The Social Psychology of Citizenship

Young people’s citizenship is routinely problematised by a range of social and political actors, driven by a series of ‘crisis narratives’ centred on young people’s perceived disengagement from formal politics. As a result, there has been a several decades-long focus on the ways that young people can be ‘made’ into responsible citizens, through citizen education programmes based in formal and informal educational contexts. In this chapter, we draw on our own social psychological research with young people to understand what kinds of youth citizenship(s) are routinely offered to young people, as well as how these are negotiated, reclaimed and/or resisted by young people themselves. We argue for the need for a social psychological model of youth citizenship that foregrounds the temporal and spatial processes that are central to young people’s experiences of citizenship in the mundane routines of everyday life. In addition, we look at what this tells us about the pedagogical project of making young citizens and how this can be developed in ways that can nurture young people’s sense of political efficacy and their capacities to act as citizens.