Topics: Engendering Justice: Youth, Politics, and the Practice of Social Change

Catalog description

This course is designed as an interdisciplinary specialtopics course focused on contemporary forms of youth resistance in the United States. It introduces students to critical literatures from youlh and childhood studies, gender studies, political science, popular culture, sociology, and digital media studies in order to understand what youth resistance and rebellion means in the 21st century. We will examine how young people become activists driven to change the wor1d and in doing so investigate their involvement with U.S. social movements including the March for Our Lives, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, Occupy Wallstreet, Carry That Weight, #MeToo and Trans Activism among others. With an emphasis on young people as essential social movement actors, this course makes visible youth activist strategies and practices. We moreover think about the ways in which age matters to activist praxis. From political demonstration and protest to digltal media, podcasts, and hashtag activism, young people not only challenge normative structures of power but also theorize new visions of social justice. In this course we situate contemporary youth resistance among radical feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist histories and social movements.