Political Engagement as a Child: Rethinking, Reseeing and Reinvesting Youth in Political Participation

This chapter explores political involvement of youth through the perspectives of the third author, Dylan. We reflexively consider Dylan’s involvement in politics to extend his perspectives on political participation and analyze the ways in which politics impact children, and in turn, how children impact politics. Pushing back on the popular notion that children are not able to be ‘political’ because they are too young, we weave Dylan’s voice throughout a discussion of the role of young people in politics grounded in critical theoretical perspectives. We position childhood as a contested and constructed space, and we examine the historical construction of childhood to search for evidence of the child who is unable (and not enabled) to be involved in an ‘adult’ world. In refuting this, we turn to one young man’s experiences to elaborate that many youth have a predisposition to critical political thought, and Dylan’s perspectives become a lens to underscore the possibilities for encouraging youth to politics.