Children and Young People Contesting Citizenship

Abstract

How citizenship is understood and enacted shapes how different actors in society are perceived and valued, whose ideas, as well as which ideas, matter and how decisions are made about what kind of a society we live in. Children and young people’s citizenship goes to the heart of how (adult) society views children and young people – and it is contested. Critically engaging with the “politics of citizenship” is essential if societies are to understand and address ongoing forms of contestation, inequality, and injustice, particularly as they pertain to the youngest members of society. Even as they experience forms of discrimination and exclusion, many children and young people are actively challenging and shaping discourses and norms of “citizenship”: in relation to communities, institutions, and the State. This chapter examines how citizenship is defined and contested in relation to children and young people. First it summarizes current approaches and limitations of ways of conceptualizing the “citizenship” of children and young people. Reflecting on brief case studies from Australia and Northern Ireland, the chapter then argues that in colonized countries there are a range of views, perceptions, meanings, and actions relating to citizenship. Drawing on Isin (Being political: genealogies of citizenship. University of Minnesota Press, 2002; Theorizing acts of citizenship. In: Isin E, Nielsen G (eds), Acts of citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 15–43, 2009), it then proposes that shifting the focus from children’s and young people’s “citizenship status” to their “acts of citizenship” can unsettle the dominant assumptions about what counts as citizenship, how it comes to be, and with what consequences.