The Kids are Alt-right (and Progressive, Conservative, Radical, etc.): ‘Selective Advocacy’ in Childhood and Youth Studies

Abstract

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

Citation

Hartung, C. (2023), "The Kids are Alt-right (and Progressive, Conservative, Radical, etc.): ‘Selective Advocacy’ in Childhood and Youth Studies", Wright, K. and McLeod, J. (Ed.) Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and their Advocates (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 33), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 209-225. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-46612023012