Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency
Autor Risa Applegarthen Limba Engleză Paperback – 18 ian 2024
Although children have prompted and participated in numerous acts of protest and advocacy, their words and labors are more likely to be dismissed than discussed as serious activism. Whether treated disparagingly by antagonistic audiences or lauded as symbols of hope by sympathetic ones, children and teens are rarely considered capable organizers and advocates for change. In Just Kids, Risa Applegarth investigates youth-organized activism from the 1990s to the present, asking how young people have leveraged age as a rhetorical resource, despite material and rhetorical barriers that limit their access to traditional forms of electoral power. Through case studies of antinuclear activism, im/migration activism, and activism for gun reform, this book reveals how childhood both limits and enables rhetorical possibility for young people. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with activists, Applegarth probes how participants understand the success and failure of their efforts beyond the immediate moment of impact. Methodologically innovative, Just Kids develops a framework of reflexive agency to make sense of how participants' activism has mattered over time within their lives and communities.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258996
ISBN-10: 0814258999
Pagini: 188
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258999
Pagini: 188
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Just Kids offers important insight into the recent rhetorical practices of young activists. Charting the persuasive tactics of children and adolescents advocating international peace, protection from deportation, and gun reform, it models innovative research methods and conceptualizes new methodologies for analyzing collective action for social and political change.” —Henrietta Rix Wood, author of Praising Girls: The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895–1930
“Applegarth provides an in-depth study of major contemporary social movements and demonstrates how protesters and advocates often hold the key to understanding social change. Just Kids urges us all to evaluate the history of social movements as well as the methods we use in our research.” —Amanda Nell Edgar, author of Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture
Notă biografică
Risa Applegarth is Associate Professor and Director of College Writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science, which won the Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Extras
It might seem that we are presently in a moment when young people are taken more seriously as rhetors than ever before: Greta Thunberg, for instance, was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019, and while young protestors filled the streets during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Scotland in 2021 and the COP27 conference in Egypt in 2022, young people were not only outsiders but were invited observers and delegates as well. As childhood studies scholar Spyros Spyrou argues, “children’s political intervention in the climate debate illustrates to the world what childhood studies has been arguing for years, most notably that children, far from being passive and naïve, are knowledgeable social actors who can, on occasion, also act as agents of change.” The case studies in this book both substantiate and belie Spyrou’s affirmation. The pervasive associations that impact young people’s rhetorical agency also leave their arguments vulnerable to adult rearticulations—as when post–Cold War child peace activists were dismissed as dupes and puppets manipulated by adults or when teens organizing in the aftermath of a deadly shooting were disparaged as “crisis actors” or depicted as engaging in a momentary outburst of passion rather than the measured, long-term strategy characteristic of adults. When the demands of young protestors are disdained as naïve or, as in the encounter between Dianne Feinstein and the Sunrise activists, dismissed on the grounds that “you didn’t vote for me,” the constraints that childhood poses for young people seeking to “act as agents of change,” in Spyrou’s phrase, are glaring.
Working against such forms of dismissal, the young activists whose rhetorics I have examined in the previous chapters operated strategically, employing the form of agency Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen describe as personal—a “capacity and willingness . . . to act, which creates an opportunity to be heard.” Their capacity and willingness to act should be evident, even as the assumptions and associations of childhood as a discursive formation limit many adults’ willingness to listen when young people are speaking. Young activists made strategic use of amplification, spatial linkages, disclosure, and disruption as they sought to address resistant audiences and to influence public matters. Through amplification and spatial linkages, young peace activists formed a transnational collective and tried to use the strength of their tens of thousands of supporters to petition a resistant audience that did not recognize their standing—an audience that instead reframed their transnational reach as a mark of their outsider status. Through the practice of disclosure, young undocumented activists sought to transform their vulnerability to state violence into a matter of public concern, using storytelling to draw audiences closer to the embodied experiences of vulnerability that shaped their lives, families, and communities. And addressing the repetitive and racialized patterns in media coverage of gun violence and its victims, young gun reform advocates anticipated audience critiques and sought to disrupt routine patterns of response by staging events that would keep public attention trained on gun violence beyond the duration of a typical news cycle.
Young activists adopted these strategies to address the constraints shaping their rhetorical situations, including the limitations and affordances, both symbolic and material, that childhood conferred. The rhetorical activity I have traced in prior chapters simultaneously addresses and belies the widespread perception that children and youth lack rhetorical agency. As a discursive formation, a material barrier, and an embodied state, childhood impacts available means for these individuals and collectives—but the strategic activity they undertake to navigate around and through childhood underscores their fundamental rhetorical capacity. Taken together, these case studies should leave my readers convinced that age is consequential for rhetorical activity—not as a barrier to rhetorical analysis but as a discursively constituted form of embodied difference that, like race, gender, disability, and other dimensions of embodiment, impinge upon rhetorical situations broadly, not only when difference is glaring but when it is normalized and submerged as well. Like other forms of embodied difference, age is both a limitation and a resource for people using their capacity to think and act together to “address rhetorical problems,” in Ratcliffe and Jensen’s phrase.
Working against such forms of dismissal, the young activists whose rhetorics I have examined in the previous chapters operated strategically, employing the form of agency Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen describe as personal—a “capacity and willingness . . . to act, which creates an opportunity to be heard.” Their capacity and willingness to act should be evident, even as the assumptions and associations of childhood as a discursive formation limit many adults’ willingness to listen when young people are speaking. Young activists made strategic use of amplification, spatial linkages, disclosure, and disruption as they sought to address resistant audiences and to influence public matters. Through amplification and spatial linkages, young peace activists formed a transnational collective and tried to use the strength of their tens of thousands of supporters to petition a resistant audience that did not recognize their standing—an audience that instead reframed their transnational reach as a mark of their outsider status. Through the practice of disclosure, young undocumented activists sought to transform their vulnerability to state violence into a matter of public concern, using storytelling to draw audiences closer to the embodied experiences of vulnerability that shaped their lives, families, and communities. And addressing the repetitive and racialized patterns in media coverage of gun violence and its victims, young gun reform advocates anticipated audience critiques and sought to disrupt routine patterns of response by staging events that would keep public attention trained on gun violence beyond the duration of a typical news cycle.
Young activists adopted these strategies to address the constraints shaping their rhetorical situations, including the limitations and affordances, both symbolic and material, that childhood conferred. The rhetorical activity I have traced in prior chapters simultaneously addresses and belies the widespread perception that children and youth lack rhetorical agency. As a discursive formation, a material barrier, and an embodied state, childhood impacts available means for these individuals and collectives—but the strategic activity they undertake to navigate around and through childhood underscores their fundamental rhetorical capacity. Taken together, these case studies should leave my readers convinced that age is consequential for rhetorical activity—not as a barrier to rhetorical analysis but as a discursively constituted form of embodied difference that, like race, gender, disability, and other dimensions of embodiment, impinge upon rhetorical situations broadly, not only when difference is glaring but when it is normalized and submerged as well. Like other forms of embodied difference, age is both a limitation and a resource for people using their capacity to think and act together to “address rhetorical problems,” in Ratcliffe and Jensen’s phrase.
Cuprins
Introduction: Activism, Agency, and the Temporality of Childhood Chapter 1: Agency as Embodied: Durable Activism for Peace Chapter 2: Agency as Perspectival: Vulnerable Undocumented Activism Chapter 3: Agency as Capacity: Disruptive Activism for Gun Reform Conclusion: Reflecting on Activism and Age
Descriere
Analyzes cases in which children and teens push back against public discourse that treats them as symbols rather than as effective organizers, speakers, writers, and demonstrators.