Conference Program

The dominant debate on youth citizenship continues to question young people’s capacity to operate as autonomous and competent civic actors (Print, 2007; Wood, 2022), focusing on the characteristics that relegate them outside full citizenship rights: age, economic dependence on adults, and marginal social status (Biesta et al., 2009; Gordon, 2010; Kiilakoski, 2020). This entails that the democratic participation of younger generations is still frequently interpreted through the lens of crisis, apathy, or radicalisation (Loncle et al., 2018; Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018; Biffi, 2023).

However, student mobilisations and forms of youth activism that traverse schools and universities at national and transnational levels show that the issue does not concern a decline in participation, but rather a profound transformation of its forms, languages, and spaces of expression (Bressant, 2020; Brennan et al., 2022; Pickard, 2019; Taft, 2010; Pitti, 2025). These practices propose counter-narratives that value young people as political subjects capable of critically interpreting the social, educational, and symbolic conditions in which they are situated, recognising them as crucial actors for social change (White & Wyn, 2008; Shah & Khan, 2023).

Through the conceptualization of doing society (Eranti and Luhtakallio, 2024), this contribution proposes a pedagogical reading of youth activism as a practice of political learning and as a form of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000; Biesta, 2012), questioning the role of formal educational contexts in processes of recognition, legitimation, or neutralisation of such experiences. Within this framework, a decolonial and intersectional reading allows us to analyse and understand how the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2000; Walsh, 2012), supported by the current political landscape and contemporary ideologies, continues to shape curricula, educational practices, and the forms of participation recognised as valid. As a consequence, the voices of young people positioned at the margins due to cultural belonging, racialisation, gender, or class remain increasingly unheard.

In this context, youth activism represents a political space for the recovery and construction of new knowledge capable of challenging dominant cognitive hierarchies and of valuing education in its democratic and transformative function. Reconsidering educational contexts in light of activist practices and decolonial epistemologies (Santos, 2014) therefore means recognising young people as co-producers of knowledge and as political interlocutors, restoring centrality to education as an inclusive relational space, a site of power negotiation, of belonging construction, and of democratic participation.