Local Community Care-based Activism and Civic Engagement Among Canadian Arab Youth

Abstract

Youth today are engaging in civic-oriented activities in ways that differ from previous generations. Civic engagement refers to volunteerism and service-oriented activities and programs that expand community, ground social networks, help people, and make civil society possible. We find from this study that Canadian Arab youth give considerable service back to their communities, especially within the communities of their own cultural milieu, but also significantly within their wider Canadian municipalities, and that, on balance, they have higher rates of engagement than the wider Canadian youth population. In this paper, we problematize and substantiate many arguments about ethnic minority youth political participation through an analysis of the local community-care activism and civic engagement of Canadian Arab youth.