Re-Thinking the Boundaries of Civic Participation by Children and Youth in North America

© 2007 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 17(2), 2007 Re-Thinking the Boundaries of Civic Participation by Children and Youth in North America Caitlin Cahill University of Utah Roger A. Hart Graduate Center of the City University of New York Citation: Cahill, Caitlin and Roger A. Hart (2007). “Re-Thinking the Boundaries of Civic Participation by Children and Youth in North America.” Children, Youth and Environments 17(2): 213-225. The growing support for the civic participation of young people across North America has reached such a momentum that it calls for critical reflection and debate. In cities big and small, conservative and progressive, and in both the U.S. and Canada, young people are increasingly working together and with committed adults to evaluate their communities and make proposals for change. The papers in this special collection offer a panoramic view of the transformative possibilities of engaging young people in research, action, reflection and governance. Together with the authors we travel across the continent to visit children and youth who are critically evaluating their schools and neighborhoods, debating decisions in youth councils, busy in after-school programs, and advocating and organizing around issues that matter to them. This volume provides an opening for assessing the changing context of young people’s participation in North America and reveals critical insights into the field. In this introduction, we address issues raised by these collected papers and identify new questions for further engagement, rather than offer a general overview of the field. Our intention is to provide critical entry points for rethinking child and youth participation in the region. We want to push, and even challenge, the boundaries that delimit our current understandings of child and youth participation. To this end, we begin with questions to open up and expand our inquiry: What is the context for participation? What does it mean to “participate”? Why have children been excluded from the current discourses on young people’s civic participation? What is the role of ideology in youth participation programs? What roles do young people play in their communities? And, finally, the overarching question that structures our discussion: What lessons can we learn about participation from an understanding of the everyday lives of young people? Re-Thinking the Boundaries of Civic Participation... 214 Inspired by the exciting ways that some children and youth are already involved in their communities here and around the world, we argue that there is a need to think much more broadly about young people’s participation in the region. Our analysis offers a counter point to the limited discourse on child and youth participation in North America, which focuses primarily on the formal programming of children’s activities by adults. We begin our discussion by sketching the theoretical contours of young people’s participation across North America to provide a socioeconomic, political, and historical context within which the essays in this special issue can be located. While the overall standard of living is high in both the U.S. and Canada, this is mediated by intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender, ability and location. The everyday lives of young people across the continent reveal not only its diversity, but also the many informal ways in which young people are already participating. Imagine: an undocumented Dominican girl in Miami, Florida who spends most of her free time having to care for her younger brother and sisters while her father works as a day laborer and her mother in a sweat shop; a middle-class second generation Korean boy in Queens, New York, whose parents manage a convenience store but who does not need to work like his parents did and so is very involved in team sports; a Navajo boy growing up on a reservation in Arizona with a single parent who has kitchen garden where he grows vegetables to help with the family income; a middle-class West Indian teenage boy in Montreal whose parents work at the university and who volunteers in a neighborhood recreation project for younger children. While the U.S. is one of the most privileged places in the world, it is marked by racialized socioeconomic disparities in health, housing, education, and...