Looking Between the (head)lines of youth civic participation

This presentation explores how cutting qualitative analysis in new ways can look behind the obvious and identify underlying social dynamics. The study focus on the dynamics of becoming a young Danish activist, including dealing with questions of equal access to participation. While the vast majority of studies concerned with youth civic participation are concerned with identifying the key public agendas defined through their participation, this study gives the backseat to the political agendas. Inspired by concepts such as ‘everyday makers’ and ‘lived citizenship’ it is argued that everyday micro actions and political agency are interwoven and that in order to study access to youth political participation it is central to also focus on the underlying normative ideals that guides how the young people internally negotiate and practice what it means to be a good activist.
The presentation draws on interviews with 85 young people in their early or mid-twenties who can be defined as ‘very engaged’ at the time of the interview. They represent in 19 youth organizations selected to represent a variety in aims, forms and sizes. To identify modes of participation and motivations guiding the activist internal practices and negotiations, a cross-cutting abductive analysis of the whole empirical dataset was performed inspired by hermeneutics (Gilje, 2017) and thematic analysis (Schreier, 2012). The presentation will explore and discuss what it means to apply a new cross-cutting analytical lens to a dataset. What insights can it contribute with and what is lost?