Defining resistance

resistance or activism?

“Their participation and use of the center, to them in itself, is a form of push back. ”

Youth in Action — Non-profit, community-based organizations can struggle with planning and executing grassroots campaigns alongside young people. This study employs ethnographic methodologies to foreground the voices of youth who participate in grassroots campaigns. Findings suggest that in some community-based educational organizations, youth and youth workers struggle to create the synergy needed to engage in traditional forms of civic and political participation. The participants often found themselves at odds with the goals and desires of the youth workers and broader community - most of these odds blooming from conflicting definitions of youth voice, resistance and activism. As a result, the young people created their own definitions of resistance.

When the term "activism" is used, civic and political participation is inherently emphasized. How young people decide to define resistance is very much so dependent on their own experiences, their own ways of resisting as well as their own ways of realizing the ways that resistance may be futile and pointless and still choosing to push back against the ideas anyway (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Christens & Speer, 2015).

This project used ethnographic methods of inquiry centered on participant observations and triangulated with individual interviews and discourse analysis.

Altogether, this project conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with participants from “Rainier Community Center’s AYE (Action and Youth Empowerment) Program”, a youth organizing program within a large community organization. In addition to the interviews, participant observations research was conducted for 360 hours. Also, the written work and discourse of youth and youth workers at Rainier were also analyzed throughout the project.

Resistance within AYE did not always mean the young people were engaging in what is normally associated with acceptable forms of activism. Thinking further about their disconnection with schooling and their experiences in their high school, youth use the center as a place of happiness after spending 8 hours in a place where they don't always feel welcome, or comfortable or appreciated. Their participation and use of the center, to them in itself, is a form of push back.

Although the young people as well as the staff members understand they are supposed to be using the center to finish homework and participate in a variety of programming geared to build good citizens, they all willingly push back against that. Simply by occupying the space and defining “action” on their own terms rather than those set by others, the young people in AYE resist. 

Youth resistance, at minimum, should entail the young people's desire to push back as well as the methods they chose to take on. Being in a neoliberal, meritocratic society that values progress, work and tangible forms of production, all forms of youth resistance are not recognized as real, valuable or valid. In the community-based educational organization, this is especially apparent as funding is often times provided under the conditions of having certain ideas and goals being achieved. Learning to accept the way the young people see their space requires a fundamental restructuring of the goals created by the programming staff and their funding sources.