Description
Book SynopsisHow do people of different ages experience and engage with politics in their everyday lives, and how do these experiences and engagements change over their life course and across different generations? Age, life course and generation have become increasing important experiences for understanding political participation and political outcomes, and current policies of austerity across the world are affecting people of all ages. This book contributes towards an interdisciplinary understanding of the temporalities of everyday political encounters.
At a time when social science is struggling to understand the rapid and unexpected changes to contemporary political landscapes, the contributors to this book present examples of activism and politics across everyday experiences of homes, communities, online platforms, local environment, playgrounds and educational spaces. The research takes ethnographic, biographical and action research approaches, and the studies described feature interlocutors as young as four and as old as ninety-two who reside in European, North and South America, and South Asia. This is an eclectic text that brings together a number of themes and ideas not typically associated with political activism, and is intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities, social and political sciences interested in the temporalities of everyday political participation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.
Table of ContentsForeword Introduction: Political activism across the life course 1. Embodying ‘the Next Generation’: children’s everyday environmental activism in India and England 2. Teenage girls’ narratives of becoming activists 3. Narrative resources and political violence: the life stories of former clandestine militants in Portugal 4. Politicisation in later life: experience and motivations of older people participating in a protest for the first time 5. Talking politics in everyday family lives 6. Digital citizens? Data traces and family life 7. Welfare mothers’ grassroots activism for economic justice 8. Play as activism? Early childhood and (inter)generational politics 9. Educational activism across the divide: empowering youths and their communities 10. Housing choices in later life as unclaimed forms of housing activism 11. Enduring ideals: revisiting Lifetimes of Commitment twenty-five years later
