‘Once you bond … you want to create social change’: Interpersonal relationships in youth activism
Abstract
This paper calls for greater attention to the interpersonal aspects of youth activism through a sociological and Black feminist exploration of peer relationships within youth political engagement. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative research, the work foregrounds the perspectives and experiences of Black girls and girls of colour involved in an anti-racist Scottish youth work charity. I argue that community and friendship ties cultivated participants' activism. Moreover, participants sought to enact social change by undertaking activist educational practices with their peers. This paper demonstrates how studying young people's peer relationships can engender a better understanding of youth activism and support it.
INTRODUCTION
Claims of young people's political disengagement have been fervently challenged, with youth and Black feminist scholars shedding light on unconventional political practices (Pickard, 2019) and everyday acts of resistance (Collins, 2000; Mirza, 1997) that young people undertake, for example, at school (Kelly, 2018) and online (Burns & Eaton, 2016). Relatedly, girlhood researchers have critiqued neoliberal discourses that frame activist girls as extraordinary (Taft, 2010), erasing their activist networks and collective actions (Bent, 2016; Edell et al., 2016). Studies of these networks have mostly focused on intergenerational ties, though a few have shown the importance of peer relationships to girls' activism in schools (Kelly, 2018) and social movements (Taft, 2010). This paper contributes to these discussions by asking – how does studying peer relationships engender a better understanding of youth activism? The exploration of this question is informed by sociological and Black feminist thought and foregrounds the under-researched experiences and perspectives of Black girls and girls of colour1 in Scotland.
To do this, the paper draws on a 15-month-long multi-method qualitative study conducted with young people who attended the anti-racist Scottish youth work charity Intercultural Youth Scotland (IYS) and their youth workers. The vast majority of the Scottish population identifies as White2 and the small number of studies conducted with students of colour in Scotland show that they experience everyday racism (Kennelly & Mouroutsou, 2020) and a lack of understanding of their identity from school staff and peers (Guyan, 2019). IYS works to bring together young Black people and people of colour and support them in contending with and challenging the discrimination and prejudice they experience in Scotland.
This paper will interrogate how friendships, peer relationships and community bonds, formed based on both similarities and across differences, can cultivate young people's activism and inform their activist practices. By shedding light on these relationships, it is possible to draw out a deeper understanding of youth activism, and in turn, provide important insights for policy-makers and practitioners seeking to support young people's political action.
UNDERSTANDING YOUTH ACTIVISM
I will now review scholarship about the political engagement of youth and Black women that inform the definition of activism that this paper is anchored in. It is often claimed that young people are politically disengaged and disinterested. In response, youth scholars have argued that the dominant definition of political participation chiefly refers to engagement with formal political institutions and does not take into account their unconventional political practices (Pickard, 2019). Relatedly, Black feminist scholars have critiqued the prevalent conceptualisation of activism for focussing on highly visible and often violent actions in the public sphere and disregarding Black women's everyday practices of resistance in the private sphere (Collins, 2000; Mirza, 1997). These scholars have therefore called for an expanded definition of political engagement (see also Taft, 2014).
In her groundbreaking study of Black women and women of colour's political organisations in the United Kingdom, Julia Sudbury (2005) challenged the notion that they were politically passive by showing that their activism was largely aimed at their communities, families and themselves and undertaken on an everyday basis, for instance by providing their children with education (see also Collins, 2000; Mirza, 1997). Relatedly, studies with youth have shed light on their diverse everyday practices of activism, for instance, raising awareness and challenging racism and sexism by creating online content (Burns & Eaton, 2016), engaging in informal conversations (Clay, 2012; Taft, 2010) and developing strategies to navigate a discriminatory environment (Kelly, 2018). This paper, therefore, supports an expanded definition of activism that is anchored in the perspectives and everyday experiences of the study's participants, as efforts to enact social change on an interpersonal, community, national or international level.
Recently, public discourses have celebrated activist girls like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg as empowered political actors. Yet girlhood studies scholars have shown that these discourses promote neoliberal, depoliticised and individualistic understandings of girls' activism that do not include their perspectives and experiences, make them individually responsible for enacting structural change and thus offer a rather narrow avenue of political engagement (Taft, 2014). Intersections of ethnicity and race with gender further shape the kinds of activism that girls can undertake (Kelly, 2018), for example, racism in feminist communities hinders the engagement of girls of colour in them (Edell et al., 2016). Attention to everyday forms of activism is therefore crucial for uncovering the unacknowledged ways in which Black girls and girls of colour engage in critical resistance (Kelly, 2018).
COMMUNITY AND FRIENDSHIP IN YOUTH ACTIVISM
I will now survey scholarship from Black feminist thought and youth and girlhood studies that, taken together, point to the importance of friendship and community in the activism of Black girls and girls of colour. Black feminist thought emphasises the importance of community and relationships of love, support and care for the survival of Black girls and women in the face of structural violence and exclusion (Anim-Addo, 2014; Brown, 2021; Luna & Laster Pirtle, 2021). For Black girls, friendship ‘is a lifeline and a way to be seen in a world when feeling overlooked’ (Brown, 2021, p. 203). While previously theorised in mainstream sociology as nonpolitical, community is a core construct and principle for organising different groups, such as women and minority ethnic groups (Collins, 2010). By sharing their lived experiences and recognising how problems affect its members collectively, community serves as a ‘site of affirmation, identification, and political expression’ (Collins, 2010, p. 10).
Black feminist scholars have shown how dedicated groups and spaces can generate such processes. Political groups of Black women were formed in the United Kingdom in the 1970s in response to sexism in Black power organisations. These groups enabled Black women to discuss shared experiences of racist and sexist oppression and fight against them collectively (Bryan et al., 2018). In the 1980s and 1990s, more organisations of Black women and women of colour were founded and they engaged in various forms of activism (Sudbury, 2005). Two recent studies, one conducted in the United Kingdom (Showunmi, 2017) and another in the United States (Kelly, 2020), highlight the importance of safe spaces for Black girls who attend schools where most of the students are White, as these spaces allowed the girls to form close bonds, speak freely about their experiences, feel a sense of affirmation and engage in critical resistance.
Despite these findings, popular neoliberal discourses on girl activists tend to frame them as extraordinary and depict them as enacting social change by themselves (Taft, 2010), thereby erasing their activist and support networks and collective actions (Bent, 2016; Edell et al., 2016). Studies that aim to foreground the significance of networks to girls' activism largely focus on intergenerational ties. However, a number of studies reveal that meaningful relationships with peers encourage and sustain girls' participation in social movements (Taft, 2010) and everyday activism in school (Kelly, 2018). Still, there is little research on how young people's friendships with peers can engender social change (Holmes, 2016, p. 11), especially outside of their activism in schools and social movements. Taken together, these findings make the case for studying how community and friendship ties with peers enable the everyday activism of Black girls and girls of colour, and the spaces and groups that facilitate these connections. The contribution of this work is not in simply examining this under-researched topic but in doing so in a youth work setting. The next section will detail the methodology that was designed to undertake this scholarly examination.
METHODOLOGY
This paper is based on a qualitative study that explored the significance of friendship in the political lives of Black girls and girls of colour in Scotland. The study was conducted from September 2020 until November 2021 and involved young people who attended IYS and their youth workers. IYS is an anti-racist Scottish youth work charity that supports young Black people and people of colour and engages them in enacting social change. The organisation was chosen because its programmes encouraged socialising and although they had a social justice orientation most were not geared towards public activism. This allowed me to explore the more implicit forms of activism that participants undertook and how their relationships informed their political actions.
The study is theoretically anchored in a sociological conceptualisation of childhood and youth, which recognises young people's agency in constructing their social worlds (Tisdall, 2011) and affecting social change (Pickard, 2019) and takes their views seriously rather than treating them as passive research objects (Pickles, 2020). Accordingly, the study was designed to establish relationships of dialogue, trust and care with participants (Emond, 2005), afford them enjoyable, affirming and varied research engagements (Davidson, 2017) and foreground their perspectives and experiences (Flewitt, 2014). A multi-method qualitative approach was employed: I conducted participant observation in 17 sessions of two IYS girls' groups, 26 sessions of the IYS youth club and nine additional IYS activities; I facilitated seven workshops with one girls' group and four with another, which included creative methods such as writing (Davies & Heaphy, 2011), mapping and photography (Rogers, 2017); and I undertook in-depth semi-structured interviews with six girls and three youth workers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the activities of IYS, and with them the study, oscillated between in-person and online settings.
15 young people and three youth workers participated in the research. The young people's ages ranged from 14 to 19. Most were of Caribbean or African heritage (some were mixed-race), others were of South Asian and Middle-Eastern heritage and one was White. Some participants were born in the United Kingdom while others were immigrants, including from other European countries. Most identified as girls and one came out as non-binary during the research. As a Jewish Israeli of European origin, some participants identified me as a person of colour and others as White (though not White British). Together with being an adult and a researcher, this made for a complex positionality that required careful navigation of my presence and participation in IYS which are beyond the scope of this paper to address.
The research was undertaken under the framework of IYS, which had a clear and robust safeguarding policy and whose youth workers had an existing relationship with the young people. In this context, the organisation and I deemed the young people as sufficiently capable of giving consent independently, an approach which recognises their rights (Tisdall, 2011) and agency (Pickles, 2020) in research. The research project, including the decision not to seek parental consent based on the above reasons, was approved through the ethical review process of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Consent was obtained in written form and on an ongoing oral basis directly from the participants. I emphasised to participants that they do not have to answer my questions and reminded them that they can ask for their words and actions to be removed from the research. There were few members of the girls' groups who attended my workshops but did not consent to participate in the research, which served as an encouraging indication that (at least some of) the girls did not feel pressure to participate. Participants were given a choice whether to be named or referred to by a pseudonym and I sought to confirm their choice later in the fieldwork but in cases where I was unable to do so, I used a pseudonym.
With participants' permission, I recorded and transcribed the interviews, workshops, some of the girls' groups' sessions and several conversations with a youth worker. I took extensive field notes of other sessions and activities that I attended. I analysed the field notes, transcriptions and textual outputs from the workshops by creating categories that stemmed from the theoretical framework and data, coding, generating themes and interpreting them, in an iterative process (Rossman & Rallis, 2017). I later conducted a workshop where I presented participants with the findings to gather their feedback.
FINDINGS
The following subsections will interrogate how creating a community with other young Black people and people of colour facilitated participants' political expression; the ways in which friendships formed across differences expanded and informed participants' activism; and how they undertook activist practices together with their friends and peers.
Building a political community with peers
When I was younger I used to go to a girls' group. I loved it. The feeling of understanding, no one could change it. Growing up I felt different and excluded. [In the IYS girls' group] I felt special just as everyone else. I first joined to try it out and discovered a little family. Girls in power. Beautiful, humble, and funny. I loved it there. We played, we joked, we wrote and we talked about important issues. Issues we could all relate to. For once I didn't feel like a fish out of water. I felt in power, I felt empowered, by myself and those other young queens.—Faith
Faith's powerful words echo sentiments expressed by many of the study's participants who described IYS as a place where they could befriend young people who, like them, belong to marginalised ethnic and racialised groups. These bonds fostered a community where young people felt a sense of belonging, affirmation and safety that served as an antidote to the inequalities they experienced and enabled the young people to challenge discrimination. This aligns with the assertion of Black feminists that community and positive interpersonal relationships are crucial for the survival (Anim-Addo, 2014; Brown, 2021; Luna & Laster Pirtle, 2021) and political organising (Collins, 2010) of Black women and girls. Although youth work settings provide opportunities and support for young people to create friendships with peers, friendship is largely ignored in youth work policy (Ord et al., 2022) and scholarship (Delgado, 2016). IYS youth workers, all of whom were Black people and people of colour and mostly young adults, played an important role in engendering these positive connections. This was done by facilitating the IYS programmes and forming meaningful relationships with the young people who viewed them as near-peers and sometimes even as friends.
At school we don't have very many people of colour, friends that are people of colour … So [IYS] was a chance to meet other people of other ethnicities and races. And to just bond over culture and stuff like that…—Angelina
In contrast to school and other White-dominated spaces in Scotland, participants felt that within the IYS youth work space they could speak openly about their cultures, religions and family backgrounds. This, in turn, enabled them to form meaningful interpersonal ties.
What makes IYS a safe space, [is] that [it] doesn't matter where you come from or who you are, we all have a thing in common and that's that we're keen to end racism and to fight discrimination. … I go in and I do not worry about racism, I don't worry about discrimination.—Asha
It was the first time in my life where I was in a space with PoC [people of colour] Scottish girls. … It was the first place where people were having the conversations that I was having in my head out loud. Suddenly I didn't feel so crazy anymore.—Emily
Sit and talk negatively about the white dominant culture and racism and oppression. I don't think I ever had a conversation really with any White person apart from [family member who is White] and some White people that are at IYS about racism, things like that. —Emily
Contrary to feeling silenced and ‘crazy’ (or in Faith's words ‘a fish out of water’) in White-dominated spaces, the formation of relationships and community with young Black people and people of colour in an anti-discrimination organisation generated a sense of safety and affirmation which enabled political expression (Collins, 2010).
I feel like the girls' group really helps because … Minorities are the most attacked group but women of the minorities are even worse. Cause even in my culture, men always have the power … It's just stressful on us a lot of times cause we're the ones that are supposed to know how to cook, how to clean, how to do this, how to do that and it's just a safe space, we're just there, you're all girls, you all understand each other and you're ‘[exhales] okay so let's talk about this, let's talk about that’.—Faith
Faith, like other participants, perceived the group as a safe space where she could relate to others based on similar experiences and challenges they faced in the ways that gender, race and age intersected in their lives, such as domestic gendered expectations. As Faith attests, talking about such issues with others in the group helped to contend with them.
Participants described the girls' group as a space where, unlike in mixed-gender IYS groups, they could speak without fear of judgement about important issues that affected them that were not discussed elsewhere, such as periods and sexual abuse. Additionally, some participants felt they were able to get to know each other better in the girls' group because they spoke of ‘heavier’ and more personal topics and the discussions were more political and in-depth. This is likely also because the group met over a long period and attendance was fairly consistent. This echoes studies which found that creating spaces for Black girls in schools enabled them to grow closer, speak freely, feel affirmed and resist racist oppression together (Kelly, 2020; Showunmi, 2017). Moreover, one participant mentioned that the girls' group was necessary because some of the boys in IYS held sexist views. The prevalence of sexism in Black power organisations was a key reason why Black women in the United Kingdom set up their own groups and political organisations (Bryan et al., 2018). In a later section, I will elaborate on how conversations that unfolded in the IYS girls' groups constituted activist practices.
Finally, when IYS moved its activities from Edinburgh to online platforms due to COVID-19 government regulations, the digital divide hindered the participation of some regular members, as they had internet connectivity issues or shared their room or technical equipment with other family members (see McBride & Ralph, 2020). On the other hand, young Black people and people of colour who lived far away from Edinburgh were then able to attend IYS. Online attendance was particularly significant for those who lived in areas of Scotland that had almost no ethnic diversity, as it allowed them to befriend and become part of a community of young Black people and people of colour. I argue that community and friendships ties with peers from marginalised ethnic and racialised groups provided a vital foundation for the political expression of Black girls and girls of colour in Scotland, as they often have to deal with intersections of racism and sexism by themselves. I will now discuss how differences between friends also fostered activism.
Expanding activism through friendship ties
I think cause there's no space for that usually. In school you sit next to each other all your school career but you don't actually learn about a person's background or their family history or their ancestors' history … That's why [in the activism programme] it's such a huge [reaction of] ‘wow I actually care, because I like you, we're friends and I would love to explore that together and see where we have similarities and where we don't and how we can support each other in these causes’.—Ola
The youth worker thus drew a connection between an affectionate friendship bond, learning about friends' experiences and identities and politically supporting them.
What I like about IYS is that it creates many bonds, and then once you bond, that's when you want to unite forces and create social change … With [friend from IYS], he's a gay man, right? … He's aware that I'm a Black woman living in Scotland and also an immigrant, he's aware that certain things will affect me. He's an ally, he shows me that he fights against those things affecting me. And by me listening to his struggles, me being educated by him or by what he posts on Instagram, I get educated, and I want to fight against the struggles that are affecting him or his community.—Asha
Asha described how a friendship she made with a young person in IYS provided her with recognition of and support in the struggles she faced as a Black immigrant woman and simultaneously extended her solidarity and activism to issues that her friend faced as a gay person. This demonstrates how peer relationships not only encourage and sustain girls' activism (Kelly, 2018; Taft, 2010) but also expand their activist interest and commitment to new sociopolitical issues, ones that do not affect them directly.
It was right at the beginning of the pandemic … I saw so much stuff about people being racist about East Asian people and I was like ‘this is so fucked up, why are people thinking like this, what the hell’. … So I made a little post about it, cause I was really pissed off and also my friend who is Filipino was really annoyed at it as well and didn't want to post on their account because they were scared of what was gonna happen so I was like ‘okay, I'll do it’. And we kinda discussed what I should say.—Alyx
While not explicitly stated, it is likely that one of the reasons that Alyx, who is White, felt enraged by anti-Asian racism was because it affected their friend, who they mention is a Filipino. It is also likely that writing the post together with their friend engendered for Alyx a better understanding of this sociopolitical issue. Similarly, Asha told me that she had written a blog post based on conversations with her friend, who is Romani, about the struggles that Roma people face. Furthermore, Alyx uploaded the post to their account so that their friend could engage in activism yet also remain protected from potential negative consequences. These findings thus begin to shed light on the under-researched topic of how young people's friendships with peers can engender social change (Holmes, 2016, p. 11), especially outside of their activism in schools and social movements. The findings also raise further questions about how intersections of age, gender, race and other identity axes shape youth's access to different forms of activism (Edell et al., 2016; Kelly, 2018) and the potential role of friendship in undermining or circumventing barriers to political expression.
I wouldn't completely agree. Even though you are friends with someone, that doesn't mean you will fight for all their beliefs. This is simply because my friends' beliefs might not always align with mine. On the other hand, when your friends have the same view as you, having conversations together will make you realise that you can fight together.—Anonymous
These comments suggest that activist engagement with friends might require sharing the same perspective with them and/or feeling passionate about the issues they face.
Furthermore, in some cases differences in identity and views erected barriers to both engaging in activism and forming friendships. The IYS youth workers shared that discussions of LGBTQ+ identities and issues, which they initiated and encouraged, were new and contentious for some of the young people. This sometimes made LGBTQ+ young people feel that they were not wholly accepted by everyone in IYS.4 One of the IYS youth workers explained that they worked to facilitate communication and positive relationships among the young people and sometimes had to mediate conflicts, for instance, on issues relating to cultural and LGBTQ+ identities. The girls, however, mostly spoke of the positive experiences they had in IYS and it was only in our one-on-one interviews that some of them disclosed tensions with others. I believe this was chiefly because IYS held such a monumental significance in their lives that they were keen to protect its image in the research and perhaps also in their own conception of it. In IYS, meaningful peer relationships and the positive feelings they generated were therefore not automatic or conflict-free but rather a result of ongoing effort. In the next section, I will interrogate how peer relationships were integral to participants' activist practices.
Learning and educating as interpersonal activist practices
Through IYS programmes and together with their friends and peers in IYS, participants engaged in various activist practices, including advocacy, media-making, consultancy and performance. In this section, however, I will focus on a form of activism undertaken by participants that sheds light on the hidden, everyday ways in which they engaged in critical resistance (Kelly, 2018) and highlights the interpersonal aspects of their activism. When I asked participants in what ways they create social change around issues they care about, the most common response was ‘learning’ and ‘educating’ themselves and others in their lives. As Angelina succinctly put it—‘an educational standpoint [is] the only way forward’. Education, especially through conversations, is not usually conceptualised as (youth) activism, even though a few studies have shown that youth in the Americas who participated in social movements viewed it as an important tool in their political repertoire (Clay, 2012; Taft, 2010). This perspective was shared by this study's participants, who described how they educate others in their lives by engaging in conversations with them and sharing content on social media. For example, in the previous section Asha recounted how talking to her friend and reading the posts he shared educated her on his struggles as a gay person and made her want to fight alongside him.
IYS was a central arena where participants undertook activist educational practices together. The girls discussed with each other and their youth workers a myriad of sociopolitical issues that they were passionate about, such as gender roles in their communities, racism in schools, representations of Black people in the media and more. These educational conversations took place in different kinds of interactions and settings: through structured activities such as debates in the youth club or specific workshops in the girls' group (on matters such as intersectionality and women's rights around the world); to recording a radio show in the girls' group where they discussed a specific topic, often of their own choosing (for example, ‘talking about female issues like periods and women's rights with males in our life’); to spontaneous moments, for instance when a fun game in the girls' group which included naming snacks turned into an opportunity for one of the girls and the youth worker to explain to others the boycott on Nestlé.5 One of the things participants mentioned that they liked about the conversations was listening to one another's opinions and perspectives. Like the everyday activism of Black women and women of colour, participants often directed their activist practices towards their own community and themselves (Collins, 2000; Mirza, 1997; Sudbury, 2005). As these practices were undertaken together with peers and friends in IYS, they had a highly interpersonal character.
Asha, the youth worker, asked what the girls thought about ‘Black fishing’. Some weren't familiar with the term while those who were began voicing their opinions. Asha said they will take turns speaking and explained to those who didn't know that, for example, Black fishing is when people use so much fake tan that they think they are Black or Brown. Elham said cultural appreciation is good but there's a line and she gave the example of belly dancing. Sonia, disagreeing that belly dancing is cultural appreciation, exclaimed ‘oh my goooood’. Maria explained that it's about the history of Black people, they used music to express themselves, and then White people appropriated it, country music started from slaves, same for hip hop, blues, and rock'n'roll which didn't start from Elvis but from a group of Black people. Then it was whitewashed. It's facts, it's history. Sonia agreed with her. Elham told us about a girl who tanned herself who told Elham that she is blacker than her. Elham said this was racist, you need to know the past, the deep meaning. Maria said ‘truth’, agreeing.
In the above conversation, the girls were teaching one another about the phenomena of Black fishing and the political, social and historical meanings of cultural appropriation. While Maria focussed on historical facts, Elham shared her own experience and both were equally accepted and validated as sources of knowledge. Sonia and Maria's reactions in this conversation (‘oh my goooood’ and ‘truth’) contributed to this dialogical process by expressing disagreement and assent, respectively. This echoes two of the key characteristics of Black feminist epistemology—using lived experience as a criterion of meaning and assessing knowledge claims in dialogue (Collins, 2000). In this sense, IYS girls' groups resembled critical consciousness groups, who analyse the conditions of their oppression and transform them (Freire, 1970), not just by direct action but also by members contributing to one another's and outsiders' critical social analysis skills through dialogue (Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015). While youth workers like Asha often facilitated such conversations in IYS and shared their own lived experiences and views, the young people had an active role in these educational dialogues.
Yeah … apart from the things that we know we also learn new things, so when it comes to going outside and that topic that we were talking about comes up and someone is just either being ignorant or just doesn't know enough then obviously me knowing what I learned from the group I can educate them. —Cece
When I presented the topic of educational conversations to participants in the findings workshop, one participant wrote in response: ‘We do talk about lots of social issues in conversations at IYS but sometimes it can feel a bit like a bubble because the rest of Scotland isn't having these conversations.’ Extending activist educational practices beyond IYS, as Cece does, can therefore help enact widespread social change. In the findings workshop, another participant wrote: ‘Talking doesn't always effect the status quo’. This comment acknowledges the transformative potential of educational conversations and simultaneously suggests that at times it may be limited. As mentioned earlier, most participants were involved in other forms of activism as well, though it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore them. Participants' feedback also demonstrates how they applied the critical thinking skills they learned in dialogue with one another not only to sociopolitical issues but also to their activism.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
I have explored how studying interpersonal relationships, particularly with peers and friends, and foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Black girls and girls of colour, helps to better understand youth activism, especially youth who belong to marginalised ethnic and racialised groups. I argue that youth activism is cultivated through bonds of community and friendship and undertaken with peers and friends in everyday ways.
First, I have shown how befriending and forming a community with peers who likewise belong to marginalised ethnic and racialised groups in an anti-discrimination organisation enabled participants to feel a sense of belonging, safety and affirmation and express themselves politically. This was especially so in the girls' groups, where participants contended with intersections of racism and sexism in their lives. These findings support Black feminist scholars' claims about the political significance of friendships (Brown, 2021), positive relationships and community (Anim-Addo, 2014; Collins, 2010; Luna & Laster Pirtle, 2021) dedicated organisations (Bryan et al., 2018; Sudbury, 2005) and safe spaces (Kelly, 2020; Showunmi, 2017) for Black girls and women. The novelty of this paper is in its focus on Black girls and girls of colour in Scotland, who are under-researched in British academia (Kennelly & Mouroutsou, 2020) outside of a racial deficit perspective (Palmer, 2016).
Second, I argued that participants' friendships expanded their activism to sociopolitical issues that affected their friends and informed the specific activist practices that participants undertook, sometimes on behalf of their friends. However, participants noted that friendship does not always result in activism, as it requires passion and similar outlooks. Future research should further explore under what conditions friendship extends activism and how it might help overcome barriers to political action.
Third, the paper explored participants' everyday activist practices, specifically how they sought to enact social change through educational conversations (see also Clay, 2012; Taft, 2010). I argued that these practices were highly interpersonal, as participants undertook them with their peers and friends in IYS in a dialogical manner as well as with others in their lives. Educational conversations should therefore be acknowledged as a meaningful form of everyday (youth) activism. Policy-makers and practitioners who wish to cultivate young people's political action should support them in befriending one another and facilitate educational dialogues between them.
Studying the role of peer relationships and friendship in youth activism challenges neoliberal individualising narratives of girl activists as extraordinary (Taft, 2010) that erase their activist networks (Bent, 2016; Edell et al., 2016). It can therefore be of interest to scholars of youth-led social movements. Moreover, it can help to better understand the motivations for dynamics and outcomes of participation in these movements. In a recent interview, Greta Thunberg described how taking part in Fridays for Future resulted in much-needed friendships and community for many of the youth activists, her included. She proclaimed that ‘Now, when I have got many friends, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters’ (Hattenstone, 2021, para. 52). However, these connections should not be uncritically celebrated. As mentioned earlier, LGBTQ+ young people did not always feel accepted by other young people in IYS and youth workers had to mediate conflicts between young people. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, the study also explored how conflicts and difficult interpersonal dynamics erected barriers to participants' activism. When researching friendships and community in youth activism, it is therefore important to also attend to negative experiences (Davies & Heaphy, 2011), power relations and boundary-making (Collins, 2010).
While this present case study is shaped by particular contexts and intersections of race, gender and age in participants' lives, I suggest that studying peer relationships, friendships and community ties can open up exciting new avenues to conceptualise, explore and support the activism of young people from marginalised ethnic or racialised groups, youth in general and even adults.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am incredibly grateful to the young people and staff at Intercultural Youth Scotland for their generous engagement with the study and for everything they have taught me. I warmly thank Mary Holmes and Niamh Moore for supervising this study and their formative academic guidance. Thank you also to Emma Davison and Laura Wright for their indispensable advice throughout the process of developing this paper and to colleagues for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This study was funded by the University of Edinburgh.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The study was approved through the ethical review process in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh on September 2020.
PATIENT CONSENT STATEMENT
Informed consent was obtained from all the participants in the study.
Endnotes
Biography
Thalia Thereza Assan is a Sociology PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include friendship, childhood and youth, activism, education, ethnography and creative methods.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Research data are not shared.
