Whose Civics? Reconsidering Political Subjectification and Socialization Across Marginalized Students’ Holistic Political Learning Experiences

As democratic
systems have failed to tackle social justice issues, it is unsurprising that
marginalized youths are losing faith in official political processes and
institutions. Concurrently, the diversification of youth activism across public
and digital spaces requires reconsideration of dominant conceptions of youth
political participation.

To investigate
young people's perspectives on their political experiences inside and outside
classrooms, we conducted a qualitative study with 23 high school students from
historically underserved urban communities in Israel, where forms of racial,
socio-economic, and citizenship-based oppression intersect. Grounded on
Biesta’s theoretical framework of political subjectification and socialization,
our findings depict how marginalized youth navigate their everyday political
experiences across formal and informal education, forming sites of contestation
and interrelation for political knowledge, issues, spaces, and values. We
conclude that formal civic education requires expansion and re-calibration to
position marginalized youth’s critiques and practices as an essential aspect of
dialectical democratic education.