De Gruyter Handbook of Youth Activism

This is the first handbook to focus exclusively on youth activism, to outline the current state of research and identify promising emerging areas, and to forecast what new developments one might anticipate in the future. It provides a comprehensive introduction to theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as insights into the directions of both the scholarly field and the phenomenon of youth activism itself within the context of global power relations.

Youth political socialization, civic engagement, and citizenship attributes have frequently been highlighted as arenas of global concern, often by pundits and politicians declaiming the supposed ‘democratic deficit’ amongst more recent generations. Youth activism scholarship has often engaged with these debates, providing critical responses to more mainstream analyses of young people as apathetic, apolitical, or unconcerned about the society in which they live. In its place, youth activism scholarship provides more nuanced accounts of the possibilities and potentials for meaningful youth engagement in political social change, and, conversely, the barriers and proscriptions that prevent some young people from taking up a place within the polity.

• The first handbook of youth activism
• A unique, innovative and comprehensive introduction to the field of youth activism and protest
• Contributions from leading global scholars

Cihan Erdal earned his PhD in Sociology at Carleton University in 2025 and was awarded the Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement for his doctoral work on youth activism. Dr. Erdal’s broader research areas include youth cultures, social movements, democracy, coalitional politics, contemporary experiences of time and temporality, collective memory, political phenomenology, citizenship education, curriculum studies, and ethnographic methods. Erdal has been serving as an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and as the coordinator of the Centre for Urban Youth Research at Carleton University. He is also the founding director of the Istanbul Youth Research Center, a non-governmental organization specializing in critical and justice-oriented research on young people.

Jacqueline Kennelly is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Centre for Urban Youth Research (CUYR) at Carleton University. Dr. Kennelly’s current research focuses on activist and homeless young people’s experiences of democracy, citizenship and public life, schools as sites of youth homelessness prevention, and the experiences of young people who have left homelessness.

Far-reaching, youth-centred, conceptually rich: this is a super-smart, super-accessible gamechanger in the study of youth activism around the globe. This excellent collection offers not only rich insights into youth-led activism, but critical new ways to think about youth as actors for social change. Chockful of learnings and provocations, taking us from Aotearoa to Zimbabwe, this is the intellectual toolkit that we need.

Anita Harris

Deakin Distinguished Professor

Deakin University, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

With Erdal and Kennelly’s carefully curated editorship, the De Gruyter Handbook of Youth Activism is a highly accessible collection by leading scholars and young activists from around the world. Chapters lean into innovative, nuanced conceptual and methodological approaches that recognise the complexity of youth-led activism. With close attention to young people’s experiences, histories and subjectivities, this Handbook reveals the creativity, passion and diversity of youth-led action for more just societies, creating the platform for a re-imagined, interdisciplinary approach to youth activism.

Johanna Wyn

Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of Melbourne

If you are having a hard time waking up, finding hope, prying yourself from the news, this may be just the book we need. The De Gruyter Handbook of Youth Activism offers a travelers’ guide to transnational capillaries of struggle that embrace the globe, with thrilling and contagious outbursts of youth activism, hyper-local and also traversing Global North and South, sutured across generations and campaigns, with sinewy linkages stretched across history, anchored in "riotous pasts."  Cihan Erdal and Jacqueline Kennelly have assembled a stunning collective of writers, activists, artivists. Collectively they have curated the De Gruyter Handbook of Youth Activism, at once midwifing and complicating a field of youth activism. Just when we need it. When dissent is being silenced, criminalized, exiled, there is a joy is recognizing that waves of youth resistance rise, predictably, despite and because of authoritarian tactics.

Anyone who has been captivated by the sensual forms of youth activism that have blossomed around us: the pedagogical and ethical brilliance of pro-Palestine encampments; consumed with the jazz of Arab Spring or the transnational movement for Black Lives; enlivened by the courage, urgency and irreverence of queer and trans actions for justice; marching alongside the swarms of everyday people demanding the abolition of ICE; impressed with disability justice advocates taking over political offices, will find a soft comforting home in these pages where vibrant stories of resistance and imagination are narrated, where big questions are asked about young people’s irrepressible desires for justice.

It is no longer a surprise or a coincidence that young people are in the forefront of demands of justice – climate, anti-capitalist, racial, queer, feminist, disability, anti-Zionist or epistemic justice.  Voiced, enacted, performed and demanded by youth, across zip codes and nation states, anchored in capacious struggles for solidarity, hungry for justice, unapologetic and generous, the volume sings -- delicious, provocative, expansive in times of rising fascism. The chapters unfold as relentless ruptures of youth-led resistance, freedom dreams and just imaginations, nourishing readers with a collective fuel for worlds not yet, reminding us there is no time for despair, and that we are in good (young) hands.

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY and Visiting Professor at the University of South Africa, Visiting Scholar at Moondani-Balluk Institute for Indigenous Research, Victoria University

This Handbook of Youth Activism offers a comprehensive reimagining of the study of youth mobilisation. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on subjectivity, it moves away from macro-structuralist perspectives. By combining theoretical analysis with activist narratives, it provides a vibrant and critical perspective on the struggles faced by young people worldwide. Rich, engaging and innovative, it is an essential reference work for understanding contemporary political issues.

Olivier Fillieule, University of Lausanne