Young People and the Politics of ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Identity

Abstract

Throughout this book, we have argued that, in order to understand young people’s political engagement, it is necessary to understand politics as ‘lived experience’. As we saw in Chapter 2, this approach has some parallels with Beck’s (1994b) concept of ‘sub politics’ or Giddens’ (1994) view of ‘life politics’. It also resonates with Bang’s (2003; 2005) argument that, under the conditions of culture governance, politics is increasingly seen in terms of individual projects of self-actualisation, where the ‘political is increasingly personal and self-reflexive’ (2005, p. 163). These approaches share a view of political engagement as involving everyday choices and actions aimed at contesting or establishing rules, practices, norms, forms of decision-making, outcomes and so on, particularly where these rules, practices, norms and so on are no longer necessarily governed by tradition. This perspective owes a great deal to both feminist and social movement politics, which have re-politicised the micro and personal spheres that were defined out of the realm of politics by liberal political discourses. As a consequence, this approach views the range of arenas in which political action may be theoretically analysed as including those in which everyday experiences and actions occur.