Making Whiteness and the Racialisation of Australian Youth Citizenship

Abstract

Rather than apprehending race or ethnicity as a predetermined social fact that then informs young people’s experiences of engagement or inclusion, youth citizenship studies would benefit from more critical perspectives that enable investigation of the racialised construction of what is legible as civic participation or national belonging. Processes of racialisation operate in the production of youth as citizen-subjects in Australian nation-making through approaches in youth policy and research that simultaneously centre and invisibilise whiteness. This paper considers the role of racialisation in ways of knowing and regulating Australian youth as citizens through a critical review of the ways different groups of young people become meaningful and knowable as racialised citizens. It explores the representation and constitution of Indigenous, ethnic minority and white youth citizenship in youth research and policy as in turn non-existent/provisional, integrative/integratable, and vulnerable/healthy, to contribute to deepened understandings of the social construction of youth in the service of white nation-making.