are practical: many of the young entrepreneurs that we have encountered describe the challenges of operating in isolation without supportive networks,

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mentoring or opportunities for peer-to-peer learning (Walsh and Black 2011; Berman and Mellon 2012). They often lack the skills and knowledge to be able to implement and scale their work in a sustainable way. Another barrier to the growth of youth social enterprise is more symbolic. As with volunteering, both the public and policy recognition of youth social enterprise are delimited and restricted by adult discourses and understandings of how young people define (or do not define) the political. During earlier research into young social entrepreneurs in Australia, we found a related and striking feature of how some young people characterized their participation. Jack, for example, started a social enterprise in response to homophobia in a regional area of Victoria in Australia. Though driven by a sense of social justice, Jack did not consider his entrepreneurial work to be ‘political’ in nature, despite the fact that his enterprise was seeking to shift exclusionary forms power based on gender identity and sexual orientation (Walsh and Black 2011). A related barrier to youth social enterprise also relates to the nature of the adult gaze. The type of language that is used by conventional institutions and politicians to describe youth change-making and young people in general (such as by the Australian Electoral Commission and Lindsay Tanner in Chapter 1) often features a deficit tone. For example, in describing a perceived (but unfounded) decline in protest by young people, one commentator laments that she is: ‘not sure why Australia has been burdened with such a mind-numbing, spirit-crushingly boring generation of young people … All I know is that there is nothing more tragic than a generation without spirit’ (Simmonds 2013). Her critique, though familiar, does not do justice to young people like the Young Social Pioneers who are actively seeking to make change. It further insults young people by reducing them to stereotypes. Statements such as this also highlight the inescapably relational and affective dimensions of young people’s citizenship experience. Brooks (2013) notes that limited government perceptions of young people and what counts as their citizenship have a direct effect on young people’s concept of themselves as citizens. This was partly true for the Pioneers as well. Despite their commitment to driving social change, they demonstrated a strong awareness of how young people being negatively described and located by traditional discourses of politics and power. As one young social entrepreneur explained, ‘as a society we problematise young people, so young people are a problem to solve’ (Young Social Pioneer 2013).

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This stereotypical problematization of young people was seen by another entrepreneur as a ‘systematic, inter-generational issue’, ‘where that the older you are, the higher ranking, tends to be easier or at least is perceived to be easier’ (Young Social Pioneer 2013). The perennial issue of experience was seen as a particular barrier to young people seeking to gain access to power and influence. One Pioneer argued that ‘people in power stick to their societal models and so that’s what we’re trying to break out of, but I think that that’s also our biggest challenge’. Another was keenly aware that ‘society doesn’t put young people in the top job and we see that in the government, we see that with big organisations … taking responsibility off young people.’ This same young person warned about the future of young people’s civic and political engagement: ‘I think we’re slowly taking responsibility off young people and the less responsibility you have, the less influence you have on society’. He also spoke about an institutional discourse that portrays young people as democratically inept and immature: So a hundred years ago, women were having babies at fifteen and that was normal. Now they’re not having babies till thirty because you know you’re not responsible at fifteen, you’re not responsible at sixteen, why would you have children? And then  … you go way back to the 1400s and Joan of Arc led an entire country to victory at the age of sixteen. We now treat our sixteen year olds like they can’t wipe their own arse and they need to be, like, managed or they need to be sorted out. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

This systemic lack of recognition of young people as competent citizens and change-makers is not an abstract social and political phenomenon, but one that has direct and personal implications for the young people we spoke to. For a number of our Pioneers, it was this lack of recognition which drove them to form their own, self-made modes of citizenship and influence. This was not necessarily a simple process: as we noted earlier, despite the ready availability of social media and communication technologies, the full range of resources needed for a social enterprise to function do not come easily. Gaining funding for their initiatives remained a real barrier for the Pioneers, as one explained: There’s a lot of people that are vocally very supportive of what we’re doing with our organisation but when it comes to … putting their money where their mouth is in supporting the drive that we’re trying to push, then there’s no-one willing to put forward that. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

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On a wider level, following our discussion in Chapter 1, if youth social enterprise is not measured as a valuable form of participation or even well understood, then funding and other important forms of recognition and support for young people’s change-making are less likely to be available. Most social enterprises struggle to attract funding, at least in the early stages of their development. For the Pioneers, however, lack of funding was seen as a function of their youth, as one said: ‘You simply haven’t had the same amount of time to build up social and financial power’ (Young Social Pioneer 2013). For young people who are barred from access to existing spaces for social change-making, such as the not-for-profit sector, however, there may be few other options than to craft their own DIY spaces. One Pioneer, for example, described her struggle to gain employment in the not-for-profit sector before founding her own enterprise: Like I’ve been in jobs before and a lot of job interviews where people have said to me you won’t get this job: you need to go away and get five years more experience or ten years more experience before you can ever even think about working here. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

This difficulty of access to established institutions and sectors is one of the reasons why many young people, like the Pioneers, seek to enact their citizenship for social change through bypassing formal channels and modes of citizenship participation to make their own modes. For some, these established modes, as well as the discourses and assumptions which underpin them, are simply unattractive. Returning to the quote by one Pioneer above, ‘most people and especially people in power stick to their societal models’ (2013, our emphasis). The multifaceted relationship which young people have with established institutions and sectors needs to be better recognized by those institutions and sectors. It should also inform a more sophisticated understanding of young people’s political engagement, as Benedicto argues: In contrast to the habitual strategy of defining types of young people as a function of their attitudes towards politics in general or their participation in the political arena, we must understand that young people pass smoothly between various political worlds without establishing barriers and by making use of available materials. (2012: 726)

This raises an important and problematic aspect of youth-led social enterprises. Within the pervasive discourses of neoliberalism, the marketization of life

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has shifted what were previously core functions of the welfare state onto individuals. Earlier in this book, we discussed the gradual dissolution of young people’s citizenship and other entitlements under the continued influence of neoliberal governance. As Rose has observed, the techniques of governance accompanying this dissolution, and the shift to which we have just alluded, ‘instil and use the self-directing propensities of subjects to bring them into alliance with the aspirations of authorities’ (Rose 1992: 153). These techniques seek to ‘autonomise’ and ‘responsibilize’ the subject, fostering a subjectivity in which the individual becomes ‘an entrepreneur of itself, seeking to maximize its own powers, its own happiness, its own quality of life, through enhancing its autonomy and then instrumentalizing its autonomous choices in the service of its own lifestyle’ (Rose 1992: 150–1). Responsibility for the self becomes the concern of the individual, not the state. It could be suggested that social enterprises reflect another form of responsibilization, one that shifts the burden of addressing the big challenges of our time onto young people such as the Young Social Pioneers. There is some credence to this. Within the neoliberal paradigm, young people experience a double-bind of being responsibilized by adult forms of governance while at the same time being treated as not responsible by virtue of their age, as the Pioneer observed above. But as we shall argue in coming chapters, this wider function of neoliberalism is not totalizing, and there is scope to understand social enterprises as an important, if problematic, expression and vehicle of young people’s citizenship. Nevertheless, this DIY citizenship needs to be located within the broader ambivalences arising from how young people, theorists and policymakers define what constitutes citizenship.

Why political institutions of democracy remain important but problematic The wider trends outlined earlier in this chapter do not mean that conventional democratic institutions and processes are unimportant to young people. Several years ago, a series of focus groups conducted by researchers from the University of Western Sydney shed insight into young Australians’ imaginaries and relationship to politics and participation. These focus groups yielded ‘clear views’ that young people see the representative democratic system as ‘adversarial’,

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‘non-participatory’ and ‘flawed’ (Horsley and Costley 2008: 4). Perhaps most significantly, all focus groups participants indicated a desire to improve the effectiveness of the political system, ‘to make it more understandable and to make it more participative’ (Horsley and Costley 2008: 4). Participants also demonstrated a broad knowledge about the Australian political system, which was not seen to value or support young people’s participation, while providing insufficient opportunities for them to participate in decision-making. Political structures, especially at state and federal levels, were viewed as complex and a deterrent to meaningful citizen participation. This theme, as we noted above, is also reflected in our previous discussions with the young social entrepreneurs, who were seeking to bring about change but did not necessarily categorize their activity as being ‘political’ (Walsh and Black 2011). Like many other young people, they demonstrated an interest in political issues, but preferred to label their interests as ‘making a difference’ socially rather than politically (Burns et al. 2008). This brings us back to one of our central concerns throughout this book: that policy – whether directly or indirectly – serves to restrict young people to certain forms and conceptualizations of what it means to be a citizen. As we will discuss in Chapter 6, for example, ideas of active citizenship that are propagated by a growing range of education policies and curricula have the effect of limiting young people’s citizenship to a thin form of civic engagement, something that can be ‘earned’ by good works. Taken further, this top-down and governmental approach channels young people’s acts of citizenship towards narrowly defined government-initiated and -sanctioned acts in ways that overlook, delegitimize or even criminalize many of the other modes of citizenship that young people might choose (Davies 2012). This institutional blindness to young people’s preferred modes of citizenship action fails to recognize that citizenship is an evolving state, and that young people are largely responsible for its evolution. Staeheli and her colleagues argue that ‘citizenship is continuously contested – and created – through acts of engagement’ (2013: 104): what is all too frequently overlooked by policy is that young people themselves are increasingly setting the terms for that engagement as well as defining and deciding the modes by which this engagement occurs. These modes tend to be more affective in nature than conventional institutions either acknowledge or allow. Our Young Social Pioneers, for example, chose to be civically involved as citizens for personal reasons rather than for institutional ones. Although they met with us at the time of an intense federal election

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campaign entering its final week, the politics of the election appeared to be far from many of the Young Social Pioneers’ minds: their interest was in the immediate practical challenges and opportunities to improve the viability and impact of their enterprises and the larger challenge of making themselves as citizens.

Conclusion This discussion does not suggest that the self-made young citizen faces an easy task. The challenges faced by young social entrepreneurs in Australia echo the experiences of young social entrepreneurs throughout the world. Addressing these challenges could start by recognizing and valuing their work. Young people show consistent interest in and engagement with bigticket political items, like racism, equality, the economy, human rights and the environment. These issues – particularly the economy and environment – are also of visible concern much of the older population, but the civic and citizenship views and values of young people are frequently dismissed simply because they are young. This suggests the need for a fundamental shift in how we view their capacity to influence. The experience of one young female Pioneer is useful here. She told us, I never really thought of myself as someone of influence … being a young person and [the] end of last year I got an award being one of the top 100 women of influence in Australia and I was really … surprised. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

The award referred to here is the annual Australian 100 Women of Influence Award, which is designed to ‘identify and celebrate bold, energetic women who capture the spirit of progress, helping shape a vibrant, inclusive, economic and social future for Australia’ (100 Women of Influence 2016). Though the other award winners included older senior executives and chief executive officers, this young woman recognized that young people could exert social and political influence in other ways than through conventional positions of power. The corollary of this was that she, herself, was recognized. Her story speaks to the need for key institutions to provide greater support for young people who want to make potentially powerful contributions to the project of citizenship, but prefer to do this in self-made ways that arise from

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and reflect their own citizenship values, concerns and modes of action. In this chapter, we have described one youth citizenship and leadership programme – Young Social Pioneers – which is conducted by an independent, not-for-profit organization for this purpose. In Chapter 5, we will describe another youth citizenship and leadership programme designed and conducted by a local government council. Each of these programmes is described by its participants as important and enabling. One Pioneer told us, It’s programs like this and it’s organisations like this that are designed to empower young people to see their full potential and give them the tools and resources to overcome their perceived barriers. That’s, yeah, I mean this is liberating for people like us. (Young Social Pioneer 2013)

Greater support and recognition for these kinds of programmes would be one step forward in supporting young people’s wider engagement in the citizenship project, although this should not be accompanied by greater controls over that engagement or the standardization of the ways in which young people choose to engage. Conventional institutions could learn a lot from the flexible, adaptive and creative forms of self-made citizenship that young people are crafting. They might also benefit from the more flexible and creative understandings of citizenship that underpin DIY or self-made modes of citizenship more broadly. Ratto and Boler have argued that ‘DIY practices ideally create “manoeuvring” spaces, encouraging us to rethink binary distinctions such as cultural/political and amateur/professional’ (2014: 18). The DIY practices of youth citizenship, of which social enterprise is just one example, offer the same opportunity to rethink citizenship beyond the binaries of formal versus informal, big ‘P’ versus small ‘p’ politics and engaged versus disengaged. This rethinking also requires a better understanding of how ‘the political’ is understood by young people. Social entrepreneurs like the Pioneers are exploring alternative means of making change. They have a strong disposition to engage as political actors and to exert their influence, but not necessarily or exclusively in conventional pathways. We therefore need to understand better how young people are participating in ways that are not recognized through the current conventional lens of political participation. We also need to more critically assess what Cammaerts and his colleagues, commenting on the political engagement of young Europeans, call ‘the real as well as perceived inadequacy of the existing political offer’ (2014: 645). At the same time, we need to recognize that social enterprises and other forms of DIY citizenship are themselves not free of problems. But as we shall discuss

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further in Chapter 6, this chapter is not an argument for a new romanticism of young people’s citizenship. The relationship between DIY citizenship and the neoliberal project continue to require critical scrutiny. These forms and acts of citizenship could be seen to be another by-product of pervasive discourses of neoliberalism. Returning to Rose cited above, they could be seen to be another technique of governance that autonomizes and responsibilizes the young person as a subject, ‘an entrepreneur of itself, seeking to maximize its own powers … through enhancing its autonomy and then instrumentalizing its autonomous choices in the service of its own lifestyle’ (Rose 1992: 150–1). There is some credence to this: as Ratto and Boler have observed, ‘to value “doing it oneself ” sounds very much like “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” and results in a continued privileging of the individual’ (2014: 12). But as we shall argue in coming chapters, this wider function of neoliberalism is not totalizing, and there is scope to understand social enterprises as an important, if problematic, expression and vehicle of citizenship. Nevertheless, this DIY citizenship needs to be located within the broader ambivalences arising from how young people, theorists and policymakers define what constitutes citizenship. We use the term ‘located’ deliberately here: location emerged as a key dimension of citizenship in our discussions with the Young Social Pioneers. While they expressed varying degrees of awareness of the national and the global, it was at the local level that the majority of participants in our discussions felt most ‘empowered’ and ‘engaged’. The importance of the local in young people’s acts and experiences of citizenship will be the focus of the next two chapters of this book.

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Citizenship Close to Home

Introduction In Chapter 3, we discussed some of the ways by which young people’s lives and identities are increasingly defined and characterized by issues arising from mobility. The discourse of mobility, with its attendant themes of globalization, internationalization, transnationalism or even postnationalism, and borderless choice, movement, consumption and identity, has also become embedded in contemporary ideas of citizenship. Where citizenship was once associated with the nation-state, more recent interpretations suggest that citizens are ‘no longer stable, homogenised, nor bound to a single nation and place’ (Arvanitakis and Sidoti 2011: 14). Citizenship, and the cultural, political and social affiliations and identifications that attend it, is now understood to be much more porous than political or other geographical boundaries: it is seen as something that can be diasporic, transnational, virtual or even ephemeral (Eriksen 2007). Some of these ideas are reflected in recent education policy. As we will discuss in Chapter 6, for example, young people in Australia are increasingly framed by education policy as ‘members of diverse local, national and global communities’ (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA] 2012: 5) who are subject to ‘multi-scalar responsibilities of citizenship’ (Desforges, Jones and Woods 2005: 441). They are also expected to emerge from the education process as citizens who are able and willing to enact this membership at any and all of these geographical scales. This raises questions about how young people might think about themselves as citizens across different geographical contexts. It raises questions about their desire and capacity for the mobility goods that contemporary citizenship promises, such as ‘world travel, national and transnational affiliations’ (McLeod 2012: 11). It also raises questions about the relationship between young people’s citizenship and the places in which that

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citizenship is fostered, constructed and experienced: in particular, their roles and relationships as citizens within their own immediate local communities. What we suggest in this chapter is that the ubiquity of the discourse of global mobility, whether in education and youth policy and in popular culture, belies the continued importance of the local for many young people. While globalization and its attendant flows of capital, culture, ideas and affiliations may have transnationalized many aspects of young people’s identity, the evidence is that locality, geography and place remain important elements of their lives (Wood and Black 2014; Webb et al. 2015). Especially in low socio-economic contexts, young people’s economic, educational and other choices and opportunities are still largely shaped by the local places in which they live. In this chapter, we critically consider the daily or everyday experiences of young people as citizens within their local communities. We consider the neoliberal construction of ‘community’ as a site for citizenship and the responsibilization of young people as actors charged with improving or redeeming their communities, often in the face of structural and systemic forces. We also consider the slippages and ambiguities of young people’s citizenship in low socio-economic communities where their construction as active and socially responsible citizens is coupled with discourses that ‘unmake’ them as citizens, as untrustworthy actors who are both sources and subjects of risk. We begin, though, by coming back to globalization and its impact and implications for young people’s citizenship.

The distance of the global in young people’s lives As we have previously suggested, the scholarly analysis of globalization hit its stride during the 1990s, yielding greater understandings of how its cultural, economic and political dimensions are inextricably linked but also of its ‘ironies and resistances’ (Appadurai 1996: 29). Globalization is characterized by mixtures of global and local cultures that result in something ‘both more diverse and more homogeneous than modernity’ (Green 1997: 185). It has been suggested that as a result of globalization, cultures are shaped by interactions and social relationships that form ‘only indirectly and without logical necessity to particular areas in physical space’ (Hannerz 1990: 239). This is particularly the case with young people, as our previous research has shown. As we have discussed in Chapter 4, that research (Third et al. forthcoming)

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includes testimonies by young people which suggested a fluidity of the boundaries between their online and unmediated (face-to-face) worlds. Young people experience these worlds as equally real, equally meaningful and mutually constituted (Rheingold 2006; Madge and O’Connor 2005). But they are not the same, as one participant in the study pointed out: ‘In a way, there is a kind of “digital world” that exists with the internet, that is in some ways quite separate from the “real” world’ (Participant 2014). For this participant, as for others in the study, the real world described here was chiefly located in the local geographic community and area. This echoes wider evidence suggesting that in the lived cultures of young people, the local remains important – particularly in relation to where they identify possibilities for enacting their daily citizenship. Our studies of young Australians suggest that despite the almost ubiquitous impact of global factors and forces, the global remains distant and abstract as a site of influence (Walsh and Black 2018; Walsh et al. 2016). Previously in this book, we have mounted an argument for the importance of the situatedness of citizenship in young Australian’s lives and the ways that geographical location shapes and sometimes appears to constrain experiences of citizenship. In Chapter 3, for example, we highlighted the role of geographical location in youth transitions, especially where economic deprivation is an issue. As part of this, geography plays a major role in shaping young people’s educational trajectories. In Australia, young people’s educational attainment post-school differs markedly depending on where the young person lives. Data from the last decade show that those who had no school qualifications by 24 years of age were more likely to be living in the least advantaged areas of the country (Robinson and Lamb 2009). The type of qualifications attained also differs according to where young people live. Geography also appears to be strongly related to young people’s experiences of social and economic mobility elsewhere in the world, but as we found in Chapter 3, this is manifested in different ways. In Australia, youth unemployment is concentrated in regional and remote areas. Certain young people, such as Indigenous young people, are locked into a stasis of disadvantage within their own geographical locales. In contrast to this, in parts of Asia and Africa, youth unemployment rates are more concentrated in urban areas (Elder et al. 2015). How do young people position themselves as agents of influence in relation to these forces? The local is a complex – and sometimes a curtailing or containing – site for young people. At the same time, it is frequently one in which they

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perceive that they can best exert influence. The following discussion further explores young people’s daily experiences of citizenship at local levels. It explores how local sites are often valorized over the global, both by some young people and by certain policies and programmes. But as we shall see, these sites are also characterized by youth resistancies and ironies.

The self-making local citizen We begin our discussion of this daily experience with two examples of local youth citizenship in practice. For the first example, we return to our study of young people of influence discussed in Chapter 4. As we explained in that chapter, we conducted a research programme over four years that aimed to understand how and where specific groups of young people seek to influence their worlds. This programme included a series of focus groups with three groups of young people: young social entrepreneurs; young local community leaders and Indigenous young people undertaking a leadership programme. In Chapter 4, we drew on our discussions with the first group – the young social entrepreneurs working within the Young Social Pioneers programme – to reflect on the relationship that such young people have with formal and institutional politics. In this chapter, we explore our discussions with the second group, the young community leaders participating in a local governmentfunded volunteering programme. We cast back to an event which took place in 2013 around 60 kilometres from the Melbourne Central Business District, where we joined a group of young people aged between 15 and 25 who had gathered in the local government office for the monthly meeting of the Youth Action Committee (YAC). None of these young people had travelled far: all lived, worked or studied in the local area. They had come together with members of the local council’s Youth Services branch to plan their role in coming local government events such as citizenship ceremonies, festivals and community gatherings for new residents, but also to talk about the progress of initiatives that they themselves had designed. At the time, this local government area was one of the fastest growing in Australia, and one whose demographic profile was rapidly changing, with a growing community of migrants and refugees. At the same time, it remained a peri-urban zone with many of the characteristics of such areas: lower levels of educational qualifications than the state average, a predominance of people employed in the vulnerable and volatile manufacturing sector, a relatively low

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socio-economic profile and a paucity of employment opportunities. It also had one of the highest youth populations of any local government area in the country. The YAC was – and remains – one of the council’s chief youth engagement strategies. Young people were invited to apply to be members of the YAC for a twoyear period, during which they were encouraged to learn about the community and the decision-making processes of local government, and to represent the views and ideas of local young people within those decision-making processes. The YAC purported to ‘develop young people’s leadership skills’ and ‘empower them to take active roles in their community’ (City of Casey 2015b) as well as to encourage them to ‘make a positive difference’ within the community and to ‘become great role models to [their] peers’ (City of Casey 2015a). These initiatives addressed issues that YAC members and the Youth Services branch agreed were important to young people in the local government area. They included a YouTube video (‘It’s OK to ask for help’) that was created in response to the emergence of the suicide cluster and that encouraged young people to seek help when they needed it (Four Corners 2012). They included Multipride, a programme designed to increase young people’s cultural awareness and understanding in the wake of escalating tensions within local schools. They also included a drug and alcohol forum aimed at educating young people and their parents about alcohol and other drugs, and a survey of how local young people transition from secondary education into employment or further education (City of Casey 2015a). Our discussions with this group of young people highlight the importance of socio-geographical context in shaping their experience of citizenship. The local community was not simply the site of their citizenship actions: it was also the level at which they felt they could have the greatest influence, as one young person explained: I mean at a local area, even just around, near the local area there’s some, very many opportunities to raise your voice, raise issues and you can actually do something about it – which is you can actually take action. (YAC member 2013)

Their comments also highlight the relational nature of young people’s experiences of citizenship and the way in which those experiences can slip and change depending on social and geographical contexts. The local council recognized, authorized, celebrated and resourced the YAC’s activities as local change-makers, but this recognition and authorization quickly dissipated

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as soon as they left the local council context and attempted to gain the same opportunities for influence elsewhere: Like, you know, you’ll go from the City of Casey where you pretty much get to have an opinion on everything and do exactly what you want to do – to other organisations where I’m sitting there feeling so frustrated, like I’m wasting my time because they’ve literally made a committee to say that they’ve had young people involved in the process or something, and, you know it’s so, it’s so frustrating going through those different things at the same level. (YAC member 2013)

There are other socio-geographical factors at play here as well. In Chapter 1, we described the impact which socio-economic status and geographical location can have on young people’s propensity and capacity to volunteer. Chapter 3 also explored the intersection of geographical and socio-economic factors with economic mobility and immobility. The YAC had been constituted as an attempt to promote young people’s citizenship and active participation in a community context where young people face multiple challenges, including economic challenges. As one YAC member explained, this created something of a vicious cycle. These same economic challenges precluded many young people’s ability to engage in the acts of local citizenship which the YAC works so hard to foster: ‘Many people now, like, some of my friends are working two part time jobs so they really haven’t got the time like to volunteer or do anything extra’ (YAC member 2013). This in turn reinforced the deficit discourse of young people that we described in our Introduction: There’s also this really, sort of, horrible thing between the generations. I think that like, like the baby boomer generation, I don’t know, there’s just like this really like ‘oh, Gen Y are lazy and apathetic; they don’t care about anything’ and, like, it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy thing. Like, if you’re told that, you’re going to become that. So, whilst you have a massive amount of young people wanting to make the change, they’re told by the rest of society that they can’t and that they’re not good enough to be able to do that. (YAC member 2013)

(Re)making the local young citizen in policy While our example above describes young people acting as citizens within their local community, the opportunity for this action has been the product of institutional policy – the policy of a local government agency. It has also been,

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whether directly or indirectly, the product of a wider systemic policy with implications for young people. This connection between citizenship and locality is hardly new within social policy. As Staeheli notes in relation to the United States, ‘there is a long history in American politics of linking citizenship in the nation-state to a sense of belonging to local places’, one which recognizes that citizenship ‘can only be realized through relationships between people nurtured in localities’ (2005: 197). The place-based local community is intrinsic to the ideas of active citizenship that we discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. In fact, as citizenship scholars have recently argued, ‘ideas of community and neighbourhood are central to the imagination and development of active citizenship policies’ (Yarwood 2014: 93) and ‘engagement within one’s communities is clearly a central prerequisite of active citizenship’ (Peterson and Bentley 2016: 7). The local community has also been for some time the site and the scale of many strategies for fostering and mobilizing young people’s citizenship (Desforges et al. 2005). Like the YAC and the Making A Difference (MAD) programme, which we describe in the next chapter, these strategies promote the local community as a key site for the development of young people’s citizenship values and capacities. This is an extension of a wider social policy ideology which has, since the 1990s, seen the local community – particularly the low socio-economic community – become a highly politicized site. Under the influence of neoliberalism, United Kingdom, United States and Australian policymakers have consistently identified the community as the primary locus for efforts to redress social and economic exclusion, with multiple place-based initiatives such as neighbourhood renewal programmes seeking to redirect resources, strengthen social ties and enable or empower local citizens to improve their own education, health, employment, safety and other outcomes (Smyth and McInerney 2013; Bee and Pachi 2014). This strategy of ‘governing through communities’ has also seen a greater focus on citizenship as something that is enacted locally: it has seen ‘a rescaling downwards of the performance of citizenship to more local contexts’ (Desforges et al. 2005: 440). In particular, it has seen the mobilization of citizenship in, through and for, the level of the local community: as Desforges and his colleagues note, ‘active citizens act for and within place-based communities and they are defined by place-based community’ (2005: 40). The link between young people’s citizenship and their local communities has been well rehearsed in numerous education and youth policy statements.

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In  Australia, this can be seen in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, which represents the blueprint for Australian schooling from 2008 until 2018 and which describes the imperative for schools to prepare young people to be both ‘global and local citizens’ (MCEETYA 2008: 9, our emphasis). It can also be seen in other policy statements which articulate the Australian government’s commitment to enable young people to be ‘active in their communities’ (Department of Human Services 2015a). These sentiments are reinforced by the Australian Curriculum for Civics and Citizenship, which positions schooling as a means by which young people are enabled to ‘live as citizens in their local and wider communities’ (ACARA 2012: 22). The idea that young people should enact their citizenship locally, as well as in other spheres, is introduced from the first year of the curriculum. The Year 3 curriculum, for example, ‘introduces students to democracy in the context of the familiar and personal’, encouraging them to consider how democratic decisionmaking occurs within communities and to reflect on how they can participate in their own communities. The Year 4 curriculum encourages them to consider the contribution of local government ‘to community life’ while the Years 5 and 6 curriculums ask them to ‘reflect on [their] personal roles and actions as a citizen in the school and in the community’ (ACARA undated).

Walking the talk of local citizenship This policy discourse of local citizenship is also echoed and supported by numerous education and youth policy initiatives. Initiatives implemented in Australia over the past decade include the Australian Youth Forum Prime Minister’s Challenge, an annual campaign that funded youth-led projects that seek to engage young people in their local community, and the National Youth Leadership Award, which was linked to the annual National Youth Week and which recognized young people who were deemed to demonstrate participation and contribution to their community (Black, Walsh and Taylor 2011). As we have already seen in the example of the YAC, local government is a key arena for policy efforts to engage young people as local citizens, especially in low socio-economic contexts. In Australia, the Victorian Government Office of Youth’s Advance programme encourages secondary schools, such as the school which we will discuss in Chapter 6, to work with local government and community organizations to create opportunities for young people to ‘make a

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difference in their community’ and to ‘do something great in their community based on their choice’, usually in the form of community-based social change projects or volunteering activities. The programme also encourages those communities to value young people’s contribution, to ‘support and recognise young people’s participation and positive role in society’ (Department of Human Services 2015b). This echoes the rhetoric of other Victorian Government initiatives such as Engage!, which encourages community and local government organizations to engage young people in their operations (Department of Human Services 2015a), and the New Gen Social Enterprise Program, which supports youth-led social enterprises that focus on the local community (Department of Human Services 2015c). Australia has not yet seen the widespread introduction of local community volunteering into the national secondary curriculum or within higher education, although both of these have been mooted many times. In the UK, however, the Higher Education Active Community Fund has seeded numerous projects that position students as ‘active players in society’ who can enrich and benefit their local community while pursuing their studies (Barber 2016: 59). The UK has also been the site of more widespread strategies to link young people to local government. In a number of local councils, Young People’s Parliaments promise to engage young people in constituency forums and interest groups in order to ensure that their voices are heard within the local decisionmaking process. Similar structures exist in almost every Australian state and in many local councils as well. The UK also illustrates the continued escalation of efforts to govern young people’s local citizenship. The highly controversial Big Society initiative launched by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government in 2010 promised, in classic neoliberal terms, to redistribute power and responsibility from government to ‘giv[e] individuals and communities more control over their destinies’ (BBC News 2010). In more practical terms, it sought to substitute a degree of public investment in communities with localized forms of investment such as volunteering (Morgan 2013). It included the Big Society Awards, an annual national programme that purported to recognize social action undertaken by youth groups and organizations that were deemed to ‘improve[e] lives and society through innovation, collaboration and new partnerships’ (Prime Minister’s Office 2015). It also included Positive for Youth, which granted an award for young people aged 10–20 who had ‘stepped up and taken action to leave a positive legacy in their local community’ (The Legacy Project 2014).

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As Youdell and McGimpsey (2015) note, the British government has subsequently moved away from the language of the Big Society, but its spirit and its emphasis on localism lives on. This is despite plenty of critique and commentary, including concerns about the privatization of schools and their capacity to prepare young people for the kind of citizenship that the Big Society expects (Gibson 2015), as well as the reduction of support for numerous youth services in the name of austerity (Youdell and McGimpsey 2015). To some degree, these policy strategies mirror a pattern in young people’s own citizenship priorities and in the ways in which they are making their own local citizenship. The drift or shift away from formal politics which we outlined in Chapter 1 includes a drift away from local politics as well: young people are less likely than older people to engage with the formal structures of local government. Tensions emerge between policy fostering local participation on the one hand, and residual forms of centralized governance on the other. As Sloam notes, ‘the highly centralized nature of public policy gives young people less of a reason to engage at a local level (where little power resides and participation is dominated by the middle-aged, the well-educated, and the welloff )’ (2014: 674). There is plenty of evidence, however, that young people have strong views about what should be happening within their local communities and that they are motivated to enact their citizenship in other ways at the level of those communities (Black 2017; Black forthcoming; Osler and Starkey 2003; Vromen and Collin 2010; Goodwin and Young 2013). Our YAC members provide another illustration of this. The willingness of such young people to engage at a local level may be because they find it easier to identify with their local neighbourhood, and feel higher levels of trust for those groups and institutions with which they frequently engage in that neighbourhood, than with what may seem like more distant affiliations. It may be that for such young people, there is greater satisfaction, and more immediate rewards, to be had from enacting their citizenship in the ‘everyday settings that are important to them’ (Torney-Purta 2002: 208). Around 80 per cent of young people surveyed by one Australian study agreed that being a good citizen entails participation in activities that are of benefit to the local community (Mellor and Kennedy 2003). Our own study of young Australian social entrepreneurs indicates that even those young people who are clearly concerned about local, national and global issues, and

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who employ physical and virtual networks and spheres of influence to occupy ‘a new space of citizenship that subsumes the local, the national and the global’ (Desforges et al. 2005: 444), tend to feel that they have a greater degree of influence when working locally. This finding is also consistent with another related study, conducted by Walsh and his colleagues (2016), of Indigenous young Australians participating in a leadership programme. The preference of young people for local action may be an extension of young people’s general gravitation towards modes of citizenship that are perceived as less formal and hierarchical. As we discussed in Chapter 1, these are modes that are less ‘distant and unwelcoming’ (Arvanitakis and Marren 2009: 8) than formal politics. They also promise young people the ability to achieve more immediate, direct and visible outcomes in relation to issues that affect their daily lives (Biesta, Lawy and Kelly 2009). Their preference for these modes may also reflect their desire for belonging and social connectedness and their belief that this is more likely to be found locally. As Hart notes, ‘contrary to much popular government and media rhetoric on the position of young people as anti-social and breaking away from their communities, … most young people are instead seeking membership and inclusion within them’ (2009: 653). The ‘micro-territories of the local’ (Harris and Wyn 2009: 327), to which we refer in Chapter 2, may offer a familiar and immediate locus for such membership. It may also offer young people a space in which they feel they are able to act as citizens. The young rural Australians interviewed by Harris and Wyn, for example, perceived the sphere of formal politics as something that was ‘remote and unrelated to their everyday lives’: they struggled to locate themselves within that sphere, to understand how they might address such national or global issues as war or terrorism, to ‘imagine themselves as political actors and agents of change’ (2009: 339). By contrast, they were familiar and conversant with those social and political issues such as environmental management and sustainability that had direct implications for the local area and its community. More than this, they were confident about the ways in which they might act to address those issues. A similar message came from our YAC members, as one young person told us: I mean at a local area, even just around, near the local area there’s some, very many opportunities to raise your voice, raise issues and you can actually do something about it – which is you can actually take action. (YAC member 2013)

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The challenges of mobilizing local citizenship in risky places Like the young people interviewed by Harris and Wyn, our YAC members appeared to gain genuine benefit and satisfaction from their actions, but this does not erase the need to ask critical questions about young people’s engagement as local citizens, including the question of which young people and which localities are being targeted by the kind of policy strategies we have discussed earlier. The local mobilization of young people’s citizenship often focuses on those geographical locations in which there are perceived to be ‘uneven geographies of local citizen action’ (Desforges et al. 2005: 441). It is also focused on those locations in which young people are deemed to be experiencing a ‘democratic deficit’ or ‘citizenship deficit’ (Black 2012). Like the City of Casey and the community of Valley High School, which we will explore in Chapter 6, these are often locations that are identified as having a low socio-economic status. The tension between mobility and stasis is ‘a fundamentally constitutive binary of citizenship’ (Nyers and Rygiel 2012: 4). Young people are increasingly subject to this tension: as we have suggested previously, their lives are formed by complex and contradictory relationships and interplays ‘of mobility and immobility, of flux and rigidity, of familiarity and estrangement, of porous boundaries and territorial and socio-economic constraints’ (Walsh and Black 2015: 71). For many, it is the second of each of these binaries – stasis, immobility and constraint – that is the primary force. As Dolby and Rizvi note, within a globalized world, ‘capital moves easily, bodies which control capital move easily, but bodies which are more expendable or peripheral are still largely constrained’ (2007: 2). In too many places, young people’s bodies remain geographically constrained and contained, whether by lack of money, lack of transport or by more subtle forces, including family and community expectations and attachments to familiar places. The effect of this containment is often to reinforce old patterns of inequality: In the society of multiple and intensive mobilities, the gap between those keeping on the move and those less on the move – to say nothing of those not moving at all – is of fundamental significance. (Elliott and Urry 2010: 82–3)

More recent Australian and UK education policies have sought to lift the aspirations of young people from low socio-economic communities, to encourage them to be ‘aspirational citizens’ (Raco 2009: 437), citizens who are willing and able not only to pursue the neoliberal project of their own self-improvement but

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also to pursue the project of improving their communities. Increasingly, young citizens are being framed as ‘the new subjects of resilience’, subjects who are ‘being designed in ways of being human that allow them to live in positive freedom under conditions of radical uncertainty’ (O’Malley 2013: 183, original emphasis). Instead of simply managing risk, and the uncertainties, ambivalences, anxieties and even neuroses that attend it (Isin 2004), the resilient young citizen ‘approaches uncertainty as a challenge and opportunity’ (O’Malley 2013: 191). This uncertainty is not merely conceptual, it also includes hard, objective and structural circumstances that continue to have a measurable impact on young people’s lives and life chances. Resilience in such circumstances requires the navigation of the uncertain ‘globalised, risky labour markets of the liberal democracies’ (Kelly 2011: 7). It continues to be associated (however problematically) with the attainment of normative and traditional markers of successful adulthood such as full employment and home ownership (Wyn 2009) as discussed in Chapter 3, but it is also increasingly equated with the capacity for social and economic mobility, including intergenerational mobility (Brown 2013). The premise that education is a key route to such mobility continues to be a central discourse or promise within UK education policy (Bathmaker, Ingram and Waller 2013; Brown, Reay and Vincent 2013; Byrom and Lightfoot 2013; Devine and Li 2013). The same can be said about Australia. As Sellar observes, recent Australian education policy constructs young people’s educational aspiration ‘as a motivational force that can increase participation and, subsequently, social mobility for disadvantaged groups’ (2013: 246). Such policy is more than merely ‘the latest expression of a long history punctured by regular moral panics about youth’ (Bessant 2003: 89). It reflects and reproduces what Raco has called the ‘dominant existential imaginations and narratives’ of citizenship as well as ‘the ways in which citizens act and produce citizenship through their everyday actions in particular places’ (2009: 437). It also reflects and reinforces specific geographical discourses or ‘spatial imaginations’ both of low socio-economic communities and the young people who reside in them (Raco 2009: 437), imaginations that are often not only homogenized – and homogenizing – but also deficit in nature.

The persistence of a deficit geographical imagination This deficit imagination begins with the communities themselves. Within policy and popular narratives, low socio-economic communities, whether urban,

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peri-urban, regional, rural or remote, are frequently subject to ‘caricatures of place’ (Amin 2004: 38). These caricatures portray them as deficit places (Smyth and McInerney 2013; Visser, Bolt and van Kempen 2015), places from which young people need to be ‘rescued or redeemed’ (Black 2012: 192), often through the medium of education. They also portray them as static or monodimensional places in ways that overlook and obscure the flux and complexity of many communities and the complexity of young people’s relationship with them (Burke, Greene and McKenna 2014). They ignore the severing of the opportunity bargain that education will enable mobility, as discussed in Chapter 3. The young people who live in such places are also commonly portrayed in deficit terms. Many sociologists have drawn on Cohen’s description of the ‘moral panic’ that attends the depiction of young people in both policy and the public domains, an institutionalized mistrust of young people that depicts them as both outside mainstream society and a threat to that society (Cohen 2002). This moral panic is part of what Giroux has called the ‘assault against youth’ (2009: 3) which constructs young people as ‘deviant, barbaric and unclean’ (Malone 2000: 136); as ‘unhealthy, antisocial, risky, or threatening’ (Bottrell 2009: 476); and as ‘feral yobs’ in need of regulation and control (Williamson 2007: 25). It links them with the leaners, shirkers and scroungers described by recent UK and Australian governments in Chapter 3. Young people in general are the subject of such characterizations: as Pain and her colleagues write, ‘young people as a whole are increasingly the focus of the fears, rather than the hopes, of western societies’ (2010: 972). Yet it is still those young people who occupy places of supposed ‘disadvantage’ who remain some of the most frequent targets of these fears. In Australia, Al-Natour has described the depiction of low socio-economic western Sydney communities as ‘Arab ghettos’ and the accompanying moral panic that attends the popular and public conceptions of young Arab men living in those communities (2010). Bottrell has described the experiences of young people in one public housing estate in inner-city Sydney, where the local youth discourses depict them as being on ‘risky trajectories’: trajectories that are ‘goin’ nowhere’ (2007: 602). As Kelly and Kamp point out, discourses such as these reflect and reproduce a long-standing moral panic in relation to certain groups of young people and the ‘wild zones’ which they are conceived as occupying, not only metaphorically but also geographically. These caricatured youth populations include ‘the Poor, the Promiscuous, the Violent, the Abusive, the Illiterate, the Idle, the Addicts,

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the Binge Drinkers, the Joy Riders, the Homeless, the Drop Outs, the Teenage Parents’ (Kelly and Kamp 2014: 145). The geographical imaginations that are applied to such populations of young people are imaginations of fear. The young people themselves stand accused as sources of social fear (Pain et al. 2010). They are also the discursive magnets for a range of policy fears, which construct them as lacking the will and capacity not only to change their circumstances (McInerney and Smyth 2014) but also to achieve the ‘project of self-capitalisation’ (Sellar 2013: 246) that is intrinsic to contemporary citizenship. Particularly if they choose to remain in their low socio-economic communities, this choice is frequently constructed as a bad choice, one which confirms their supposed inability and unwillingness to engage in wider forms and expressions of citizenship (Kenway and McLeod 2004). These geographical imaginations comprise just some of the ‘subterranean’ forces that influence and attend young people’s relationships to citizenship and space, forces which constitute the ‘emotional topographies’ of young people’s citizenship (Anderson and Smith 2001: 8). As Cuervo and Wyn argue, educational institutions are predicated on standardized and normative ideas of the places in which education should take place and to which it should enable young people to move or progress (2012). Studies of young people’s responses and relationships to the places in which they live illustrate the significance of those places and the experiences of meaning that young people may have within them, particularly in rural settings. This strong attachment to the local emerges from interviews with young people in many rural communities. For some young people in rural Australia, the desire to move to the city in pursuit of higher education and other positional opportunities is set against the ‘pull of home’ that often sees them return to their rural town or village once they have completed their studies (Webb et al. 2015: 34). O’Connor’s conversations with young people in rural Ireland are filled with a similarly strong sense of place and meaning that stem from the natural beauty of the local areas as well as from their historical significance (2005). Young rural people’s keen sense of their local place, and of the beauty, freedom, safety and social connectedness that they associate with that place, may also be coupled with a sense that the local community is a place in which they can readily act and participate as citizens (Gill and Howard 2006). Tensions emerge here between the power of belonging as core to citizenship that we explored in Chapter 2 with the forces of mobility and immobility generated by contemporary labour markets described in Chapter 3.

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Losing the local in constructions of community These stories offer important insights into the resources of meaning and belonging that local places can offer young people, but young people’s relationship to the local is usually more complicated, ambivalent and fluid. If citizenship ‘is always in a process of becoming, rather than an end state’ (Staeheli 2005: 198), then so too are the sites and relationships in which it is felt and enacted. As Bartos argues, the affective experience of place is not static: ‘Both our sense of self and our sense of place are perpetually being felt, formed, dislodged, and (re)created’ (2013: 91). The emphasis on the community as a site for young people’s citizenship promotes an idealized and homogenized discourse of community, constructing the community as a site for nostalgic notions of belonging, unity, meaning, belonging and citizenship. This construction has its roots in some of the oldest notions of community, which constructs it as a place that is fundamentally about belonging (Davies et al. 2014). As May warns, however, such experiences are inherently ephemeral: Belonging is … not a given or something that we accomplish once and for all. Because the world and the people in it, including ourselves, are constantly undergoing change, belonging is something we have to keep achieving through an active process. (2011: 372)

In fact, these experiences may never have existed in reality. The community as imagined by policy is, arguably, just that – an imaginary. It is, in Bauman’s words, ‘the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us – but which we would dearly wish to inhabit and which we hope to repossess’ (2001: 3). As Harris writes, ‘Community is perceived as one physical, bounded space that coheres as its members share a sense of ownership, and an imagined environment where conflict is absent and security and trust are valued above all else’ (2010: 574). This policy imaginary is undoubtedly attractive, even seductive. One only has to look at the rise and spread of various forms of gated communities or at the appeal of projects such as Poundbury in Dorchester, Prince Charles’s 20-year social experiment to design and build an ideal English village complete with traditional village ideals and community values. Such imagined communities and community imaginaries tend to develop cracks, though. At the small scale of Poundbury, the project has been troubled by allegations of unstable housing and even shakier social relationships, both within the village and between established surrounding cultures and communities

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(The Guardian 2009). At the much larger scale of the European community, the outcomes of years of effort to create an imagined community based on common social, cultural and political values and visions are now increasingly in doubt (Bee 2014). Events such as the 2016 British referendum to leave the EU have furthered challenged any imagined cohesiveness of the European community. These failures have not deterred the creation of new community mythologies, though the previous Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, evoked the mythology of ‘Team Australia’ as a way of galvanizing support, especially from Muslim communities, for new and more rigorous counterterrorism laws (News. com.au 2014). The imaginary of the community also conceals the specificity of individual communities and the conditions that shape them, belying the ‘enormous disparities in the particulars of different geographical, social and political locations’ (Eckert 2011: 310). When it comes to young people, such imaginaries also fail to engage with the complexity of many young people’s relationships within their communities, the multiple roles that they may play within those communities and the complex experiences of citizenship that they may experience within them. The conceptualization of citizenship as something that is enacted in local communities recognizes the potential that ‘the relationships developed in place can enhance a feeling of mutuality, obligation, and care on the part of individuals toward each other’ (Staeheli et al. 2012: 638). Yet for many young people, such feelings of mutuality and shared belonging may be compromised by their lack of recognition within the local community, as well as by the intersecting ‘pushes and pulls’ of national and transnational forces such as labour markets. While there may well be, as we have suggested earlier, a trend or preference for young people to enact their citizenship at the local community level, their motivation to do so may depend on their sense of belonging to that community and the degree of recognition that they experience within it (Kiwan 2007). Young people in low socio-economic communities may lack this sense of belonging and recognition, finding themselves instead to be subjects of distrust or wariness (Black 2011). For such young people, local communities may be ‘liminal spaces’ or ‘spaces of uncertainty’ (Wood 2012: 338): spaces in which they are, in Wood’s terms, in between the governed and institutionalized status of childhood and the autonomous citizenship that is meant to accompany adulthood. The YAC members whom we discussed earlier were clearly recognized and supported by their local council, but this recognition became

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far patchier as soon as they ventured out into the community, as one member explained: A lot of the time you’ll sort of, talk to someone with some sort of authority in some organisation and whilst you might think you’re having a really good conversation, you know, the next time you see them they won’t remember you. You know, you had no impact on them. Your voice as a young person, despite them working in a youth organisation, had no impact and I, I find that that’s a struggle. (YAC member 2013)

The result for young people may be an experience less of belonging and connection than of being ‘out of place’ (Harris 2015: 155) as local citizens. Isin suggests that we can understand the experience of citizenship as ‘a spectrum of intensity ranging from hospitality to hostility: citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens’ (2008: 19). The irony for some young people is that it is precisely when they are acting most as citizens that they are made to feel like aliens.

Conclusion This chapter is a response to the call for scholarship that can better illustrate the meaning and importance of place for the ‘embodied identities and personal horizons of contemporary youth’ (Farrugia 2014: 304), scholarship that moves away, once and for all, from the limited and homogenous conceptions of citizenship as ‘a fixed and bounded entity that can be applied equally to all citizens regardless of their real lived situations’ (Hart 2009: 655). There is a need for further scholarship that recognizes the situated nature and conditions of young people’s citizenship, including those conditions which determine the extent to which young people feel ‘they can or cannot be citizens’ within their own communities (Biesta, Lawy and Kelly 2009: 9, original emphasis): a scholarship that accommodates the complexity of many young people’s relationships with their communities, the multiple roles or identities that they may enact and the complex forms of inclusion or exclusion that they may experience within them. Such a scholarship would allow us to shed better and more consistent light on the conditional, temporal nature of young people’s citizenship as an experience that is ‘constantly made and remade through acts of engagement that occur across space’ (Ellison 2013: 54). It would enable us to better understand the ways in which young people experience and express that citizenship in the ‘local ordinary and everyday spaces’ (Wood 2010: 110) of their own geographical

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communities, the spaces in which they have those ‘everyday lived experiences, of discrimination and disrespect, and of having a voice and being listened to, [which] are pivotal to citizenship’ (Hart 2009: 646). This trajectory of research has significant implications for policymakers, particularly education policymakers and practitioners. As we shall critically discuss in the next chapter, the school is a key site in which citizenship is experienced and not experienced at the local level. The idea of active citizenship continues to be pursued with particular vigour within education policy and school programmes – often in problematic ways.

6

Schooling the Citizen

Introduction Over the past two decades, it has become a trope – almost a cliché – to observe that young people’s citizenship is under scrutiny. We began this book by commenting on the persistent concern among contemporary governments about the nature of the citizens that young people will ‘become’, noting that it has now become commonplace for democratic systems to voice their concern – even their panic – about the nature and extent of young people’s civic and political engagement. This concern has been accompanied and underlined by numerous policy interventions, programmes, campaigns, initiatives and curricula across numerous nations and jurisdictions which seek to engage young people in the democratic process, some of which we described in Chapter 5 as they relate to young people’s acts of citizenship within the context of their local community. The most popular and dominant of these interventions has been citizenship education. Recent years have seen the growing educationalization of young people’s citizenship through a proliferation of new and refreshed citizenship education policies and curricula which are springing up across a growing number of nation-states. The impetus for this fresh interest in citizenship education stems from an old and familiar proposition – that schooling can help to maintain a stable, democratic society by preparing young people to participate in that society (from imagined local to global) – but it is also informed by empirical evidence, pulled together by numerous national and international surveys of school-age young people, which suggests that their citizenship attitudes, dispositions and acts are influenced by what they learn and experience through schooling. For example, research suggests that those young people who complete school are more likely than others to value the idea of living in a democracy as well as to be engaged in their local communities (World Values Survey Association

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2009; Lamb, Robinson and Walstab 2010). Other studies suggest that curricula and pedagogies which encourage young people’s understanding of social justice issues, and their capacity for critical debate or action in relation to these issues, are the most likely to develop what education systems identify as the competencies and attitudes of citizenship (Flanagan, Syvertsen and Stout 2007; Syvertsen, Flanagan and Stout 2007). Having said this, there is no getting away from the fact that citizenship is a political construct. The resurgence of citizenship education as a policy strategy has focused primarily on a specific and politically contested idea: that of active citizenship. There is nothing new about this idea: it is one with a long history, but also one that, like neoliberalism, has become almost transpolitical in its appeal. As Marinetto has noted, ‘the idea of active citizenship has entered the political calculations and ideological calculations of governments on both sides of the political spectrum’ (2003: 104). Although its use within policy still varies depending on which end of this spectrum we are talking about, and it is subject to different definitions and interpretations, its central proposition is that citizens should not only understand the ways in which political and civic society operates but also should enact, practice or perform their understandings in ways that contribute to the stability and well-being of that society. The idea of active citizenship has been applied to numerous areas of public policy including welfare and community development (Raco 2009), but its most common use has been in relation to education (Mascherini and Hoskins 2009). Active citizenship is now promoted as an educational strategy across numerous nation-states, including Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and Canada. It is also the subject of strategies by multinational bodies such as the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the OECD and UNESCO. In Europe, this link between education and active citizenship took on fresh energy during the late 1980s, when attention began to be paid to the role of education in forming young citizens for the new EU. The purposes of this active citizen formation have remained fairly stable ever since: on the one hand, to foster young citizens who can accommodate and navigate the EU’s multiple identities and political arenas and promote its vision of social and cultural inclusion (Mascherini, Manca and Hoskins 2009); on the other, to secure the stability of the political process in the face of the increasing loss of faith in civic and political institutions which we describe in Chapter 1, especially in those nations most affected by dramatic economic downturns (see Hoskins et al. 2012).

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Some systems have mandated formal civics and citizenship education curricula: the UK’s Active Learning for Active Citizenship programme is one example. This builds on the ideas of active citizenship articulated by the seminal Advisory Group on the Teaching of Citizenship and Democracy in Schools report, usually referred to as the Crick Report, which laid out the mandate for citizenship education in England: We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting; to build on and to extend radically to young people the best in existing traditions of community involvement and public service, and to make them individually confident in finding new forms of involvement and action among themselves. (Crick 1998: 8)

Similar statements can be found in the Council of Europe’s Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education, which places importance on educating young people ‘to exercise and defend their democratic rights and responsibilities in society, to value diversity and to play an active part in democratic life, with a view to the promotion and protection of democracy and the rule of law’ (2010: 5–6). In Australia, the same purposes are described by the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, which, as mentioned in Chapter 5, serves as a blueprint for Australian schooling from 2008 to 2018. This emphasizes the preparation of young people to be ‘active and informed citizens’ who are able to help shape a more ‘democratic, equitable and just society’ (MCEETYA 2008: 4) as well as to engage in specific tasks for the common good such as ‘sustaining and improving natural and social environments’ (9). The national Australian Civics and Citizenship education curriculum, which we discussed in Chapter 5, echoes this construction, seeking to produce young citizens who ‘actively engage in practical citizenship activities within schools, in the community and online’ (ACARA 2012: 3). Kallio and Mitchell have recently argued that ‘the state system remains a powerful machine for conditioning citizenship and constituting citizens’ (2016: 26). The Australian curriculum makes it clear that schools are the agencies most likely to be charged with this constitution: Students in schools are citizens but they need opportunities to build their knowledge and understanding and experience to become active adult citizens. The school plays an essential role in the provision of opportunities for preparing active and informed citizens to ensure the continuation of Australia’s parliamentary, liberal democracy. (ACARA 2012: 5)

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Making the active citizen through schooling As we discussed in the Introduction to this book, the performative turn in the scholarship of citizenship suggests that contemporary citizenship is best understood in terms of the acts through which it is expressed. We have particularly acknowledged the work done by Isin in focusing our attention on young people’s acts of citizenship (2008) and, in so doing, allowing us to pay greater attention to the acts that constitute young people as citizens and the circumstances, contexts and conditions that support, promote, inspire or hinder those acts, including educational circumstances, contexts and conditions (Wood and Black 2014). The emphasis on active citizenship within education policy which we describe above begs numerous questions, including the questions of what acts of citizenship young people should be enabled to undertake, what (and whose) purposes these acts serve, and what resources for their enactment may be available to young people growing up within marginalized social groups or settings. This last question is one that we considered in greater depth in both Chapters 3 and 5, but it cannot be left out of our discussion here or, we would argue, out of any discussion about young people and their lived experiences of citizenship. Despite its broad transpolitical appeal, there continues to be a struggle over the precise meaning and purposes of active citizenship as well as a ‘struggle over what kinds of education practice should be pursued in its name’ (Black 2015: 384). The idea of active citizenship has its genesis in a number of quite different conceptual traditions and is subject to different definitions and interpretations, including some troublingly vague ones (Johns, Mansouri and Lobo 2015; Peterson and Bentley 2016). Within education, the most popular – and certainly the most romantic – of these interpretations is the critical one. This conceptualizes active citizenship as a movement for democratic and personal empowerment, one that has particular potential application and meaning for young people situated in economically marginalized or precarious locations. Citizenship education curricula which are inspired by this critical interpretation seek to prepare young people for a form of active citizenship that is, at its very least, ‘characterised by mutual respect and non-violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy’ (Hoskins 2006: 4). In many cases, they are also seen by educators as a means of promoting young people’s ability to ‘critically engage with and seek to affect the course of

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social events’ (Ross 2012: 7), to act as ‘agents who shape and change society’ (Onyx, Kenny and Brown 2012: 56), and even to carve out ‘new democratic public spheres’ (Giroux 2011: 331). Such curricula also construct active citizenship as an affective endeavour, one which enables young people to ‘shap[e] the terms and conditions of their own belonging’ (Cooper 2013: 8). These critical ideas and concerns with the relationship between citizenship and the better protection of human rights can still be found within some education policies and curricula. In Australia, for example, the Melbourne Declaration and the Civics and Citizenship curriculum, which has been developed under its auspices, inject a conscious social change and justice agenda into the purposes of Australian schooling. In Northern Ireland, the Local and Global Citizenship curriculum introduced in 2007 is ‘very much a child of the peace process’ (McSharry and Cusack 2016: 66), an educational attempt to instil common and uniting active citizenship values in young people in the face of the long shadow cast by The Troubles. Critical interpretations of active citizenship also continue to have meaning for some scholars. In their analysis of citizenship education programmes in the United States, Westheimer and Kahne mount an argument that schools should seek to produce not simply personally responsible or participatory citizens but ‘justice-oriented citizens’, who ‘question, debate, and change established systems and structures that reproduce patterns of injustice over time’ (2004: 240). Reflecting on citizenship education in Singapore, Andrews and Mycock make a similar distinction between the merely ‘good’ citizen and the active citizen, ‘who has highly developed critical faculties and who participates in civic action’ (2007: 19). In Australia, critical interpretations of active citizenship have informed a body of academic literature that advocates for the role of schooling in the creation of a more just society (e.g. Down 2004; Thomson and Holdsworth 2003). As we discussed in Chapter 5, the enactment of young people’s active citizenship is often at the level of the local community. In this chapter, we examine the implementation of the ways in which the school curriculum reinforces this promotion of young people’s local acts of citizenship. We also discuss the emergence of similar aims in the curriculum of global citizenship education (GCE). We touch on a number of local active citizenship programmes and curricula developed by committed Australian educators, as well as continued calls for GCE. We also reflect on what might be at stake for educators and citizenship education in the context of an increasingly regulated education system. First, however, we consider the goal of developing active citizenship

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and its relation to the intensified manifestations of neoliberalism that valorizes individual entrepreneurial freedoms, skills, private property rights, and free markets and trade, as described by Harvey (2005) earlier in this book.

The neoliberal colouring of citizenship For some scholars, active citizenship has either become an exhausted and moribund concept, or always been politically and theoretically suspect. For many of us, the strong neoliberal policy nexus between ideas of active citizenship and the ‘obligation-based visions of citizenship’ (Fuller, Kershaw and Pulkingham 2008: 158) that have shifted responsibility for social welfare and services from government to civil society render active citizenship an ambiguous notion at the very least. The UK’s Big Society initiative, for example, which we discussed in Chapter 5, led to a rush of activity to foster active citizenship by both the state and civil sector organizations (Bee and Pachi 2014). Despite the critical and idealistic interpretations of active citizenship which we describe above, there continues to be real concerns that education for active citizenship has either been colonized by neoliberal policy purposes or been constituted to support those purposes in the first place. These concerns centre on the employment of active citizenship as an educational means of constituting the young citizen as ‘a self-governing agent who is both capable and desirous of making reasoned and responsible choices about her or his own life as well as of acting in ways that are morally, socially and economically productive’ (Black 2012: 38). In Sweden, for example, Aldenmyr and her colleagues describe the ‘neoliberal colouring of the notion of active citizenship’ (2012: 257). Their mapping of Swedish education policy over the past two decades highlights its emphasis on active citizenship as one expression of the ‘skilled, strategic choice making’ or ‘self-making’ that is a hallmark of the contemporary consumer (Aldenmyr, Wigg and Olson 2012: 258). In Australia, echoing Cruikshank (1999), Bessant has long argued that successive governments are pursuing a ‘technology of citizenship’ (2003: 88), a governmental strategy that is designed to counter the risks associated with young people’s alleged absence from the democratic process and that heightens the regulation of young people in general and of specific groups of young people in particular, including those who are already most subject to policy scrutiny and intervention. When applied to such young people, the intervention of active citizenship education is typically designed to alter

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them, to remake them in the more desirable citizen image which the polity holds in its collective mind: As de Koning and her colleagues note, such citizenship strategies ‘invariably imply models of virtuous and deviant citizens, favoring particular subject-citizens over others, and suggesting ways to transform the latter into the former’ (2015: 121). In a neoliberal era, the virtuous and active citizen is one who does far more than engage in civic and political systems and processes: he or she is ‘a subject capable of tolerating the new and harsh conditions inspired by neoliberalism’ (Turner 2015: 18). Active citizenship strategies become particularly questionable when they are directed towards social groups such as migrants, minority groups and young people, who are simultaneously the most subjected to those harsh conditions and are viewed as democratically marginal. In the UK, strategies to boost the civic and political engagement of such groups have been a political priority since the end of the 1980s, although these have taken different forms depending on the government in power (Bee and Pachi 2014). The previous NLP government (1997–2010), for example, floated the idea of ‘earned citizenship’, which  would have required prospective migrants to undertake regulated community volunteering – an oxymoron if there ever was one – to prove their commitment to British values and public institutions (Yuval-Davis 2006). While this was dispensed with when NLP lost power, the idea of earned citizenship is taking on policy popularity in the United States, Canada and Australia. It has already gained a strong foothold in Italy, where the past decade has seen policies and strategies of active citizenship which purport to engage young migrants in political and civil society but which also appear to seek to regulate that engagement, equating citizenship with specific cultural and political hegemonies and specific ways of becoming Italian (Villano and Bertocchi 2014).

Enacting citizenship locally: Educational challenges and possibilities In highlighting these concerns, we certainly do not mean to suggest that schools cannot serve as genuinely enabling sites for young people’s active citizenship. The critical interpretation of active citizenship that we described earlier has a strong legacy within Australian schools, especially within schools where the geographical or locational context includes entrenched low socio-economic

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or economically precarious conditions. In such schools, where educators are haunted by the prospect of the kind of precarious youth futures that we discussed in Chapter 3, active citizenship is frequently and consciously employed as ‘an educational intervention that will endow students with full social and economic membership despite their circumstances’ (Black 2015: 382). In such sociogeographic circumstances, active citizenship becomes much more than an idea or ideology: it becomes a curriculum strategy to foster hope (Black forthcoming), a way of promoting attitudes and competencies that might better enable young people to avoid the fate of being ‘flawed consumers and unwanted workers’ (Giroux 2010: 1) and to position themselves instead as actors and agents capable of engineering personal and social change. In Chapter 5, we discussed the importance of the local community as a site for young people’s acts and experiences of citizenship and influence. Another example of local youth citizenship in practice comes from Black’s 2012 study of two Australian schools which introduced active citizenship curricula as part of their middle years programme. One of these schools, Valley High School (not its real name), is located in a small town around seventy kilometres from the state capital city of Melbourne. Ringed by thickly forested hills, it retains many of the characteristics of a small country town, including a sense of relative isolation and limited employment opportunities for its young people. Comparatively few local young people enter higher education and many move straight from school into relatively low-skilled and poorly paid employment. At the same time, the town is located within a rich valley filled with vineyards, expensive restaurants and art galleries that is a weekend mecca for well-heeled Melbournians and tourists. These parallel realities jostle uncomfortably within the valley. The school’s MAD programme was developed in 2009, partly in response to concerns about the educational engagement and achievement of middle years students – students in the crucial age group of between 12 and 15 – and partly as a conscious pedagogical strategy to strengthen students’ connections with the local community. The community was seen as an important site for young people’s learning and citizenship experiences, but it was also seen as a source of services, resources and protective connections, a resource that could boost the students’ sense of efficacy and hope for the future while it provides them with social and material forms of support. The principal explained: One of the things that we find about our kids is that they all want to get out of [Valley], because they see it as like the small rural town, and we were saying ‘you know what, that’s not right, you should be proud. People ... from all

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over the world want to come to [Valley]’. But they don’t see it that way. And part of the thing is we thought, well, they need to know: one, what’s in the community; and they also need to know what services are available to them as well. (Principal 2012)

As part of the programme, the entire Year 9 student cohort spent one semester each year designing and implementing citizenship projects. Students were first offered the choice of four thematic groups: Environment, Local and Global, Creative, and Sport and Recreation. They then formed smaller working groups to develop and implement their project, many of which focused on the local community. These included projects to attract funding for local reforestation and the installation of local solar power systems, projects through which students volunteer as sports coaches at the local primary school or at the local child care centre and animal shelter, initiatives to push for better public transport in the area or for improved local youth recreation facilities, projects to improve local community facilities such as the rail trail or to develop a community voice website, and projects to raise community awareness of issues facing young people such as bullying, drink-driving and drug use. The consensus of the educators involved was that this strategy of encouraging local citizenship through the curriculum was succeeding, as the principal explained: They knew their community, they had actually done something, be it raise money, influence something even to the point where they’ve talked to the local shire about incorporating a basketball court – doesn’t matter, that changed a plan and they achieved a significant outcome. (Principal 2012)

Participating students also described their belief that they had enacted their citizenship in ways that had concrete benefits for their communities. This belief brought them a sense of satisfaction and hope, as one student explained: I think that it helps us as well because it shows, if we see results then it shows that we actually can do something. Like we can make a difference in the community if we try hard enough and stick to it. (Student 2012)

Students also described their belief that a deeper transformation had occurred through their experience of the curriculum, one which extended the scope and degree of influence that they had, and that they were seen to have, within the school and the community. As another student explained, ‘it gives you the feeling that you’ve actually got a bit of power and a voice’ (Student 2012). The

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curriculum not only enabled these young people to enact their citizenship in the community, but it also encouraged them to see themselves as local changemakers, actors with the capacity to effect – or, at the very least, to seed – needed local change in the face of crumbling economic and social circumstances. It offered these young people an experience of hope, power and influence which may have been transient, but which gave them a sense of efficacy as citizens. As one student described, The idea was making the whole community branch out, make things a little bit better for something else, and they’ll make things better for something else. So that was the idea of the ripple effect, and we’re trying to do that into our own projects, to see if we can make something better and see if other people carry out our own ideas. (Student 2012)

Such experiences highlight, once again, the affective dimension of young people’s citizenship experiences. Wood has described similar experiences among young people involved in active citizenship curricula in New Zealand schools. As she notes, these citizenship experiences are both situated and affective. They are ‘forged within the specificities of particular locations, and grounded in emotional attitudes to one’s neighbourhood’ (2013: 56). There is no shortage of other anecdotes about the value of active citizenship curricula for the young people who are their subjects. Both Zyngier (2015) and Heggart (2015), for example, have described Australian active citizenship curricula through which young people have gained a greater understanding of social justice issues and have had a taste, at the very least, of constructing projects and strategies to address some of those issues. While Heggart in particular retains concerns about the depth of understanding about the root causes of social injustice which the young people in question have been able to achieve through the curriculum, the impression which emerges from such studies, like that of Black above, is that education offers opportunities for the development of valuable and meaningful citizenship acts and attitudes which may otherwise not occur. Some young people themselves make a similar argument for the enabling nature of education in fostering the beliefs and capabilities that are required for social change-making. In Chapter 5, we reflected on our interviews with the members of the City of Casey Youth Action Committee. Like the young people at Valley High School, these young people regarded themselves as local changemakers in a geographical area where employment and other economic resources were severely limited. At least one saw education as a key resource for the

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development of their own and other young people’s active citizenship capacities as well as for their hopes for a more enabled future: I still think education is really important. I mean most people, most young people that you see volunteering and doing things and using their own time and energy to really create change, not all of them but a big majority of them are from middle-class white families with education and that’s just a fact and I think that like education is a huge step upwards in being able to change your own life and therefore be able to change other’s lives and bring change back to your own community as well. (Youth Action Committee member 2015)

Fostering global aspirations: Education for global citizenship While our discussion above has focused on the enactment of citizenship at the local level, the aspirations that attend the project of education for developing active youth citizenship in the West are large ones. There is a relatively long history of world studies that has sought to develop an ‘awareness that we are actually living in one global world, and what happens in one part of the globe may have substantial impacts elsewhere’ (Lee and Leung 2006: 68) with associated responsibilities as citizens of local, national and global communities. GCE is another approach that seeks to promote the development of ‘knowledge, skills, values and attitudes learners need for securing a world which is more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable … at local and global levels’ (UNESCO 2014: 9–15). It aspires to prepare young people to view themselves as active citizens at a scale that extends beyond national boundaries and that has a potential impact elsewhere in the world (Lee and Leung 2006). This is done through the exploration of issues of global as well as local or national concern and by injecting ‘elements of an emerging global civic culture’ into the curriculum (Tawil 2014). As an extension of this, GCE is also concerned with the cultivation of cosmopolitan values and perspectives. These typically acknowledge the impact of globalization and the resultant interconnectedness and interdependencies of individuals beyond their local communities and nation-states. This aspect of GCE seeks to enable the development of young citizens who ‘identify with peoples from diverse cultures throughout the world … while maintaining attachments and roots to their family and community cultures’ (Banks 2008: 134), who have ‘a deep understanding of the need to take action and make decisions to help

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solve the world’s difficult problems’ and who are willing and able to ‘participate in ways that will enhance democracy and promote equality and social justice in their cultural communities, nations, and regions, and in the world’ (Banks 2008: 134–5). One of the arguments – and aspirations – underpinning GCE curricula is that these combined factors make cosmopolitanism ‘a necessity’ (Tawil 2013: 2). Cosmopolitanism is derived from a Kantian notion of world citizenship. This view of citizenship is grounded in the ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another’ (Kant 1795). While the concept of cosmopolitanism also has many other strands of thought attached to it, the notion that we focus on here is one informed by a moral view of social justice that incorporates universalistic principles while acknowledging that dialogue between cultures will inevitably require the use of different vocabularies emanating from diverse local perspectives. This is the argument made by advocates such as Tawil (2014), who suggests that a moral cosmopolitanism is needed in response to the intensification of globalization and its ‘common challenges for all societies and countries around the world’. Tawil’s approach is based on a ‘principle of universality [that] is fundamental to humanist, humanitarian, and human rights perspectives where, in addition to being members of local communities and citizens of nation-states, individuals are also seen as members of a global community of human beings’ (2013: 3). Integral to this cosmopolitan approach is ‘an acknowledgement of difference, a commitment to pluralism, and to the principles of respect for diversity’ (Tawil 2013: 3). In a similar vein, Appiah writes that recognition of universality acknowledges that ‘every human being has certain minimum entitlements – many of them expressed in the vocabulary of human rights; and that it is also the obligation of every human being to do his or her fair share in making sure that everybody gets what they are entitled to’ (2008: 95). This latter obligation to others includes those from dissimilar cultural backgrounds. It is thus moral in nature. It seeks to move beyond the individualistic notion of duty which accompanies the classical liberal notion of citizenship to the Kantian concern for the ‘stranger’ or ‘Other’ which we mention above. As Hannerz (1990) suggests, cosmopolitan views are interpreted differently (and occasionally ambiguously) according to local values. There emerges a kind of spectrum of engagement with the Other, from that of ‘spectator’ to a more actively engaged ‘cosmopolitan’.

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But despite arguments for the necessity to adopt a moral cosmopolitan view in response to globalization, the basic goal of developing active citizenship itself comes up against persistent and very real constraints closer to home, as well as intensified manifestations of neoliberalism that valorize individual entrepreneurial freedoms, skills, private property rights, and free markets and trade as described by Harvey (2005) earlier in this book. Neoliberalism presents a kind of counter-narrative to the aspirations of advocates of cosmopolitanism, pushing young people’s lived experiences of citizenship in a different direction.

Enabling or overly optimistic? The evidence is, then, that some active citizenship curricula can be genuinely enabling for the specific young people involved in them, fostering hope, confidence and recognition in environments where these affective resources may be in short supply, but this evidence cannot be taken at face value. Harris argues that ‘even well-intentioned efforts to enhance and defend young people’s entitlement to legitimately inhabit the category of citizen ought to be interrogated as part of the circuitry of citizenship technology’ (2012: 143–4). The critical tradition which we mention earlier has long been criticized for its romantic naivety, including its tendency to overlook the power relations that underlie attempts to construct young people as active citizens (e.g. Walsh and Black 2011). Active citizenship curricula and interventions have also been criticized for what McLeod calls their ‘triumphalist hubris’ (2011: 184): their inference that ‘young people have inherently or latently agentic identities that await only the right pedagogical conditions to emerge’ (Black 2012: 48). Less frequently, they have been subjected to the question which we have previously asked (Black 2012; Walsh, Black and Berman 2013): Do critical interpretations of active citizenship present an overly optimistic narrative of young people’s agency and capacity to provoke social change? As Miles notes, this question may be hard for youth sociologists to ask as ‘it goes against a long-established belief system to deny the ability of young people to make a difference’ (2015: 104), but it remains an important aspect of the scrutiny which technologies of active citizenship require, even when prompted by the good intentions of committed educators and critical pedagogues.

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These intentions require even more scrutiny in regard to the kind of educational practice we have mentioned above, where the geographical and relational context is that of economic precarity. Active citizenship as an educational strategy has done little to address the social disadvantage and marginalization of growing numbers of young people (Bessant 2016; Black 2012). As Black has argued, such young people ‘are promised the ability to contribute to the project of social justice even while they themselves have little access to it’ (2012: 221). Instead, educational strategies and systems tend to ‘obfuscate structural inequalities’ by emphasizing young people’s ‘autonomy, self-regulation and individual responsibility for outcomes’ (Pearce and Wood 2016: 3), the same neoliberal strategies outlined in Chapter 4. There are also practical constraints to educating for active citizenship. Despite the calls for GCE to be embedded in the curriculum (Lee and Leung 2006), many school-wide and cross-curricular strategies come up against the limitations of teaching within crowded curricula and working within limited pedagogical frameworks, as well as the constraints of national curricula (UNESCO 2014). Research has shown that teachers in Shanghai and Hong Kong, for example, experience difficulties teaching topics related to global citizenship (Lee and Leung 2006). These topics can be complex to address: they can be seen to be abstract and hard to integrate into local curricula. Teachers can lack the time, experience and resources to develop or adapt these topics within the curriculum, which is in part why there have been repeated calls for more professional development in GCE during the last thirty years (for example, see Pike and Selby 1988; Steiner 1996; Marshall 2005). And where international exchanges of teachers are valuable (UNESCO 2014), resourcing these is beyond the scope of many schools. These constraints emanate from national and local levels of policy and schooling. Any appraisal of the success of strategies for active citizenship education should therefore take account of the experience of educators charged with developing or delivering the curricula. It should also take account of the experience of the young people who are the subjects of those curricula. In the flurry of policy statements and curricula to foster young people’s active citizenship, these perspectives are frequently overlooked or omitted. As well as navigating the challenges we have discussed above, the educators who design and conduct the kind of active citizenship programmes and curricula we describe in this chapter often do so at considerable personal cost. They frequently devote considerable professional and personal time, effort

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and creativity to their development and implementation in the increasingly standardized environment of neoliberalism that is rapidly narrowing the pedagogical and curricular space. Such educators may find themselves at odds with the dominant pedagogical culture of the school itself, ‘caught between policy and the hard place of pedagogical practice, with its attendant emotional risks’ (Black 2015: 383). They may find themselves forced to engage with, and to help their students navigate, confronting social realities, such as those that persist in Northern Ireland (McSharry and Cusack 2016). Especially in geographical locations where socio-economic exclusion is an issue, critical educators may also find themselves caught up in ‘the ambiguities of teaching for active citizenship’ (Black 2015: 382), promoting young people’s citizenship agency in an environment where little economic agency or opportunity may be actually available. In contexts such as this, the curriculum of active citizenship can put undue pressure on individual educators to promote forms of social change that are unlikely. As Black has previously argued, Critical pedagogy promotes the argument that the teacher is one of the most powerful potential drivers of social change, yet even the best teacher efforts and intentions cannot redress the larger policy and socio-geographic forces that shape the culture of schools and the experience of young people within them. (2015: 385)

Despite this, there is a surprising dearth of educational inquiry into the motivations, beliefs and experiences of educators in regard to the curriculum and pedagogy of active citizenship in schools. Of that which does exist, some suggest a disjunction between the dictates of education policy and the attitudes of those educators charged with its implementation. Cleaver and her colleagues (2005), for example, describe the behaviour of educators who espouse the principle or employ the language of active citizenship without actually enacting it in the classroom, or who else enact it in dutiful or cursory ways with little commitment to its principles. Other studies describe educators’ scepticism about the value or validity of active citizenship as an educational purpose, or their concern about its potential to change the classroom dynamic in ways that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable (Deuchar 2009; Rudduck 2006). Zyngier’s recent analysis of the citizenship understandings of pre-service or trainee educators in Australia is not reassuring, suggesting as it does that they have ‘a largely thin conception of democracy’ (2016: 799, original emphasis). This speaks to another concern about active citizenship as an educational

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intervention. Van Deth notes that ‘images of the “good citizen” are, by definition, normative statements about desirable orientations and behaviours of individuals in a democratic polity’ (2009: 176). Similar critiques have been made about the way in which active citizenship is constituted within school curricula: namely, that it is primarily expressed through acts which are ‘in support of the state and its policies’ (Yarwood 2014: 97), which promote ‘law-abiding behaviour, service to the community and the national interest’ (Down 2004: 22), and which do not challenge the nature of the democratic process, the wider social order or the role of the young citizen within that process or order. Critiques of citizenship education policies in the UK, Canada, Sweden and Australia, for example, have described their construction of young people’s active citizenship as ‘fixed and pre-defined’ (Aldenmyr, Wigg and Olson 2012: 267), to be enacted within conventional processes, by means of a predetermined set of social behaviours, and in the service of a normative social and political order (Black 2012; Staeheli, Attoh and Mitchell 2013).

Schooling’s failure to keep pace with young people’s imaginaries of citizenship A third question relates to the degree to which young people’s own understandings and imaginaries of citizenship are reflected in the policy and curriculum of active citizenship education. Most analyses suggest that the curriculum of active citizenship is keeping poor pace with young people’s own conceptions of what matters within citizenship. In England, for example, Gholami observes that the national citizenship education curriculum is ‘overly nationalistic, normative and “fact-based”’, that it is ‘failing to engage the dimensions of young people’s identities which they experience as deeply meaningful’ (2016: 1) and that it is resulting in their ‘indifference and disillusionment’ (2016: 2) rather than in the greater civic and political loyalties and affiliations which are its underlying purpose. Ridley and Fulop’s critique of the interpretation of active citizenship within Hungarian education policy and curricula raises similar concerns. They argue that the emphasis within the formal curriculum on ‘the dutiful “improvement” and “building” of the country’ meshes poorly with young Hungarian people’s more critical understandings of their own citizenship, with their emphases on social justice and change (2014: 37).

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Findings like these highlight the affective aspects of citizenship, but they also suggest that normative active citizenship education curricula are affectively blind: they overlook the ‘many nuances of young people’s identities, some of which are affective and non-verbal, all of which are deemed to be significant, are more or less untouched, unacknowledged and even dismissed by statutory citizenship education’ (Gholami 2016: 5). Even where the active citizenship curriculum is perceived by young people as valid and enabling, it often has a tenuous relationship to the rest of the curriculum, and to the project of schooling overall. The MAD curriculum which we described earlier in this chapter was an example of this. The curriculum offered students the opportunity for far greater influence, recognition and autonomy as citizens than was normally available to them within the normative experience of schooling, but that opportunity was both geographically and temporally limited. Young people could access these important affective resources while they were located, in time and in space, within the framework of the MAD program, but these resources evaporated as soon as regular classes resumed, with their much more normative pedagogies and teacher-student relations: they were ‘gone with the ringing of the school bell’ (Black 2012: 174). Conversations with these same young people showed that the MAD curriculum had not significantly altered the way that they perceived themselves within the classroom context. For them, school was still school, with its frequently deficit assumptions of young people and their capabilities. As one young person stated, ‘It hasn’t really changed my opinion of school or anything like that’ (Student 2012).

Active citizenship under the radar of conventional understandings Such studies also highlight the relational nature of active citizenship for young people, especially for those whose cultural and family experiences may be poorly reflected in the dominant discourses and curricula of active citizenship. As Black has previously argued, young people’s citizenship ‘can only be understood as a relational participation, one that depends on the discursive context in which they are located as well as on the authorizations, opportunities and relationships that accompany that context’ (2012: 221). In England, Gholami’s interviews with young people, which we mentioned above, describe the poor link between the active citizenship education they have

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received through the national curriculum and key aspects of their own lives. As one young woman tells her, ‘There are things which matter to me and my family – like our religion, for example … these things are not really properly talked about [in citizenship lessons], you know?’ (2016: 5). Similar insights come from the studies by Patton (2014) and Harris and Roose (2014) which we described in Chapter 2. Harris and Roose found a tendency for young Australian Muslims to focus their active citizenship efforts on their local social networks – ‘family, friends, community, colleagues, fellow students and sometimes religious, sport or youth group peers’ (2014: 13), but they also describe the under-recognition of such young people’s civic contributions by the wider society and polity. At the same time, they identify the pressure that some young people feel, not only to contribute as active citizens, but also to be seen to contribute. One young man interviewed by Harris and Roose sums up this pressure in these terms: ‘Be a good Muslim, engage with the community and make them think you’re a good Muslim too because you’re a good Muslim and a good Muslim engages with the community’ (2014: 15). Along similar lines, Patton describes the ‘imaginative ways young Australian Muslims fashion themselves into citizens’ (2014: 107), ways that bridge and bring together the expectations and ideals of active citizenship which derive from their religious education and family practices with what they understand to be the expectations of the Australian polity. This bridging work can be difficult affective labour: as Patton points out, these young people do not feel that their role and contributions as active citizens is readily recognized or appreciated by the dominant culture or its institutions. For them, citizenship is an affective struggle through which they ‘assert their citizenship in the face of a community that is reluctant or outright unwilling to accept them as fully fledged members of the polis’ (2014: 118). Mansouri and Kirpitchenko’s work with young migrants of African, Arabicspeaking and Pacific Island backgrounds in Australia (2016) provides further evidence that many young people may define themselves as active citizens in different or new ways to what is implied in the school curriculum. These young people belong to what may be among the most marginalized groups in Australian society. They have a keen desire to participate and contribute actively to the life and well-being of their own families or ethnic groups. They also have a strong sense of ‘citizenship responsibility’ (315) in relation to their own communities and neighbourhoods. Many are also interested in assuming leadership roles within those communities. Like the young people that we began to discuss

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in Chapters 1 and 2, what they do not want to do is to limit this citizenship responsibility to formal and conventional civic modes and sites. Instead, they want to make their own voluntary contributions in the spheres that matter to them. As we observed in Chapter 1, these contributions are rarely recognized by government policies or data collections. They also tend to fall below the radar of school programmes and curricula. This policy blindness to the citizenship values and acts of culturally diverse young people has wider implications. In Chapter 2, we suggested that many young migrants to Australia have to actively work to feel that they belong to Australian society. The evidence is that recent young arrivals are, in fact, less likely than other groups of young people to engage as active citizens in the wider community beyond their own ethnic or religious commitments (Centre for Multicultural Youth 2014), but this is likely to reflect their feelings of marginalization or exclusion from unfamiliar political, civic and cultural processes than an inherent lack of interest. The risk is that policy strategies to address this alleged lack of engagement further embed the characterization of young people as an homogenous collective, and of specific groups of young people in particular, as democratically disengaged. Reflecting on the experiences of young people from Muslim transnational communities, Abu El-Haj and her colleagues have argued that we need ‘new educational approaches to developing engaged and active young citizens working for a more just and peaceful future for nations across the globe’ (2011: 55). This is true for all aspects of citizenship education, and for all young learners and citizens. Promoting normative ideas and normative acts or expressions of citizenship through school education risks overlooking the democratic commitment that many young people feel and wish to express. It also reduces the nature of citizenship to something that is far more constrained than the way in which many young people understand and demonstrate it.

Conclusion It is a widespread policy expectation that ‘schools address and help young people to understand global issues including climate change, resource depletion and the world financial system’ (Starkey 2012: 33). Following this, Starkey suggests, ‘cosmopolitan citizenship education with a utopian vision has the potential to challenge existing structures, whether of the school or of

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wider society. It is a programme that cannot guarantee control of its outcomes’ (2012: 33). It is also one that faces the many and deep constraints that we have outlined in this chapter. The dissonance between the idea of active citizenship and the reality of young people’s experience of full membership and participation in Australian (and global) society takes place from the level of policy through to everyday life. This sends conflicting messages about the value of young people’s citizenship. In particular, there remain deep fissures between the idea of active citizenship and young people’s lived experience in contexts where socio-economic or cultural marginalization is already an issue. This compels us as educators to rethink what we mean by the project of active citizenship. It suggests the need to better articulate exactly what citizenship means to young people, and the role of schools in this. Schools can provide young people with the first challenging discussions and explorations of citizenship that actively includes and values their contributions. They can equip young people with a powerful language of possibility – the possibility of feeling included and valued, of participating in the nation’s political, cultural and economic development, of making change where necessary and, as active citizens, of leading healthy and happy lives. In so doing, they can also help to protect what we argue are the entitlements of citizenship for young people, including the right to express and enact their citizenship in the ways in which they choose and that have meaning for them. GCE, like much other education for active citizenship, is founded on a belief in openness (Skirbekk, Potancokova and Stonawski 2013). But pursuing the cosmopolitan idea of ‘welcoming the stranger’ is arguably a luxury available only to those with security and social and economic resources and mobility. One study of cosmopolitanism (Skrbis and Woodward 2007: 745) suggests that people ‘pick and choose’ more acceptable parts of cosmopolitanism ‘rather than the more difficult aspects of openness such as showing hospitality to strangers, or accepting human interest ahead of perceived national interests’. As outlined earlier in this chapter, GCE advocates a promise of global democracy (Lee and Leung 2006), an aspiration that seems all the more distant given the divisive and problematic experiences of democracy at local levels outlined throughout this book, within and beyond Australia. None of these promises and ideals can be fulfilled, however, unless citizenship education in schools addresses the realities of young people’s experience (Black 2017). A thorough knowledge and understanding of democratic processes and

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government, political heritage and judicial system remain an important basis for the maintenance of any meaningfully active citizenship. At the same time, the design and delivery of effective citizenship education must recognize the distance which many young people feel – not only from political decisionmaking and the formal systems and structures on which it currently relies – but from the expectations and ideas of citizenship held and propagated by the dominant civic culture. It must enable young people to recognize themselves and their own cultural and local experiences and acts of citizenship in the curriculum. It must also create spaces for young people to participate, deliberate and be heard as citizens in ways that resonate and have authenticity for them and their lives within their own communities as well as in ways that recognize and promote their participation rights as citizens. This is a fundamental challenge for democratic systems: to open the doors to all young people in a way that recognizes and supports their capacity – and entitlement – for enacted citizenship across existing political, cultural, economic and other spheres of life, as well as their capacity to act for the common good and human rights in the face of global issues such as ecological destruction and economic instability (Walsh forthcoming). It is a challenge that extends beyond schooling to young people’s lives in general.

Conclusion

This book has explored the complex and contested nature of citizenship in contemporary society. Citizenship in liberal democracies such as Australia is imbued with qualities and aspirations such as active participation in the political, social, cultural and economic domains of life. It is associated with a range of rights and other entitlements. It is also intimately entwined with identity and experiences of local, national and global membership and belonging. National and local political cultures can play a powerful role in shaping these aspirations and experiences and in upholding or curtailing the rights associated with them. When it comes to young people, citizenship is also imbued with both hope and concern. In scholarship, public commentaries and policymaking, we routinely see concerns about young people’s supposed democratic disengagement alongside parallel discourses in which young people are seen to be sources of hope for a better civic, economic and political life. This hope brings with it a projection of futurity: young people are seen to (and will inevitably) carry forward the mantle of responsibility for tackling the big issues of our time. This mantle of responsibility is now being carried into increasingly unstable and uncertain economic, political and cultural terrains. As labour markets become more precarious, as we have seen in Chapter 3, social safety nets are being stripped away in the name of austerity – even in countries that are faring relatively well, such as Australia. As cultural tensions are heightened by terrorism, the migration of refugees and asylum seekers and flows of international labour, there has also been a turning away from social policies of diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism, as we have seen in Chapter 2. As part of this – as we have discussed previously – some politicians have in recent years called for the ‘end of the age of entitlement’. We have seen how punitive neoliberal policy responses following this call can compound forms of economic, political and cultural exclusion experienced by large numbers of young people while promoting the message that young people should assume greater responsibility for creating a future as individuals without reliance

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on social safety nets or stable pathways to work. In Australia, this is evident in government proposals such as Work for the Dole and the Youth Jobs PaTH internship programme outlined in Chapter 3. Such responses reflect a wider attempt at embedding and reinforcing a new social contract that responsibilizes young individuals (and their families and carers) while viewing young people in deficit and suspicious ways (Walsh 2017b; forthcoming). They also valorize particular forms of youth participation and political expression, while ignoring, undermining and removing others, as we discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. At the same time, as Wood and Black have noted (forthcoming), new notions of citizenship are emerging which challenge the traditional nexus between citizenship and the nation-state. We have recognized and drawn on some of these new notions, but our argument in this book is that the role of the state and its associated political climate and strategies remain central to shaping young people’s experiences and feelings of citizenship and belonging. If anything, we suggest that the current era is reinforcing and solidifying the relationship between citizenship and geography, as well as the affective, relational and temporal dimensions of young people’s citizenship. In this conclusion to our book, we reflect further on some key aspects of these dimensions and what they may mean for young people’s citizenship after the age of entitlement. We also return to one of our central concerns within this book, one that is also largely mediated by the nation-state and which has enormous implications for young people’s citizenship: the relationship between citizenship and rights, and the changing nature of that relationship within the current political climate in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.

The lasting influence of place: How the political context shapes youth citizenship We start with Australia. Despite its rich cultural heritage and high historic level of support for multiculturalism (Markus 2016), contemporary Australian policy has a preoccupation with exclusion. In 2015, towards the end of May, two extraordinary things happened in Australian federal politics. First, details of a usually confidential meeting of the executive Cabinet of senior ministers led by the then prime minister Tony Abbott were leaked to the mainstream media. The leak was particularly detailed, and focused on one topic of discussion that was reportedly raised without notice towards the end of the meeting: the then

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immigration minister, Peter Dutton, proposed that ‘he should have the power, at his own discretion, to strip an Australian of his or her citizenship’ if that person was ‘suspected of terrorism-related offences’ (Hartcher 2015). Some Cabinet members reportedly objected to this elevation of discretionary power, which would effectively bypass the rule of law, the use of evidence and right to trial. ‘Isn’t that what we have courts for?’ the deputy leader of the National Party reportedly asked – ‘If you don’t have enough evidence to charge them in a court, how can you have enough evidence to take away their citizenship?’ Somewhat chillingly, the immigration minister allegedly replied: ‘That’s the point… . You don’t need too much evidence. It’s an administrative decision.’ The relationship between citizens, the state and the rule of law that binds them is fragile. As unsettling as this proposal was, it arguably reflects a deeper pragmatism that is rooted in the formation of Australian democracy, one which notably has a constitution but no formal Bill of Rights. A major influence on this formation was Bentham’s liberal philosophy (Collins 1985), particularly the ‘utilitarian standards’ of efficacy (will it work?) and plurality (have you got the numbers?) in governmental decision-making. Australians, writes Collins, ‘are people proud in their pragmatism, sceptical of speculative and abstract schemes, wedded to “common sense”’ (1985: 156–7). This pragmatism is evident in the distinctive nature of Australian federalism, cabinet and the constitution, which was adopted in some ways as a practical response to circumstances (Collins 1985). It is also evident in the continuing tensions in how and when implied rights are articulated (or bypassed) in relation to the rule of law. Returning to our discussion of racism in Chapter 2, it was in the context of the former Abbott government that the then attorney-general George Brandis announced that ‘people do have a right to be bigots’ (Griffiths 2014). He said this in the context of efforts by the Abbott government to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Vilification Act, which represented a neoliberal attempt to detach issues of racism from the rule of law, and to override implied cultural rights in the name of freedom of speech. This right to freedom of speech was used selectively and driven by a political agenda, such as Brandis’s evocation of right-wing media commentator Andrew Bolt’s legal prosecution, as a motivation to repeal Section 18C. The distinctive nature of the Australian polity highlights the importance of understanding the political context in which young people’s citizenship is articulated and experienced. The dynamics of exclusion highlighted earlier in

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this book also suggest deeper tensions in relation to Australia’s responses to increasing cultural diversity and the challenges raised by globalization such as terrorism and migration. In turn, these point to tensions emerging beyond Australia in relation to how citizens are perceived and treated as subjects of governance and technologies of citizenship and in relation to who is deemed to belong and who is excluded. Though complex, the role of nation-states continues to be central to the realization (and deprivation) of citizenship. This role has been made particularly clear by the events of 2016, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States, which suggest that some nation-states are shifting towards a more insular outlook. The effects of this insularity on young people and their citizenship need to be understood within the wider context of the refugee crisis to illustrate the scope and scale of human exclusion that characterizes the current era. Globally, at time of writing, forced displacement has reached record numbers. Enflamed by domestic conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria, 65.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by 2015 ‘as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations’. At least 10 million of these people were stateless (UNHCR 2015b). This was 5.8 million more than in 2014 (59.5 million). In recent years, one in every 122 humans has been forced to flee their homes (Nebehay 2015). What we are seeing throughout the world is a tipping away from inclusive ideas of citizenship and its associated human rights, including the right to mobility and the provision of safe asylum, and towards wall-building (literally, in the case of Trump) and other forms of exclusion. One effect of this is that certain nation-states are carrying a disproportionate burden of migrants – specifically refugees. In 2015, for example, Lebanon, hosted the largest number of refugees in relation to its national population, with 183 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants. Jordan and Nauru ranked second and third, respectively (UNHCR 2015b). For many of these refugees, exile is permanent, with voluntary returns to home at their lowest levels in more than 30 years. In mid-2015, 84,000 people returned home voluntarily compared to 107,000 at the same time a year earlier (Nebehay 2015). Around 3.2 million people awaited decision on their application for asylum at the year’s end (UNHCR 2015a). In the same year, at least 680,000 people in Europe were without citizenship of any country (Osborne 2015). Significant numbers of children and young people are affected by these shifts. UNHCR (2014) figures suggest that at the end of 2014, children below the age of 18 made up 51 per cent of all refugees across the world. This was an increase of 10 per cent from 2009 and the highest figure in over a decade.

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The effects of this are still rippling across Europe on a scale hitherto unseen in the world, and continue to have impacts as far afield as Australia. The Introduction to this book noted the flight of refugees across Europe in search of sanctuary, who have been met with antipathy by pro-nationalist protesters (McLaughlin 2015). In the UK, specific groups of migrants and refugees, such as those from the Middle East, have been proposed as targets of rejection (Wintour 2015). Other economic migrants, such as those coming to the UK from Europe seeking low-skilled work, are also viewed with suspicion. These alarming developments remind us not only of the importance but also the fragility of human rights. They also remind us that the legal status and the legal entitlements of citizenship continue to be important. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child includes an obligation by governments to grant nationality to any child born within their countries who would otherwise be stateless; however, according to one report, ‘Few EU countries have adopted this principle into domestic law and those that have consistently fail to implement it’ (Osborne 2015). Some of the children of refugees do not even know that they are stateless. As the same report explains, ‘often the children realize they do not have legal citizenship only when they reach adulthood and find they cannot legally work, marry, own property, vote or even graduate from school’ (Osborne 2015). Despite these and many other stories, successive Australian governments over the last decade have been reluctant to alter policy to better accommodate refugees. Australia is one of the most prosperous countries in the world and one whose populace is historically profoundly shaped by migration, yet the former Abbott government positioned exclusion as a centrepiece of its election campaign (Abbott 2013): slogans such as ‘Stop the boats’ appealed to popular fears that Australia could be overrun by ‘illegal immigrants’ such as those seeking asylum. Having transferred asylum seekers to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, the previous Australian ALP-led government also froze the assessment of claims to refugee status under the ‘no advantage’ principle. Legislation was then passed in 2013 that effectively excised the entire Australian mainland from its previous migration zone as part of this wider campaign to deter the arrival of asylum seekers. Prior to the legislation, asylum seekers who got to the Australian mainland by boat could not be sent offshore for immigration processing to Nauru or Manus Island. The move to take Australia off the map sought to further remove any possible legal advantage gained by asylum seekers arriving on Australian soil (Barlow

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2013). According to a National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention (Australian Human Rights Commission 2014: 12), this left ‘about 31,000 asylum seeker families and children in a legal black hole in which their rights and dignity have been denied, in some cases for years’. This policy has been maintained by successive governments, keeping asylum seekers in an effective limbo in which a return to their country of origin is unviable and the achievement of Australian citizenship is impossible. In late 2015, Australia held 104 children in immigration detention facilities, along with 331 children in community detention (Australian Human Rights Commission 2015). As we have seen, it has also been mooted that Australians found to be engaged in terrorist-related activity be stripped of their citizenship. (We shall return to this below.) What makes Australia striking is the particularly punitive nature of its border control measures and how they represent one extreme response to globalization. These measures have received international criticism for their harsh nature and potential violation of human rights, including ‘persistent discrimination against asylum seeking and refugee children in all areas’ (Amnesty International 2016: 32), but little has changed as a result. While the mandatory detention of asylum seekers has been subject to numerous protests throughout Australia, the egregious denial of their basic rights was virtually a non-issue in the 2016 Australian federal election. Such policies represent more than a closing of borders: they represent the denial of citizenship and human rights to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

The role of education for democratic citizenship These developments are daunting in their scale and their effects, but they also represent a challenge for education. As educators, we need to keep interrogating the current role of education in relation to young people’s citizenship and in light of the themes discussed above and throughout this book. The geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions of youth citizenship discussed in previous chapters lend themselves to a more multifaceted view of that citizenship, one that could enrich how educators engage in the formal curricula of civics and citizenship education as well as in modes of teaching and learning that link young people to local and global issues, contexts and places and that enable them to enact their citizenship in ways that are genuinely meaningful to them. It could also enable greater recognition of the ways in which many young people are already acting as citizens in the modes and sites of citizenship action

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that they prefer. Young people’s active citizenship is a target of policy, yet the self-made, entrepreneurial modes of youth citizenship that we discussed in Chapter 4, alongside the youth volunteering that we discussed in Chapter 1, are rarely recognized within the culture of schooling, and rarely reflected or even acknowledged within citizenship education programmes. We need to keep interrogating whether and how young people’s understandings and experiences of citizenship are reflected in the curriculum and policy of citizenship education (as argued in Chapter 6). More importantly still, we need to keep interrogating whether and how the school curriculum recognizes or reflects the local relationships, cultural affiliations and responsibilities that make up young people’s everyday experience as citizens, especially where – as we discussed in Chapter 2 – those young people are migrants, refugees or members of culturally diverse communities. This has to happen at a policy level. It is our belief that individual educators can and do have a major positive impact on young people’s lives, but they can only do so much. In Chapter 6, we touched on some of the challenges and risks that face educators who champion innovative citizenship education curricula in the face of conflicting or competing educational discourses and priorities (see also Black 2015). However, the challenges that face the project of educating young people for citizenship in the so-called post-entitlement era run deeper than these. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the mobilities and immobilities of young people are characterized by fluidity, precarity and change underpinned by deep structural fissures. A key question here is how educators and education systems respond to these. Aside from a gradual severing of the opportunity bargain outlined in Chapter 3, a constellation of factors related to geography, ethnicity and socio-economic status continue to be linked to young people’s social mobility or stasis. For example, completion rates at university are lower for Indigenous students, as well as students who live remotely or are from low socio-economic backgrounds (Edwards and McMillan 2015; Moodie 2016). But as we have seen, even those who graduate face ongoing challenges in gaining secure and/or desirable work. Factors such as globalized labour markets and technological change compound these challenges (Walsh 2016a). Citizenship is, in part, about economic participation. It is underpinned by the promise of education as a means to that participation and the security of membership which it brings. So what happens when the nature of work changes? Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Given the rapid technological change

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outlined in Chapter 3, such as the automation of labour, some are speculating about the possibility that human labour as a core feature of life may become obsolete (Thompson 2015). This raises an interesting question: What would be the purpose of mass education in a world without work? This question strikes at the very heart of what education has arguably always been about: the development of young people’s ‘intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing’ (MCEETYA 2008: 4). Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, suggests that ‘we used to teach people to be free. Now we teach them to work’ (Thompson 2015). Education is not solely about economic imperatives: it has a moral purpose, one that continues to motivate teachers throughout the world. We shall return to this moral purpose below. This book, as we have stated earlier, is in part an argument for a more nuanced understanding of youth citizenship. We have just suggested that this could inform new educational approaches. It would also benefit policymakers in general. Recent years in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and parts of Europe have all seen something of a paucity of strong leadership in favour of strengthening social cohesion, citizenship and human rights. In 2013, a former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, responded to an earlier discussion by Walsh (2013) about how to respond to racism (which we revisited in Chapter 2), with the observation that ‘racism demands action from all of us.’ The lead, he argued, ‘needs to come from the top’ (Fraser 2013). This holds true for many of the issues raised throughout this book. But leadership on these issues has been inconsistent or even punitive in responding to the challenges and opportunities faced by young people. This has only been compounded by the policy argument that the age of entitlement is over.

The end of entitlement? As we wrote at the start of this book, it was during a controversial budget speech in 2014 that the former Australian prime minister Abbott’s appointed treasurer, Joe Hockey, proclaimed an end to the age of entitlement (Hockey 2014). Abbott was deposed as prime minister the following year. His government rose and fell during the course of researching and writing this book. But it was that government and Hockey’s proclamation that prompted us to ask about what entitlement meant and its implications for youth citizenship.

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Our reference to the end of the age of entitlement throughout this book is double-edged: on the one hand, it refers to the erosion of rights to education, housing, and an adequate standard of living, health and culture, as well as the loss of legal rights such as the right to congregation and protest in public places. On the other hand, the age of entitlement refers to a suspicious view held by those in power towards these rights, amenities and resources. Hockey’s view exhibits this suspicious attitude. Prior to his 2014 budget speech, Hockey had rehearsed this view in a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 2012. In this speech, he evoked a budget debt emergency – a view that his government later downplayed – to propose significantly decreased government spending on a range of social programmes, including education, health and social safety nets. This was justified by his argument that ‘the social contract between government and its citizens needs to be urgently and significantly redefined’. He added, ‘As a community we need to redefine the responsibility of government and its citizens to provide for themselves, both during their working lives and into retirement’. Fundamentally, Hockey viewed entitlement as ‘a concept that corrodes the very heart of the process of free enterprise that drives our economies’ (Hockey 2012). Citizenship entitlements, many of which were seen previously to be fundamental to social welfare, cohesion and democracy, were thus reconstructed as the enemy of neoliberal governance. One of the implications of his later budget speech proclamation concerns the scale at which young people’s citizenship is expected to be enacted. In Chapters 5 and 6, we noted a growing and widespread policy orientation towards the local and a focus on forms of citizenship that are enacted locally. This ‘rescaling downwards’ (Desforges et al. 2005: 440) from the national to the local needs to be understood within the context of techniques of governance that are aimed at responsibilizing individuals and local communities even while social support mechanisms and safety nets are defunded and eroded. We have described the local mobilization of young people’s citizenship in areas in which young people are seen to be experiencing a democratic or citizenship deficit (Black 2012). Like the City of Casey and the community of Valley High School, which we described in Chapters 5 and 6, these are often also places identified for government intervention because of their low socio-economic status, intervention that often constructs young people as active and socially responsible citizens even while simultaneously positioning them as sources and subjects of risk. As we saw in Chapter 4, this double discourse is also prevalent within even the most well-intended community organizations and youth citizenship

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programmes. While these characterize young people as agents of change, at the same time they sometimes construct young people as the problem to be changed. Policy proposals, such as the one seeking for young people to undertake internships that we described in Chapter 3, should be interrogated in light of this ambiguous discourse. As one of the Young Social Pioneers (2013) from Chapter 4 suggested, there is an ongoing view within the policy sphere that ‘if you didn’t give [young people] something to do, they’d be doing something wrong’. In the case of policydriven internships, some young people bear both the stigma of unemployment and the association of unemployment with the delinquency of ‘idle hands’. Perhaps one of the cruellest impositions of the policy discourse about youth is the message that young people can choose their own circumstances and forge their own futures. Choice and its illusions are central to the lexicon of neoliberalism. Choice, for example, is unequally attached to social and economic mobility. Following on from our earlier discussion, and as we critiqued in Chapter 3, the long-standing assumptions about young people’s educational attainment and mobility which have been promoted by education policy and educational institutions are now being challenged by global labour market dynamics. If there is still an opportunity bargain implicit in education as a pathway to social and economic mobility, it is increasingly the one available only to those with social and economic capital. That is, education is a game that is gradually becoming stacked towards a narrowing number of people. This book has in part sought to explore what young people’s citizenship looks like in the context of the nearly totalizing domination of neoliberalism, in which deregulation of markets is normalized as a basis for private corporations and individual interests to pursue profit maximization without limits or responsibility to the common good. As we outlined in Chapter 5, young people are now expected to embrace the uncertainty fuelled by neoliberalism as ‘as a challenge and opportunity’ (O’Malley 2013: 191). This renders the project of contemporary citizenship one of ‘self-capitalisation’ (Sellar 2013), through which those who are seen as being at risk, such as young people, are expected to be able to elevate themselves by being more resilient. But resilience need not be reduced to the neoliberal vision. Some sociologists have noted a shift in the policy discourse from risk to resilience (Rose 2014). As Walsh (2016a; 2017b) has argued previously, the recent work of Rose and others proposes the possibilities of polyvalent resilient strategies that move beyond the idea that neoliberalism is a totalizing force. This view understands individuals as beings who are shaped and who draw from the social

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ecologies around them, including peers and family. The local is therefore also a site for resistance, one where resilience and citizenship can be harnessed and developed. A challenge for rethinking youth citizenship after the age of entitlement relates to how we consider citizenship beyond its formal status, in the more nuanced ways proposed throughout this book. These include its geographical, temporal, relational and affective dimensions. A key theme intersecting all four of these relates to the emotional, political and physical distances between young people and political representatives and institutions. In this book we have argued in particular for a need to recognize the situated or geographical nature of young people’s citizenship and the conditions that shape the extent to which young people feel ‘they can or cannot be citizens’ (Biesta, Lawy and Kelly 2009: 9). We have also argued for the need to engage the complex nature of many young people’s relationships with their communities.

Why rights still matter Our fourth interpretation concerns the conventional understanding of entitlement in the formal legal sense. In our introduction, we referred to Isin’s (2013) list of some of the rights that are associated with citizenship: civil rights, political rights, economic rights, social rights and participatory rights as well as, potentially, sexual rights, technological rights, ecological rights and ethnic or cultural rights. Our discussion in this book has focused primarily on young people’s civil, political, economic, social, participation and cultural rights and the factors and forces that mediate them, but we would argue for the importance of the full range of these rights as aspects of young people’s citizenship. The Australian Cabinet discussion described above affirms a persistent fact beyond the pragmatism inherent in Australian politics: all of these rights still matter. And as Pinker (2011) has pointed out, the ‘rights revolutions’ in recent centuries have seen an unprecedented release of historical energy in support of the extension of rights throughout the world. He argues that, with the demise of slavery and the dwindling practice of capital punishment in the face of recognition of certain human rights, once these rights are established, it is difficult for these practices to return. This is evident in the Australian context, in which implied rights feature in recent policy recognition of the disabled, (the National Disability Insurance Scheme) and the rights of women and children to be safe from assault in the home (reducing domestic violence).

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These rights revolutions continue to march forward in the form of current proposals to recognize same-sex marriage in law and Indigenous Australians in Australia’s constitution. Rights, as we suggest above, remain important to understanding citizenship. They also remain essential aspects of young people’s lived experiences as citizens. We began this book by reflecting on the conventional definition of citizenship described by T. H. Marshall (1964), which describes the rights and responsibilities associated with full membership of a community. We noted that contemporary citizenship is no longer confined to the categories provided by Marshall. We also noted that there have been advancements and enhancements of Marshall’s notion that include the rights and entitlements that go with membership across legal, social, economic, cultural, political and environmental aspects of life. What constitutes citizenship rights is necessarily subject to reinterpretation over time. Our argument is that these reinterpretations must not dilute our focus on young people’s rights and entitlements as citizens, or be used as an excuse to whittle away at those rights and entitlements. Young people are already the constant subjects of policy and politics: these same processes and institutions should also act to better recognize and enshrine their rights, not as vague ideals but in specific and concrete terms. As Dean argues, ‘Rights are an expression of our sociality; they imply that humans, as interdependent social beings, make claims upon each other, claims based on shared experience’ (2013: 232). Young people’s rights, and the claims that they make upon us, are not simply abstract notions. As we have argued throughout this book, young people do not live their lives in the abstract: they live and enact their citizenship as affective beings, in real geographical places, in real time and in the context of a range of relationships and relational influences. Returning to the 2015 Australian Cabinet meeting discussed at the start of this chapter, other ministers objected to the proposal for the immigration minister to have discretionary power to deny an Australian of his or her citizenship if that person was suspected of terrorism-related offences. One concern was that removing citizenship would render that person stateless without a right to live anywhere. If that person was overseas, he or she could be denied the right to return to Australia. Alternatively, ‘if they were in Australia, they could be detained indefinitely’ (Hartcher 2015). While a related proposal to revoke the citizenship of persons with dual citizenship had broad support, the first proposal was specifically for persons with only Australian citizenship. This is the second extraordinary aspect of this discussion, and one that is central to this book.

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Beyond affirming the importance of the rule of law, the objections to these proposals had deeper resonances: they related to identity, social inclusion and the role of the nation-state. For example, the then communications minister reportedly argued that A person’s citizenship is of enormous importance, intrinsic to themselves. Take me. The only people who’ve lived in Australia longer than my family are Aboriginal. I have no other identity. Are we seriously saying some minister could take my citizenship?

The former education minister allegedly raised a similar concern that A sole Australian citizen, terrorist or not, is our responsibility. We can’t wash our hands of the fact. We can’t pretend they’re not Australian when they are (Hartcher 2015).

This debate highlights a continuing belief that when it comes to citizenship, rights, identity, the state and nationality still matter. However, rights and their associated entitlements (implied and otherwise) continue to be under threat by governments advocating neoliberal policy. These need to be understood within a longer term turning away from conventional institutions and practices of democracy, and a deeper erosion of trust and hope.

The withering of young people’s trust, hope and belonging in the West If citizenship is about experiencing full membership to a community, then there is evidence to suggest that young people routinely experience exclusion across a range of domains in life (Walsh and Black 2011). These experiences are aligned with the erosion of social capital and its inherent aspects of trust and belonging – a condition exacerbated by neoliberalism. The erosion of trust is by no means recent and is evident across the cultural, political, social and economic domains of young people’s lives. In Chapter 1, for example, we saw that young people are discouraged by political leaders who are seen to be untrustworthy (Print, Saha and Edwards 2004). This is significant because trust is integral to their voting behaviour (The Australia Institute 2013). And returning to another survey cited earlier in this book, young people’s attitudes to democracy are characterized by ambivalence.

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A 2015 survey found only a minority (49 per cent) of 18–29-year-old Australians expressing a preference for democracy, with a quarter (26 per cent) saying ‘it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have’. While these figures were an improvement on results from 2014, there was an increase in those who said that ‘in some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable’ (23 per cent) (Oliver 2014; 2015). This ambivalence is not confined to Australia. In November 2016, the New York Times reported that across countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, ‘the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations’ (Taub 2016). In nations experiencing greater instability of governance, this distance appears to be widening even more markedly, across both democratic and nondemocratic systems. Throughout the world, politicians of all major political orientations appear out of touch with the needs, approaches and voices of their young people. This perception is also by no means new, but becomes significant when the power bases of major parties have significantly eroded, when the level of formal participation through voting is significantly lower among young people, and when young people’s attitudes to the current form of democracy as a preferred basis of government show signs of decline. Whatever its causes, exclusion breeds distrust. The study of racism in schools cited in Chapter 2, for example, found that young victims felt a loss of trust in the world as a whole (Mansouri et al. 2009). This decay of trust reflects an erosion of the community and the social capital that binds people together. Yet the research also reinforces the important role that family and peers can play as safe harbours of trust for young people experiencing racism or other forms of exclusion (Mansouri et al. 2009). The local community can do the same. The definition of community provided by Harris in Chapter 5 highlights its role as a locale in which ‘security and trust are valued above all else’ (2010: 574).

Citizenship and temporality: The limbo of waithood Young people are as diverse as the dimensions of citizenship explored throughout this book. But many share something in common. From the extreme example of ‘lives in limbo’ experienced by stateless peoples seeking safe asylum (Leach and Mansouri 2004) to the deferring of markers of adulthood such as secure

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work and home ownership throughout Western societies, the prolongation of youth is a wider by-product of modernity, in which a ‘state of limbo is becoming pervasive and is gradually replacing conventional adulthood’ (Honwana 2014: 19). For example, a temporal effect of changes to the labour market, and young people’s transition to it, is the prolongation of youth; that is, as a marker of belonging in society, the attainment of suitable work is extending further in life and, for some, is unattainable. Honwana (2014: 19) writes of young people ‘living in a period of suspension between childhood and adulthood’ that she calls ‘waithood’. Honwana’s notion of waithood draws from research on young people in the Middle East and North Africa that ‘encompasses the multifaceted  nature of youth transitions to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and extends to social life and civic participation’ (Honwana 2014: 20). It ‘involves a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial independence in circumstances of deep socio-economic crisis’ (Honwana 2014: 23). This can be generalized to include the impact of downturns on other countries, such as those impacted by the GFC described in Chapter 3. As we have seen, the transition to adulthood is being extended; for some, this can be indefinite as conditions of economic precarity extend across the life course as labour markets become more insecure and fluid. Honwana suggests in relation to African youth that ‘waithood may last for extended periods, well into their thirties and even forties. Some never get out of it and remain permanently in the precarious and improvised life that waithood imposes’ (2014: 21). The same could be said of young people in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Waithood, Honwana writes, represents the contradictions of modernity, in which young people’s opportunities and expectations are simultaneously broadened and constrained. They are enlarged by the new technologies of information and communication that make young people more globally integrated. Youth relate to local social structures and cultural patterns, but they are also connected to global culture via mobile telephones, cyberspace, television, and advertising. At the same time, they are also constrained by lack of access to basic resources due to unsound socio-economic policies, epidemics, political instability and repression. (2014: 20–1)

As Honwana suggests of young people in one African context, those in

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waithood are pushed out of the system and forced to survive on the margins of society. Rejected by the state and the formal sector of the economy, they create new spaces and mechanisms for survival and operate in subcultures outside hegemonic structures. They live in a state of ‘want’, of desire for basic socioeconomic freedoms, and every day is a struggle to attain freedom from want. (2014: 23)

Honwana argues against waithood as a ‘failed transition, a form of deviance, or a pathology from which young people suffer’; rather, it ‘constitutes also a period of experimentation, of improvisation and of great creativity as young Africans adopt a range of survival strategies to cope with the daily challenges in their lives’ (Honwana 2014: 24). This is applicable to the citizenship choices of many young people throughout the world, such as the forms of ‘self-made citizenship’ discussed in Chapter 4. Perhaps there is hope in the ways that young people seek to engage in changemaking that often do not register on conventional measures of participation. As we have previously observed, official measures of youth participation (such as those collected by the ABS) fail to capture forms of volunteering and other forms of engagement in change-making such as through social enterprises (Walsh and Black 2018). As with the Young Social Pioneers and others engaging in DIY citizenship, it is through ‘improvised and precarious strategies’ that young people use ‘their agency and creativity to fashion new “youthscapes”’ (Maira and Soep 2005) or ‘sub-cultures with alternative forms of livelihood and social relationships in the margins of mainstream society’ (Honwana 2014: 26). This raises an important question in relation to youth citizenship in general: Is it enough for young people to have to work interstitially between conventional institutions, within precarious labour markets or at the margins of society? Whatever the answer, hope is also apparent in the ways in which young people are engaging in the conventional avenues of citizenship participation. For example, while voter registration has consistently been low among 18–24-year-olds in Australia, with 18-year-olds in particular showing the lowest enrolment figures of any age group, there are positive signs that this is changing. Where only 51 per cent were enrolled in 2013, for the 2016 Federal Election it increased to 71 per cent (AEC 2016). Could this be related to reports of a resurgence of youth engagement in politics, such as that which has been reported in the 2016 US presidential election and immediately following the appointment of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in the UK (Jones 2016)?

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In Australia, as we suggested in Chapter 1, the potential influence of young people on Australian election outcomes is significant. Because young voters represent about 30 per cent of the electorate, a shift in the vote of this age group could have a significant impact on an election outcome. As Sidoti (2011) has suggested, The collapse of the youth vote for Labor between the 2007 and 2010 elections, for example, saw a drop of well over 15 points among 18 to 34 year olds, and their intentions to switch to the Greens (by roughly the same number) goes some way to explaining the hung parliament… . Yet as an electoral cohort comparatively little is known.

As we also saw in Chapter 1, recent elections in Australia have shown that young people continue to favour ‘progressive’ parties (such as the Greens) over their conservative counterparts: this is especially true among women aged 18–24 (Brooker 2013), although neither gender exhibits stable voting behaviours. Young people’s political participation, like their economic participation in the labour force, has in many ways become more fluid and unstable. Understanding this fluidity requires an understanding of the different dimensions of young people’s citizenship and exclusion which we have analysed throughout this book.

The end of youth or the start of a moral conversation? On 2 September 2015, widely publicized photographs emerged of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, a casualty of the Syrian refugee crisis. The image of this Syrian refugee child lying dead on a beach in Bodrum evoked outrage and despair. His death represented the death of a future. Children and young people are imbued with a heavy and complex burden. They are sources of hope, possibility and concern – sometimes simultaneously. In times of trouble, they are seen to be at risk and/or sources of risk, a potential danger to the community. Reports of children and young people attempting selfharm in the refugee camps at Nauru suggest being both at risk and considered by some to be sources of risk. At the start of this book, we outlined the complex ways in which young people are inscribed with hope and concern for them and because of them. On the global stage, this is magnified in ways that raise the stakes in thinking about youth citizenship. As outlined in Chapter 3, in the wake of the GFC

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of 2007–8 there were reports of vast waves of young people in the tens of thousands migrating across Europe in search of work (The Economist 2013a). In 2016, an estimated 71 million young people were unemployed (ILO 2016). As the United Nations has previously observed, many may lose hope and give up seeking work and consequently a better life (UNRIC 2012a). Other global factors loom in the futures that young people must navigate. For example, with globalization comes an awareness of the imminent and potentially devastating impact of climate change. The first climate refugees were reportedly relocating from the Pacific atoll of the Carteret Islands as rising sea levels began threatening their homes (Morton 2009). In 2015, climate scientists revised their estimate of rising sea levels to suggest that levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted, amounting over three metres by 2065 (Holthaus 2015). The consequences of this, it is argued, could threaten the very fabric of civilization that children and young people will inherit. The future seems bleak. Young people navigate seas of uncertainty and many are keenly aware of this. They are concerned about their future prospects. Even in strong economies, young people’s hope in the future may be in decline. An Ipsos MORI (2014) survey of young people in 20 countries found that a majority (42 per cent) believed that their future prospects were worse rather than better (34 per cent). This pessimism is notable in prosperous countries such as Sweden and Germany. Similarly, in Australia, 42 per cent indicated a feeling that the current generation would be worse off than their parents, in contrast to the 30 per cent who thought they would be better off. According to another study published in 2016, the majority of young Australians surveyed agreed with the notion that their job prospects were worse than for their parents’ generation (70 per cent of Australians aged 16–18 and 73 per cent of those aged 19–25) (Infosys 2016: 7). Many young people find themselves in a trajectory towards uncertain and apparently austere futures, experiencing a kind of limbo. It is safe to assume that every parent seeks a better life for their children, which is probably the reason why Aylan’s family attempted the voyage across dangerous seas. But arguably for the first time in history, the heirs to our planet’s future will in fact be worse off on a range of economic, environmental, social and political indicators. Contemporary forms of governance seem incapable of dealing with this, which many young people appear to recognize. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama (2006) famously argued that the world was reaching ‘the end of history’, a point at which Western liberalism represented the

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final stage in humanity’s socio-cultural evolution as the last form of government. He has since revised this thesis and with good reason. Beyond his particular perspective, the death of Aylan reflects the new and complex entanglement of problems that humanity collectively faces as a species and yet seems unable to process. Liberal democracies of the United States, Australia, United Kingdom and governments in other parts of Europe find themselves increasingly in varying states of deadlock and paralyses of inaction or, at best, short-term policies that seem to be governed by political self-interest. Forms of nationalism are remerging that are often hostile to forms of human mobility and the recognition of the rights of strangers. Perhaps these struggles are the reason young people are turning off politics. Far from being at the end of history, Western civilization now increasingly appears to be governed by forms of palliative democracy: ones that struggle just to keep things cohesive and afloat, and which are unable to deal with transnational by-products of global markets, domestic wars in seemingly faraway countries and human-made climate change. The image of Aylan on the beach signified the death not only of one future but, potentially, the end of a collective future as well. This is one that can no longer be dealt with by individuals, ‘free’ markets, NGOs or nation-states such as Turkey and Lebanon. It is a reminder that we need new ways of thinking about the shared problems of humanity. Part of reframing a response to this begins with rethinking youth citizenship after the age of entitlement, the collective challenges this entails, and perhaps the very meaning of what it means to be young. As we see the markers of adulthood being pushed further out in life – and disappearing in cases such as secure work – perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that these trends signify the end of ‘youth’ as a useful sociological category. Aside from wide international variations in methodological distinctions as to what constitutes ‘young people’ (Walsh 2016a), what constitutes ‘being young’ appears to be changing. Young people are experiencing adult responsibilities earlier in life. Many are experiencing work at younger ages (as youth in lesser economically developed countries such as Haiti have for some time). There are arguments for young people to vote earlier in life as discussed in Chapter 1, even though these are often regarded sceptically by politicians based on a presumption that young people are too ‘immature’. The trends and challenges of rethinking citizenship after the age of entitlement pertain to all of our futures. Labour market precarity, for example, is not confined to young people. Nor is the distance experienced by young people in relation to

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political representatives. The decay of trust in government also extends beyond young people. As discussed in Chapter 1, research into the wider Australian population finds levels of trust in decline (Alcorn 2014; Markus 2013). At a deeper level, we are arguing for a rethinking of citizenship as it pertains to human dignity. A corollary of our argument for a renewal of discussion about rights as a basis for enshrining and protecting human dignity is a case for developing a moral dimension of citizenship. In as much as rights can serve as points of direction on a moral compass, our efforts to rethink youth citizenship after the age of entitlement has a dimension that is moral and ethical in nature: Under what conditions should people live? Some may be uncomfortable with this argument for a reinvigoration of morality as there are multiple and shifting moralities that are as diverse as human life. But citizenship in its many forms contains normative and moral dimensions that are difficult to elide. This returns us to young people, for as unstable as the notion of youth as a sociological concept has become, it is during the early period of human lives that key forms of knowledge, dispositions, skills and moral compasses are developed. This is why education, though in many ways fraught, continues to have salience.

Final reflections Contemporary youth citizenship is best understood as an ‘uncertain’ or ‘slippery’ citizenship, a contradictory and contingent experience that is  subject to constant change. And yet despite the economic uncertainties, forms of cultural exclusion, and ambivalence towards politics that some young people exhibit and feel the experience of citizenship is often anchored or tethered to certain structural and solid phenomena, such as geography and socio-economic background. In Australia, for example, despite the longest unbroken period of prosperity in the nation’s history, young people continue to experience citizenship differently based on where they live. This book has suggested the possibility that young people are being educated to play a game in which only a few can be winners. This game is tied to place; that is, where many young people go in life depends on where they have come from. Young people are expected to be able to independently navigate the changing world. But to what extent are they able to critically navigate the complex challenges of contemporary life? And is education able to fulfil its ambitious promise of developing active, healthy, happy global citizens who feel that they belong to the society in which they live

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and who are encouraged to belong? Key institutions such as schools can play a role in constructing and constituting young people’s citizenship but, as we have argued, they are not without limitations. Across this book, we have argued a case for the continuing recognition and expansion of rights. These rights have universal qualities, but gain meaning at the local level. Eleanor Roosevelt’s influential 1958 speech continues to resonate: Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world. (Roosevelt 1958)

But we note that assumptions of universal rights – and universalisms in general – are not straightforward as was perhaps once assumed. In a thoughtful opinion piece on the current state of politics, Tsiolkas (2016) argues that ‘insular and unintelligible theory dominates identity politics … while the rhetoric of social justice and human rights trades in bland universalisms that have absolutely nothing to say about economic exploitation within the nation state’. The various studies we have discussed across this book make it clear that the role of the nation-state and the issues that stem from local geographies and shifting forms of class remain important determinants of young people’s citizenship and its attendant experiences of belonging and exclusion. They are experienced in concrete and everyday ways that will not be addressed by the ‘bland univeralisms’ and romantic statements that characterize much education, youth and social policy. Young people do not experience their citizenship on a theoretical level: they live it on a daily basis with all of its ambiguities, many of which derive from concrete structural and policy forces. Greater attention needs to be paid to these ambiguities. Taking into account young people’s socio-spatial circumstances, and the effects of those circumstances on their everyday citizenship acts and experiences, would enable policymakers and educational and democratic institutions to draw on a far more nuanced and grounded understanding of young people’s actual engagement with democracy than currently takes place. Understanding young people’s acts of citizenship

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(Isin 2008) might do much to ameliorate the concerns about that engagement which currently trouble so many governments. It may also, as we discussed in Chapter 6, enable the development of curriculum strategies that foster young people’s hope and belief in the democratic system as well as the attitudes and competencies to become actors and agents for personal and social change, and to critique and challenge the reduction of their citizenship to that of the ‘flawed consumers and unwanted workers’ to which we refer in that chapter (Giroux 2010: 1). We are not suggesting in this book that no such strategies already exist. As we have seen in Chapter 6, some educators are doing excellent work to make young people’s citizenship priorities and existing acts of citizenship visible within the school and the curriculum. We have also described other initiatives by government and non-profit organizations, such as those discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, which are attempting to do the same thing outside educational institutions. As Black has previously noted about the role of schools, however, two complex truths continue to coexist with regard to young people and their citizenship: ‘That young people can be the subjects of an educational technology that conceals the causes and roles of structural inequality in their lives, and that they can be genuinely enabled by that same technology to understand themselves as social actors and agents’ (2012: 224–5). Such contradictions are endemic across young people’s citizenship experiences. For these strategies to be successful, we need a greater recognition of the role that key institutions and social structures play in young people’s citizenship experience. We also need a greater recognition of the fact that citizenship, like belonging, is something that is ever-evolving. As we discussed in Chapter 5, citizenship is not static, but something that is achieved through an ongoing and active process (May 2011). The theories and research into citizenship from a youth perspective which we explored throughout this book could help to better establish and expand understandings of citizenship as a category in contemporary life. We argue for the need to draw on these to revivify discussion about citizenship rights. In particular, we argue for the need to rethink citizenship in ways that account for and reinvigorate young people’s rights as citizens in response to neoliberalism. As Rose (2014) and others have suggested, the prevalence of neoliberalism is not a totalizing force. It is a relatively recent and historical by-product of globalization and localized pragmatism (in the case of Australia, at least) that can be critiqued and resisted. Young people can contribute to this

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process. They have ‘an unassailable right to democratic participation, and to design and enact this participation in forms and for purposes of their choice’ (Black 2012: 227). They also have the right to be better recognized as shapers and not simply recipients of citizenship in the complex times and places that characterize the contemporary world.

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Index Abbott, Tony (former prime minister, Australia) 150, 151 ‘life-style choice’ 7 mythology of ‘Team Australia’ 123 ‘Stop the boats’ slogan 153 absolute poverty definition 80 neoliberal responses 80 workforce uncertainty 80 active citizenship 8, 125, 128 as educational strategy 128 community development 128 conventional understandings and 143–5 (see also conventional understandings and active citizenship) critical interpretations of 131 curriculum 143 dissonance between policy and everyday life 19 education and 128 and ‘good’ citizen 131 and informed citizens 129 in neoliberal era 133 welfare 128 active global citizens 1 Active Learning for Active Citizenship programme 129 actual citizenship practices 16 Advisory Group on the Teaching of Citizenship and Democracy in Schools report 129 affective dimensions and changing nature of work as identity 78–80 belonging 78 challenges 79 feelings of insecurity 79 financial security 78 fluidity in working life 78 Indigenous Australians 79–80 labour market fluidity 79

Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth 78 material effects of precarity 79 National Survey of Young Australians 78 non-Indigenous Australians 80 persistent unemployment 79 age of entitlement 60 and age of opportunity 6, 7 end of age of entitlement 149, 156, 157 policy arguments 156 youth citizenship after 16, 20, 60, 81, 150, 159, 167, 168, 171 Arab Spring 15 art of living with difference 57 aspirational citizens 118 asylum seekers 42, 50, 52, 53 cultural tensions 149 seeking security with uncertain prospects 82 subject to racism 61 transferring of 153, 154 Australia age of entitlement 6–7 ageing population 5 Bentham’s liberal philosophy 151 border control measures 3, 154 Constitution of Australia 11, 13 denial of citizenship 154 development of democracy 12 distinctive nature of federalism 151 elevation of discretionary power 151 increasing cultural diversity 152 Keynesian approach 12 liberal democracy 11, 15 Liberal-National Party (LNP) coalition government 6 low socio-economic communities 7 Marriage Act 1961 11 multiculturalism 150

Index National Census of Population and Housing 32 neoliberalism in 13, 15 Racial Vilification Act 151 refugee status under ‘no advantage’ principle 153 responsibility for active citizenship 8 right to freedom of speech 151 ‘Stop the boats’ slogan 153 ‘utilitarian standards’ of efficacy 151 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 32, 66 volunteering, definition 32–3 Australian Civics and Citizenship education curriculum 129, 131 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) 65 Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 107 Australian Curriculum for Civics and Citizenship 114 Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) website 25 world of adult responsibility 26 Australian Human Rights Commission 58 Australian young people and racism 44–7 cultural composition 44 discrimination 44 geographical dimensions of exclusion 46 geographical territoriality 47 migration 44 racism 45 Australian Youth Affairs Coalition (AYAC) 73 Australian Youth Forum (AYF) 114 Australian youth, turning away from democracy 28–30 ambivalence attitude 28 ethical consumption 29 Lowy Institute opinion survey 28–9 non-democratic government 29 Australia, volunteering as affective and relational experience 32–5 (see also volunteering as affective and relational experience)

209

as civic participation in 30–1 (see also volunteering as civic participation) as expression of citizenship located in time and space 36–7 (see also volunteering as expression of citizenship located in time and space) authoritarianism 97 baby boomer generation 5 being ‘good citizen’ 56–7 being versus becoming 81 belonging and citizenship 41 questions of 41 spatially and temporally precarious 74 belonging in the West, withering of 161 lower voting in young 162 big ‘P’ versus small ‘p’ politics 19, 89, 104 binary of citizenship 118 blogging 55 borderless choice 107 border protection 14 Brandis, George (former Attorney-General, Australia) 51, 151 Brexit (British exit from the EU) campaign 2, 152 budget ‘deficit emergency’ 7 bystander effect 58 CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) communities 36, 37 Cameron, David (former prime minister, UK) 2 changing nature of work as identity, affective dimensions and 78–80 belonging 78 challenges 79 feelings of insecurity 79 financial security 78 fluidity in working life 78 Indigenous Australians 79–80 labour market fluidity 79 Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth 78 material effects of precarity 79 National Survey of Young Australians 78 non-Indigenous Australians 80 persistent unemployment 79

210

Index

choice 158 citizenship 2, 107, 156 as acts and practices 43 and belonging 41 contemporary society 149 definition of 4 as legal status 9 political construct 128 question of 3 spatially and temporally precarious 74 Western conceptualization of 13 citizenship and temporality 162–5 changes of labour market 163 engagement in change-making 164 financial independence 163 lives in limbo 162 negotiating personal identity 163 resilient strategies 164 self-made citizenship 164 survival strategies by Africans 164 youthscapes 164 citizenship deficit 118 citizenship education 127 resurgence of 128 citizenship responsibility 144 citizenship rights 14 City of Casey 157 Youth Action Committee programme 85 civic engagement 31, 33, 102, 127 ‘broader repertoire’ of 93 and community participation 22 DIY citizenship 90 ethnicity and migrant status for 24 types of 55 civil rights 5, 58, 159 civil war in Syria 152 Colbeck, Richard (former Australian Senator) 30 collective rights 4–5 color-blindness, neoliberalist discourse of 52 constructions of community, losing local in 122–4 belonging 122 belonging and connection 124 community imaginaries 122 conceptualization of citizenship 123 imagined communities 122, 123

intersecting ‘pushes and pulls’ 123 ‘liminal spaces’ 123 mythology of ‘Team Australia’ 123 process of becoming 122 ‘spaces of uncertainty’ 123 contemporary life 5, 21, 83, 169, 170 contemporary politics 95–7 away from established ideological bases 95 citizenship engagement 96 ‘flip-flop’ on issues 96 Independence Party in the UK 97 middle-aged white men 95 ‘mix and match’ approach 96 One Nation party in Australia 97 social enterprises 97 youth’s lack of trust in 96 contemporary youth citizenship 168 ambiguities 169–70 citizenship priorities 170 citizenship rights 170 complex challenges 169 globalization 171 localized pragmatism 171 conventional understandings and active citizenship 143–5 citizenship responsibility 144 cultural experiences 143 family experiences 143 migrants 144 policy blindness to citizenship 145 relational participation 143 under-recognition of young people’s contributions 144 Corbyn, Jeremy (Labour Party leader in the UK) 164 cosmopolitan citizenship 43 cosmopolitan citizenship education 145 belief in openness 146 cultural marginalization 146 democratic processes 146 enacted citizenship 147 fundamental challenge 147 government 147 judicial system 147 political heritage 147 providing challenging discussions 146 socio-economic marginalization 146 welcoming stranger 146

Index cosmopolitanism 138, 139, 146 Council of Europe’s Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education 129 counter-terrorism 14, 123 Crick Report 129 cultural affiliation 107 cultural citizenship in Australia, rise and provocation of 43–4 cultural empowerment 43 multiculturalism 44 rights and obligations 43 cultural empowerment 43 cultural rights 5, 58, 61, 151, 159 cultural tensions 149 culturally diverse young people 53–6 acts of citizenship 55 affective dimensions of citizenship 55 everyday makers 54 homogenous group of young people 54 romanticizing citizenship acts 54 young Muslim people 55 cyberspace 92 death of multiculturalism 51 (see also multiculturalism) deficit geographical imagination 119–21 Arab ghettos 120 assault against youth 120 caricatures of place 120 deficit imagination 120 emotional topographies 121 geographical imaginations 121 moral panic 120 project of self-capitalisation 121 risky trajectories 120 ‘subterranean’ forces 121 democratic citizenship, role of education for 154–6 active citizenship 155 automation of labour 156 culturally diverse communities 155 culture of schooling 155 (see also schooling) economic participation 155 migrants 155 mobilities and immobilities 155 post-entitlement era 155

211

social mobility 155 stasis 155 youth volunteering 155 democratic deficit 118 democratic socialism 12 discrimination 44 geographical dimensions of exclusion 46 geographical territoriality 47 disempowered 86 in citizenship framework 87 disengaged 86 in citizenship framework 87 distance of global, young people’s lives 108–10 digital world and real world 109 globalization 108 role of geographical location 109 situatedness of citizenship 109 young people’s experience 109 youth resistancies and ironies 110 youth unemployment 109 do it yourself (DIY) attitude 90 DIY citizenship 91, 104 ‘early adopters’ of internet 91 emergent citizen-type 90 and neoliberal project 105 practices 104 doing it oneself 105 ‘Dutch’ auction by employers 78 Dutton, Peter (former immigration minister, Australia) 150–1 earned citizenship 133 ecological citizenship 43 ecological rights 159 economic dimensions of young people’s citizenship 64 economic downturns 68, 69 in UK 71 economic globalization 6 (see also globalization) economic mobility 62, 63, 68, 81, 109, 112, 119, 158 economic participation 19, 67, 76, 155, 165 economic rights 5, 159 economic security 63, 73 economic stasis 75, 81, 82, 109, 155 tension between mobility and 118

212

Index

economic uncertainty 2 education for global citizenship 137–9 cosmopolitanism 138 cosmopolitan values and perspectives 138 developing active citizenship 139 global civic culture 137 principle of universality 138 education policy 8, 107, 125, 141, 158 active citizenship with 130 Australian policy 18, 119 Hungarian policy 142 Swedish policy 132 UK policy 119 educationalization of young people’s citizenship 127 EMES (European research group) 88 empowered 86, 105 in citizenship framework 87 enabling optimism 139–42 active citizenship education 140 autonomy 140 citizenship technology 139 concern about active citizenship 141 economic precarity 140 educational inquiry into motivation 141 images of good citizen 142 individual responsibility 140 international exchanges of teachers 140 involving specific young people 139 law-abiding behaviour 142 obfuscating structural inequalities 140 self-regulation 140 standardized environment of neoliberalism 141 triumphalist hubris 139 enacting citizenship locally 1, 133–7 affective experiences 136 citizenship and concrete benefits 135 community awareness of issues 135 community voice website 135 geographical context 133 hopes for future 137 local youth recreation facilities 135 sense of efficacy as citizens 136 situated experiences 136 socio-geographic circumstances 134

end of entitlement 156–9 erosion of human rights 157 implications for youth citizenship 156 loss of legal rights 157 end of the age of entitlement 7, 26, 149, 157 end of youth 165–6 ‘being young’ 167 immature young people 168 markers of adulthood 167 thinking about youth citizenship 165 uncertainty 166 Engage! (Victorian Government initiative) 115 engaged 86, 105 in citizenship framework 87 England affective aspects of citizenship 143 fusion of political institutions and ideas 11 mandate for citizenship education in 129 national citizenship education curriculum 142 entrepreneurial selfhood 35 ethnic rights 159 Europe people antipathy by pro-nationalist protestors 153 coming to the UK 153 economic migrants 153 without citizenship of any country 152 everyday acts of citizenship 55 everyday citizenship 43 exclusion consequences of 47–50 (see also exclusion, consequences of) geographical dimensions of 46 neoliberalism as force of 52–3 exclusion, consequences of 47–50 anger and frustration 48 Anglo-Australian backgrounds 49 erosion of trust 49 feeling ‘out-of-place’ 48 ‘them’ or ‘out-group’ 50 ‘us’ or ‘in-group’ 50 vulnerable and marginalized young people 48

Index Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (FMLSA) 65 feeling safe and secure 59 Fernandez, Jeremy (television journalist) 58 Rosa Parks moment 58 flexible citizenship 70 flows of international labour 149 forced displacement 152 formal democratic institutions 83 fostering global aspirations 137–9 cosmopolitanism 138 cosmopolitan values and perspectives 138 developing active citizenship 139 enactment of citizenship 137 global civic culture 137 principle of universality 138 Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) 70 Fraser, Malcolm (former prime minister, Australia) 156 GetUp (Australian activist group) 30 global citizenship education (GCE) 131, 137, 138, 140, 146 global communities 10, 42, 107, 137, 138 global financial crisis (GFC) 6, 18, 63, 66, 81 aspects of globalization 68, 81, 163, 165 and migrations of young people 19, 69 global labour market competition 63 global mobility 108 globalization 3, 42, 64, 107, 108 contemporary experience 42 definition 3 globalized contemporary global labour markets, on social mobility 67–70 economic downturns 68, 69 economic mobility of young people 68 flexible citizenship 70 full hardship for youth 68 global technological transformations 70 long-term effects 68 recessions of 1990s 69 unemployment 68

globalized workforce 63, 64–7 financial security 64 getting job 64 identity formation 64 levels of unemployment 66 non-standard employment relationships 65 part-time work 65 temporary forms of employment good citizen 56–7, 59

213

65

Henley Club (private social club) 89, 91 Hockey, Joe (former treasurer, Australia) 156 budget debt emergency 157 proclamation 157 hope in the West, withering of 161 human mobility 2, 167 human rights 85, 96, 103, 147, 153, 156 active citizenship 130 education policies 131 inclusive ideas of citizenship 152 potential violation of 154 principle of universality 138 recognition of 159 100 Women of Influence Award 103 self-made ways 103 Hungarian education policy 142 affective aspects of citizenship 143 Hunnicutt, Benjamin (historian, University of Iowa) 156 identity 107, 161 and belonging 47, 59 changing nature of work as 78–80 cultural identity 41, 45 getting a job as 64 young people’s experiences of citizenship 49 immigration 2, 3, 12, 153 Indigenous Australians 45, 46, 61, 75, 76, 79, 160 individual rights 4–5 information and communication technologies 84 Institute of Economic Affairs in London 157 intercultural citizenship 43 internationalization 107

214 International Labour Organization (ILO) 64 Islam 55–6 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

Index

9

Japan 69, 128 youth unemployment levels 69 justice-oriented citizens 131 Kantian notion of world-citizenship 138 ‘Kevin 07’ campaign 94 knowledge 91, 96 of democratic processes and government 146–7 GCE in promoting knowledge 137 notion of youth as sociological concept 168 Lebanon, refugees’ population 152 legal fiction 12 Legislative Council of Victoria 30 Summary Offence Act 2013 30 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) young people 86 Local and Global Citizenship curriculum 131 local citizenship, walking the talk of 114–17 Australian Youth Forum 114 being a good citizen 116 belonging 117 Big Society initiative 115 Engage! (Victorian Government initiative) 115 Higher Education Active Community Fund 115 micro-territories of the local 117 National Youth Leadership Award 114 networks and spheres 117 New Gen Social Enterprise Program 115 social connectedness 117 Victorian Government Office of Youth’s Advance programme 114 young people’s own citizenship priorities 116 making active citizen through schooling 130–2

citizenship education curricula 130 conceptual traditions 130 global citizenship education (GCE) 131 intensified manifestations of neoliberalism 132 justice-oriented citizens 131 marginalized social groups 130 new democratic public spheres 131 making a difference (MAD) programme 102, 113, 134 autonomy 143 curriculum 143 recognition 143 Marshall, T. H. definition of citizenship 4 ideas of citizenship 4 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians 114, 129, 131 migration 42, 44 asylum seekers 149 challenges of post–Second World War migration 50 and competitive labour markets 20 integral part of modernity 59 intensification, in Australia 69, 153 Muslim migration 60 of refugees 149 role in UK’s 2016 referendum decision 2 terrorism and 152 mobilizing local citizenship 118–19 aspirational citizens 118 binary of citizenship 118 ‘citizenship deficit’ 118 ‘democratic deficit’ 118 dominant existential imaginations 119 engagement as local citizens 118 spatial imaginations 119 uncertainty as a challenge 119 multiculturalism 44, 46, 149 in Australia, right of all citizens 50 death of multiculturalism 51 in Europe 61 ideas and ideals of 51 preoccupation with exclusion 150–1 multi-dimensional citizenship 43

Index multi-scalar responsibilities of citizenship 107 Muslims as community 56 anti-democratic behaviours 57 anti-Muslim policies 2, 3 creating register of 2 experience, in Australia 55 Muslim migration 60 religious understanding of civic engagement 55–6 social pressure to be ‘good citizens’ 56, 144 ‘Team Australia’ 123 transnational communities 145 National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 154 National Youth Leadership Award 114 nationalism 2, 167 neoliberal colouring of citizenship 132–3 collective mind 133 earned citizenship 133 in neoliberal era 133 notion of active citizenship 132 obligation-based visions of citizenship 132 neoliberal construction of community 108 neoliberalism 7–8, 83, 158 chilling effect 72 continuing impact of 83 critique of 8 definition of 70–1 demographic dimension 73 deregulation of Australian economy 74 economic downturn 71 impact on young people’s work 70–4 individualization of youth policy transitions 74 market-driven workforce fluidity 72 participation 81 pervasiveness of 1 politics of aspiration 73 social justice of dominance of 15 neoliberalism, as force of exclusion 52–3 asylum seekers 53 refugees 53

215

same desires and aspirations 52 writ large 53 networking self-made citizenship 91–5 adopting to internet 91 cyberspace 92 networked media 92 networked publics 92 online 92 technology 92 Newstart allowance 72 not in employment, education or training (NEET) 67 Obama, Barack (former president, US) electoral campaign 94 Facebook election 94 techno-demographic appeal 94 One Nation Party 3 anti-Muslim sentiment 3 opportunity bargain 18, 72, 77, 81, 120, 155, 158 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries 65 average youth unemployment rate 68 NEET category statistics 67 overly optimism 139–42 active citizenship education 140 autonomy 140 citizenship technology 139 concern about active citizenship 141 economic precarity 140 educational inquiry into motivation 141 images of good citizen 142 individual responsibility 140 international exchanges of teachers 140 involving specific young people 139 law-abiding behaviour 142 obfuscating structural inequalities 140 self-regulation 140 standardized environment of neoliberalism 141 triumphalist hubris 139 palace democracy 84 palliative democracy 167 participatory rights 159

216

Index

peri-urban municipality 85 policy proposals 7, 37, 158 political affiliation 107 political context and youth citizenship 150–4 Australia (see Australia) political engagement 25, 81, 93, 94, 127 ‘mix and match’ approach to 96 in UK 133 understanding of 100 of young Europeans 104 political instability 8 political institutions of democracy 101–3 change-makers 102 immediate practical challenges 103 representative democratic system 101 top-down approach 102 University of Western Sydney 101 political participation 9, 19, 23, 36, 81, 104, 165 variations in 24–8 political rights 159 politics of choice 89–91 citizen-oriented repertoires 90 DIY citizenship 91 emergence of 90 post-national citizenship 43 postnationalism 107 productive exchange 61 Racial Vilification Act 52, 151 racism 2, 156 Australian young people and 42, 44–7 in contemporary Australia 45 eroding self-esteem 47–8 erosion of trust 49 and exclusion 53–4, 58 geographical dimensions of exclusion 46 geographical territoriality 47 how to respond to 156 migrants’ experience of 48 pervasive form of 46, 61 problem to the society 50 response to 59 tensions related to 18 Reagan, Ronald (former president, United States) 74

(re)making local young citizen in policy 112–14 engagement within one’s communities 113 global and local citizens 114 governing through communities 113 institutional policy 112 linking citizenship in nation-state 113 Making A Difference (MAD) programme 113 YAC programme 113 resilience 80, 119, 158 and citizenship 159 reverse auction by employers 78 Richmond Emerging Aboriginal Leadership (REAL) Program 85–6 right to be racist 50–2 combating institutional racism 50 constitutional recognition 51 multiculturalism 50 Racial Vilification Act 52 recognition of cultural diversity 50 rights 159, 160, 161 identity 161 National Disability Insurance Scheme 159 objections 161 reducing domestic violence 159 rights revolutions 159 same-sex marriage in law 160 of women 159 right to freedom of speech 151 risky citizens 9–10 motivated by political and religious causes 10 schooling 1 Australian schooling 129 in constituting young people 15 culture of 155 making active citizen through 130–2 normative experience of 143, 147 secondary schooling 75 for stable democratic society 127 volunteering or service learning 34 schooling’s failure and young people’s imaginaries of citizenship 142–3 security 21, 61, 62, 63 and belonging 62

Index economic security 63, 73 emotional security 50 financial security 64, 78, 79 global economy and 2 job security 73 personal security 73 self-capitalisation 158 self-made citizen(ship) 14, 19, 89–91, 103 citizen-oriented repertoires 90 DIY attitude 90 DIY citizenship 91 networking 91–5 (see also networking self-made citizenship) ‘self-making’ citizen 8, 132 self-making local citizen 110–12 active participation in community context 112 Indigenous young people 110 learning decision-making processes 111 local change-makers 111 local government area 110 Multipride (programme) 111 paucity in employment opportunities 111 promoting young people’s citizenship 112 young local community leaders 110 young social entrepreneurs 110 YouTube video (It’s OK to ask for help) 111 sexual rights 5, 159 shared identities 61 skilled, strategic choice making 132 ‘smashed avo’ controversy 5 social affiliation 107 social cohesion 156 social enterprises 14, 84 change-making 87 citizenship participation 89 defining 87–9 features 87 growth of 88 hybrid in nature 88 Young Social Pioneers 87 social entrepreneurs 88, 89, 104 social media 55, 91, 92 governance by social media 94 social mobility 63, 73, 75, 119, 155, 158

217

social mobility, impact of globalized contemporary global labour markets on 67–70 economic downturns 68 economic mobility of young people 68 flexible citizenship 70 full hardship for youth 68 global technological transformations 70 long-term effects 68 recessions of 1990s 69 unemployment 68 social rights 4, 5, 159 start of moral conversation 165–6 human dignity 168 labour market precarity 167 liberal democracies 167 socio-cultural evolution 167 thinking about youth citizenship 165 stasis 75, 81, 82, 109, 155 tension between mobility and 118 street democracy 84 Student Volunteer Army 34 supranational citizenship 43 Tanner, Lindsay (former member of Australian Parliament) 25 world of adult responsibility 26 technical and further education (TAFE) 75 technological rights 159 temporal chimera, of youth transitions 77–8 changing trend 78 ‘Dutch’ or reverse auction by employers 78 full-time employment 77 heightened global competition for jobs 78 middle class citizens 77 multiple employment pathways 78 opportunity bargain 77 university graduates 77 usefulness of formal education 78 vocational education and training graduates 77 workforce security 77

218

Index

tension 1, 18, 43, 44, 57, 152 and implied rights 151 aspects of globalization 68 cultural tensions 149 between mobility and stasis 118 between past structural aspects of citizenship 80 policy fostering local participation 116 power of belonging 121 project of belonging 61 terrorism 21, 117, 149, 152 -related offences 151, 160 Thatcher, Margaret (former prime minister, UK) 74 transnational citizenship 43 transnationalism 107 Trump, Donald (president, US) 2, 9, 152 Commander-In-Tweet 94 isolationism 3 Muslim migration 60 trust in the West, withering of erosion of 161 exclusion and distrust 162 instability of governance 162 UK Active Learning for Active Citizenship programme 129 ‘age apartheid’ 73 ‘age of opportunity’ 7 baby boomer generation 5 Big Society initiative 132 Charity Works trainee programme 35 civics and citizenship education 15 decision to leave European Union 2, 3 entrepreneurial citizenship 73 Higher Education Active Community Fund 115 migrants as targets of rejection 153 mobility 9 multicultural policies 51 parties, internal leadership instability 8 post-war UK 4 promoting ‘strivers’ 71 young people participating in elections 23 youth unemployment 66

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 153 World Youth Report 68 underemployment 19, 65 unemployment 19, 64, 66, 68, 158 impact on mental health 79 unemployment, rates of 67 in the Asia-Pacific 67 in Australia 66 in Japan 69 precarious status 67 in South Asia 67 in Spain 66 in UK 66 US Bill of Rights 13 contemporary labour markets 80 employer investment in staff 80 recent politics 8 use of formal education in jobs 78 young volunteers 31, 32 Valley High School 134, 157 affective experiences 136 citizenship and concrete benefits 135 community awareness of issues 135 local youth recreation facilities 135 school’s MAD programme 134 sense of efficacy as citizens 136 situated experiences 136 students’ sense of efficacy 134 thematic groups 135 Victorian Government Office of Youth’s Advance programme 114 Vietnamese migrant 63 volunteering as affective and relational experience 32–5 displacement or substitution of voluntary internships 35 entrepreneurial selfhood 35 feelings of belonging 32 fetishizing of experience 35 formal voluntary organization 33 ‘informal’ volunteering, definition 33 mutual obligation programs 34 relational dimension 32 role of affect 32 timebanks 34

Index traditional definitions 34 underrecognized 33–4 volunteering as civic participation 30–1 reasons for volunteering 31 US survey findings 31 volunteering as expression of citizenship located in time and space 36–7 being undemocratic 39 CALD communities 36 ethical consumption 39 geographical dimensions 36 low socio-economic communities 37 people from non-metropolitan communities 36 politics of belonging 36 relational dimensions 36 social-cause service roles 37 socio-geographical dimensions 36, 37 standard-cause service roles 37 temporal aspect to volunteering 37 temporal dimensions 38 Vote Compass (online tool) 94, 95 welfare-state era 65 Western civilization 166 Work for the Dole government proposal 150 mutual obligation program 34 workforce mobility, geographical and temporal dimensions of 74–7 geographical factors 77 Indigenous versus non-Indigenous people 76 Indigenous young people 75, 76 labour market 76 living in remote areas 75 non-Indigenous young people 75, 76 rural versus urban young people 76 socio-economic factors 77 spatially and temporally precarious 74 statistics 76 technical and further education (TAFE) 75 transitions to work and post-school life 75 voluntary mobilization 75 youth unemployment rates 77 Working Holiday Makers 69

xenophobia

219 2

young Australian Muslims 144 experiences of young people 145 family practices 144 religious education 144 young change-makers 95–7 away from established ideological bases 95 citizenship engagement 96 ‘flip-flop’ on issues 96 lack of trust on politics 96 middle-aged white men 95 mix and match 96 young Muslim people in Australia 55, 56 young people citizenship 18 daily citizenship 17 democratic disengagement 149 democratic engagement as citizens 21 democratic participation 18 immune to developments 60 insufficient engagement 22 legal status of 18 notion of 16 responsibility for challenges 20 socio-economic refugees 82 young people citizenship challenge 150 dimensions 150 young people of influence 84–6 citizenship framework 87 City of Casey’s Youth Action Committee 85 LGBT young people 86 Mission Australia 86 peri-urban municipality 85 Richmond Emerging Aboriginal Leadership (REAL) Program 85–6 social entrepreneurs 85 Young Social Pioneers programme 85 young people’s attitudes to change-making 85 to contemporary politics 84 to politics 85 young people’s citizenship 83, 124 active citizenship 125 everyday lived experiences 125 implications for policymakers 125

220

Index

young people’s participation, influences of and variations in 24–8 Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) website 25 end of the age of entitlement 26 new forms of politics 26 theorization of citizenship 27 voting age 25 world of adult responsibility 26 young social entrepreneurs, barriers to 97–101 deficit tone 98 difficulty of access to established institutions 100 double-bind of being 101 gaining funding 99 influence of neoliberal governance 101 inter-generational issue 99 marketization of life 100–1 operating in isolation 97 perennial issue of experience 99 political engagement 100 relational and affective dimensions 98 restricted by adult discourses 98 shifting exclusionary forms power 98 struggle to attract funding 100 systemic lack of recognition 99 Young Social Pioneers programme 85, 87, 89, 92, 104, 105, 110, 158 change initiatives 93

creation of networks 93 in networking 91 Youth Action Committee (YAC) 110, 113 chief youth engagement strategies 111 youth as risky citizens, burdens of 9–10 motivations 10 Youth Bonus wage subsidy 71 youth citizenship Do It Yourself (DIY) practices 19 economic dimension of 18 participation 14 reinserting rights into 10–11 right to marriage equality 11 youth electoral participation in Australia 22–4 ambivalence towards political participation 23 community participation 22 in contemporary electoral politics 23 electoral activity 22 favouring ‘progressive’ parties 24 lack of civic engagement 22 opinion on issues of concern 22 Youth Electoral Study (YES) 23 Youth Electoral Study (YES) 23 career politicians 27 political dishonesty 28 Youth Jobs PaTH (Prepare, Trial, Hire) programme 71, 72 internship programme 150 Youth Participatory Politics Survey 93