Biographies of young people's participation in eight European Cities.

This thematic report addresses the core research questions of the Partispace project from a biographical perspective. This perspective aims to further Partispace’s understanding of the complexity of young people’s social and political participation, and spaces and styles of participation, by exploring participatory activities over the course of young people’s lives and the young people’s meaning-making of participation in terms of their biographies. Partispace’s analysis of national and European discourses on participation (see Andersson et al, 2016; Becquet et al, 2016) indicates that these frameworks endorse participation in the teenage and young adult years because it is integral to individuals’ socialisation processes and is important for outcomes in later life. However, little attention is paid to how young people perceive their social role and interpret their participation in their daily lives and in their particular social and personal contexts. In addition, the prevailing perspective of ‘demotivated’ young people within European discourses is one-dimensional and neglects a variety of factors that are important in young people’s participation - for example, belonging to and recognition from peers, and experiences in and with institutions and particularly with decisions that are crucial for identity-work and self-efficacy. Furthermore, in considering that young people in Europe now are living in an individualised, pluralised and complex world where the life-course is less predictable, further Partispace findings from the ethnographic case studies (see Batsleer et al 2017) indicate that young people’s participation is changing and that dominant discourses on participation must, therefore, be challenged. Importantly, the Partispace project does not conceive of young people as a homogeneous group with common needs and aspirations; nonetheless, the age group of the Partispace sample includes young people who are in a life stage that is characterised by common challenges in terms of opportunities and changes in life domains (e.g. education, training, employment, welfare, housing, and health). These issues over the life-course, as well as ongoing identity-work, influence the reasons why and the ways in which young people participate in their everyday lives and in democratic spaces. The young people taking part in Partispace are viewed as active and meaning-making individuals who define their situations, and reflect about themselves, their actions and the lives they live, and as active social actors with their own conceptualisations and lived experiences, complex identities and social positioning. The interconnected relationship between the self and the social world, however, requires an exploration of the meanings of ‘participation’ for young people in order to understand how these meanings relate to a wider, sociocultural context from a micro-perspective. This interwoven micro-perspective is developed by analysing the narrated life stories of young people in order to reconstruct life trajectories and subjective meaning-making. Utilising an understanding of biographies as a construct within the dialectic of the subjective and objective, biographical reconstructions can illustrate on the one hand meaning-making, trajectories and subjective interpretations (the micro) and, on the other, structure, society and opportunities (the meso and macro). The current report considers the micro, meso and macro level of young people’s biographies of participation. Many studies on participation focus on who participates where and when, but few studies explore how and why (or why not) young people participate in different ways throughout their lives. Partispace’s biographical analysis began during the ethnographic case studies, which analysed summaries of all of the biographical interviews collected during the project (96). The analysis of the summaries centered on young people’s self-presentation and motivations and their involvement in participatory activities and derived five overlapping themes (‘stories’) in order to start to capture the biographical meaning of participation for the young people: • Self-made wo/man stories refer to young people for whom participation means self-development with pragmatic and/ or careerist motivations. These motivations are further broken down: young people who prioritise their personal development through their participatory activities; those who relate their leadership skills in particular to their participatory activities; and those who aim to make a career from participatory activities. • Experimentation stories refer to young people who participate in order to explore life in general, their identity, or a specific participatory practice. Young people engage in experimentation in a number of ways: through motion and change, which involves trying new things, places, activities, and social environments and norms; through identity-work, which involves exploring personal qualities, and strengths and weaknesses; and through immersing themselves in an activity (e.g. sport, music or theatre) in order to test potential or limits. • Doing/ changing/ resisting/ taking responsibility stories include those young people who want to challenge systemic and societal injustices by taking responsibility for working towards change through participation. These young people can ‘resist’ and ‘rebel’ but stress also taking responsibility for creating change. This theme demonstrates that young people can both resist and take responsibility, and that their self-presentation is not always neatly aligned with their participation settings. • Stories of rediscovery of oneself and one’s identity refer to young people who use their participation to cope with racial, ethnic, class and gender issues and discrimination and to cope with other personal problems including health issues and bullying. These stories centred on social identities and self-identity. • Finally, stories of role models (or their absence) include young people who associate their participation with an important figure (through aspiration, inspiration, orientation or conditioning) or the absence of such a figure. Important figures are, generally, parents or teachers, and participation framed in this way is often related to early-life conditions. By introducing a biographical perspective into the research on the styles and spaces of youth participation, then, the analysis can explore how and why participation unfolds, who (e.g. significant others) and what (e.g. turning points, experiences and family backgrounds) are subjectively relevant to participation and in what way. In this analysis, participation is conceived as integral to a young person’s biography while a biography is, in turn, integral to participation. The aim of this thematic report is to analyse a small number of the Partispace biographies in depth in order to understand the individual biography by reconstructing it analytically and exploring the relationship between biographies, life trajectories and participation. In order to do so, the analysis used two complementary approaches, connecting the concept of ‘biography’ with the concept of the ‘life-course’. The analytical link between the life-course and the biographical perspective rests on the classical, interactionist assumption that the individual must be understood as a social being who is embedded within a socially constructed world (Mead 1934/1967). The first approach developed ‘clusters of participation careers’ by focusing upon the interaction of biographies with (i) structural elements within a life-story, including turning points and significant others; (ii) needs, wishes and desires that inform young people’s participation; and (iii) (lived) participatory learning processes and experiences that influence the individual biography. The second approach explored the young people’s ‘participation biographies’ (see von Schwanenflügel 2015) in terms of how biographical experiences within young people’s stories lead to and bring about their involvement with various participatory activities over time by attributing experiences to activities. The second approach developed ‘dimensions of participation biographies’. Drawing the findings from the analysis together enabled using reconstructions of biographies for a micro, meso and macro exploration of biographies of participation. The report comprises six more sections. The next chapter sets out the importance of considering biographies of participation by exploring some statistical findings on youth participation in Europe and by starting to question why young people participate. Chapter 3 summarises the theoretical rationale for the analysis and sets out the methodology and methods utilised in the two strands of analysis. The fourth and fifth chapters explore the biographical data in ‘clusters of participation careers’ and ‘dimensions of participation biographies’. Chapter 6 synthesises the findings and draws conclusions, and is followed by the final chapter which sets out some policy recommendations from the analysis.