Young people and citizenship

Clegg, Zoe 2020. Young people and citizenship. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis explores young people’s understandings and experiences of citizenship. As members of society who are unable to influence decision making through electoral participation, for children and young people (under the age of 18) practice becomes an ever more important part of their citizenship. The study aims to understand how civically engaged young people experience citizenship in their everyday lives and what their motivations are for participating in civic society. The thesis addresses normative concepts of youth citizenship characterised by the view that children and young people require citizenship education in order to become citizens. Following a review of the literature, the research focused on developing a person-centred understanding of citizenship, seeking to recognise ways in which young people are citizens now as opposed to citizens of the future. It implements a framework that conceptualises citizenship as a contextual lived experience, thereby broadening the concept of citizenship beyond narrow and exclusive parameters that overlook the meaningful aspects of people’s everyday lives (Wood, 2014; Larkins, 2014). The research employs a mixed qualitative methodological framework and a series of interviews and focus groups facilitated by visual and creative methods capture the diverse and contextual aspects of what citizenship means to the young people in this study. The empirical findings of this research focus on presenting the issues that young people most emphatically identified as meaningful to their citizenship. A significant aspect of this related to young people’s experiences of education and learning which participants believed they should have a greater say in.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 April 2021
Last Modified:	27 Sep 2022 01:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/140307

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