Book Review: Youth Active Citizenship in Europe: Ethnographies of Participation by Shakuntala Banaji and Sam Mejias

Abstract

In a time where youth-led movements like Fridays-for-Future make the news, it is easy to think that European youth has found their role as citizens in a society. Ultimately, the way young citizens act in the political system they have been socialized in, is an important indication about the state of this political system. But while societies at large mostly care about the question if youth is active, researchers from disciplines like political science, psychology, sociology, cultural and media studies, and communication science have an ongoing interest in the question, how young citizens act politically and what these acts entail. This book reintroduces these questions by focusing on Youth Active Citizenship in Europe. The edited volume gathers ethnographic studies on young political activists. In the beginning, it problematizes the ‘binaries of civic participation’. The editors Shakuntala Banaji and Sam Mejias argue that questions about what is ‘political’ or what counts as ‘active’ have been answered unsatisfactory by large-scale survey research’s attempt to categorize the rich field of youth engagement. The goal of this volume, hence, is to go beyond these categories and to provide insights into how young Europeans become active in political matters. It approaches the question of what active citizenship today entails from a variety of angles and theoretical schools: What are motivations of being active? What is the role of emotions for participation? How diverse are youth movements and what are the chances of an activist burnout? For readers of International Journal of Press and Politics, Chapter 6 on “Hybridity in the Media and Political Strategies of Leftist Youth Organisations” by Alena Macková Macková, Sam Mejias and Jakub Macek may be of greatest interest, as it illustrates the long-known struggle of balancing communication strategies between offline and digital activities. There are several things to like about this book: First, the cases of ethnographic studies undertaken in eight countries—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the UK— are illustrative of youth engagement to an extent that quantitative research will never be. The rich ethnographic work, Book Review