within schools (Cross et al, 2014) to children’s or youth parliaments (Cushing and van Vliet, 2017). Examples abound of young people being invited to comment on community, service and policy developments, at local, regional and national levels; sometimes their involvement goes further, in forms of co-design and co-production (Tisdall et al, 2014). Participation projects and activities have proliferated, from young people influencing their local contexts (for example, care-experienced young people influencing local authority services2), to young people speaking to international decision makers on issues ranging from child marriage to equal opportunities.3 The recent profile of young people’s activism in climate change, including Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN General Assembly4 and the widespread marches of school children and youth (Sengupta, 2019), have gripped the public imagination and flooded both traditional and social media. Young people’s participation is now high profile for the public, as well as being of policy, practice and research interest.
Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, participation as a concept is used widely but differently, with no consensus across literatures, research and policies on its definition. A very basic definition of ‘participation’ – for example, ‘the fact that you take part or become involved in something’ in the Cambridge English Dictionary5 – is very generalised, lacks links to decision making and impact, and thus provides only a starting point from a rights perspective. Inspired by Cotta (1979), the concept of participation is defined here as having two interconnected meanings. On the one hand, participation does refer to ‘taking part’ in something and particularly to taking part in civic and political activities. On the other hand, participation refers to ‘being part’ of something, included in a society with a series of rights and possibilities. Through a wide variety of case examples, this book demonstrates how the two dimensions of participation are interconnected in young people’s possibilities of being part of and taking part in different welfare societies.
Youth
As a second focus, the book interrogates the conditions of ‘youth’ and ‘being young’ in contemporary Europe and how these impact on young people’s practices and possibilities of participation. The book starts from the premise that ‘youth’ is first and foremost a social category (Bourdieu, 1993) whose boundaries and contents are continuously defined and redefined in the evolving interactions between structural forces and individual agency (Archer, 2003). Further, ‘being young’ is conceptualised as a status that entails specific opportunities, constraints and expectations of behaviour that emerge from and are negotiated in the interactions between young individuals and their surrounding social contexts (Furlong, 2009; Kelly and Kamp, 2014).
Social sciences have analysed youth through different theoretical frameworks. The transition perspective (Furlong, 2009) has understood youth as a life stage traditionally meant to prepare young individuals to acquire adult roles in society through a series of ‘modern’ rites of passage that young people have to face: namely – for Western societies – completing education, finding a job, moving out of the family home and starting a family of their own (Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Transition analyses have highlighted how growing social mobility has increased the transitions young people go through and the speed by which they take place (Furlong et al, 2011; Rosa, 2013). A generational perspective recognises certain similarities across young people in different societies but also how individual young people can experience these differently in their particular contexts (Woodman and Wyn, 2015). Lastly, the cultural perspective highlights not only the variety of youth cultures, but also the cultural practices and strategies through which young people cope with and make sense of their positions in society (Hall and Jefferson, 1975; Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Despite their differences, these three perspectives within youth studies point out how youth must be understood in relation to the young person’s specific life conditions and surrounding social contexts. With that in mind, the book has sought to give space to diversity among young people. Contributions depict an array of different youth conditions: for example, young people with disabilities, young asylum seekers, and young people living in rural areas. The stories consider the multifaceted and differentiated meanings that ‘being young’ can have to young people and how differences in conditions can affect young people’s participation.
The ‘adult world’ intervenes to shape youth through definitions and discourses. Legal definitions can define the passages from youth to adulthood, with implications for young people’s participation opportunities: for example, a minimum age for voting rights. Adults’ understandings of youth can define the appropriateness of a young person’s participation. Such definitions are part of an intergenerational struggle, where young people and their expressions are often portrayed in negative terms, such as being passive, unengaged and self-centred or dangerous and threatening (Pickard and Bessant, 2019; Walther et al, 2020). The book therefore pays attention to how youth participation is formed in the interactions between young people, adults and institutions. Chapters consider how particular understandings and discourses of ‘youth’ shape what counts and is discounted as young people’s participation. They consider what spaces young people are invited to engage with, which ones they are excluded from, and which ones young people carve out for themselves.
Inequality
The third concept scaffolding this book is inequality. A long tradition in social sciences and related studies has grappled with the concept and manifestations of inequality (Castel, 2003; Dorling, 2015). For this book, inequality is the structuring of advantaged and disadvantaged life chances and is the effect of an uneven distribution of opportunities among the members of a given society (Rawls, 1971; Nussbaum, 1995). The unequal distribution of life chances within a given society produces social hierarchies and different degrees of integration for its members, who can occupy more ‘central’ or more ‘peripheral’ positions in relation to civil, political and social spheres (Castel, 2003). When it comes to youth, social sciences have analysed structural disparities in young people’s possibilities to meet basic needs such as food and housing (Green, 2017), in access to education (Heathfield and Fusco, 2016), and in health and other services (Alemán-Díaz et al, 2016). Research shows how dimensions of class (Threadgold, 2017),
