Call for Papers: Young People in Public Life
An event hosted by Deakin REDI
September 13 2024

This interdisciplinary event brings together perspectives on the contested role that young people play as participants in public life, and interrogates the nature of public / private distinctions in youth political participation. The conversation is inspired by transformations in the nature of youth citizenship, which raise new questions about definitions of the political and about the social positionings that young people create through contemporary citizenship practices. The event welcomes researchers from a range of disciplines who wish to discuss these questions through their research.

On the one hand, young people are the targets of significant but highly contested efforts to educate them as particular kinds of citizens, through instruction in global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and formal political participation, and through efforts to encourage them to be entrepreneurial, reflexive and self-governing subjects who actualise their citizenship in a range of marketplaces. Young people have also been at the forefront of a series of contemporary social movements on issues including climate change and precarious work, reframing the nature of activism and public participation. On the other hand, it has become necessary to recognise forms of political participation and citizenship in new arenas: researchers now explore the political dimensions of everyday life in the identities, social and intimate relationships, consumption and leisure practices, and modes of belonging, including how these are enacted both inside and outside of schools, universities, workplaces and other arenas of public life.

This will be a one-day workshop style event taking place on the 13^th of September at Deakin Downtown.

Abstracts can be submitted to d.farrugia@deakin.edu.au by the 23^rd of March 2024.

Keynote Speaker

Prof Jackie Kennelly (Director of the Centre for Urban Youth Research at Carleton University)