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The intention of this article is to contribute to the debate about whether the voting age should be lowered to the age of 16, by examining quantitative and qualitative data collected in a local participation project with young people in Portugal: questionnaires (N = 961), interviews (N = 3), and focus group discussions (N = 15). Considering the coexistence of both willingness and reluctance to get engaged in formal politics--as youngsters often feel ill-equipped politically--it is argued that adequate political education needs to be provided by schools to enable young people to be confident and knowledgeable voters. We propose that governments recognise the importance of this area in the school curriculum, in order to enable the young people's acquisition of knowledge and skills that can sustain their growth as competent voters. This is crucial in legitimising democratic representative systems.

In the current climate crisis, young people are portrayed paradoxically: victims and stakeholders, political protagonists and school truants. Based on ethnographic research with the climate movement, this article explores how youths manage their activism as it interfaces with their socialisation contexts, tracing prevalent adult antagonisms: radicalism, condescension and individualism. Drawing on sociological conceptualisations of climate precariousness and on an educational theorisation of subjectification, I argue that activists construct margins of resistance in their everyday political practices by incorporating processes that interrupt adult structures while reframing educational imagination. This highlights how the individual present is colonised by the risks posed to a collective future, leading adult power to be contested at a collective-public level (through performative reconfigurations of existing orders) and subverted at an individual-private level (by repurposing privileges towards climate struggle). Resistances to adultism uncover competing notions of future and education as integral to politicisation processes within the climate movement.

Purpose: This article explores the classical relationship between socioeconomic status and political domains, and the need to include different variables (contextual and individual) to measure the effect of economic and cultural capitals on youth participation and knowledge. Method: A multivariate analysis of covariance was performed on a sample of 732 Portuguese students, from Grades 8 and 11, in order to analyse how different socioeconomic variables related to family and schooling contexts have an effect on their political knowledge and experiences. Findings: The article highlights the differential role of socioeconomic variables on political knowledge and participatory patterns. Low economic capital instigates participation, while high cultural capital is related with higher political literacy. However, both forms of capital interact with the schooling context, revealing more complex patterns of behaviour and knowledge in students attending public and private schools.

In the last decade, we have witnessed increasing knowledge production on populism at the level of individuals. However, the systematization of these studies' conclusions is still scarce. There is also little research on the relationship between populism and education. Based on a systematic literature review, this article contributes to this by first focusing on what studies have revealed about the relationship between populist attitudes and socioeconomic, political, emotional characteristics and media-related preferences. Based on predefined criteria and a double-screening process, our literature search led to the selection of 68 studies focused on populist attitudes. The analysis of these articles enables us to understand that populist attitudes (i) are influenced by socioeconomic characteristics; (ii) have a nuanced relationship with politics; (iii) are driven by emotional dimensions; and (iv) are associated with diverse views about the media and media consumption preferences. We discuss the main findings of this systematic literature review and point out possible educational responses to individual populist standpoints according to their various causes, particularly in terms of the role of political and media education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WaterCircle (WC) project was implemented in a school, with young adolescents, to address environmental problems. Framed in a participatory research (PR) approach, this school-and-community based intervention includes the use of online tools through which environmental problems in the community are discussed within and by a group of students. Using a quasi-experimental design, with intervention and control groups, the present study involved 361 young adolescents, in grades 7 to 9, from a public school in the northern region of Portugal. Mixed methods were used for data collection and analysis, namely based on questionnaires administered in the pre- and post-test moments, as well as on students' discourses produced in the classroom during planned activities. Statistically significant changes on self-efficacy were found for the experimental group, suggesting that the intervention program has the potential to raise young people's empowerment regarding environmental issues. The WC program seems to foster students' awareness of the socio-political dimensions of environmental problems, since they were able to identify different actors in the community who should be involved in the proposed solutions. Longer-term intervention is required to foster the impact of the PR on the students' experience.

This article examines the perceptions of young migrants (and non-migrants), their parents, and teachers to discuss whether the school is a device of inclusion or a device of exclusion that produces inequalities. It presents qualitative and quantitative data collected in the urban areas of Lisbon and Porto. First, we analyze data from 14 focus groups, involving 94 participants, and 12 interviews. Second, we consider survey data from a sample of 1,010 youngsters of Portuguese, Angolan, and Brazilian origin. Findings suggest the school plays an ambivalent role; however, participants emphasize mostly its discriminatory and segregating role.

This article presents a 2-year participatory intervention developed in a secondary school. Based on the European project Catch-EyoU, fostering a critical and active European citizenship, Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) was used with students to develop individual and collective reflection on the possibilities of political change over dating violence. The complexity of doing TO inside the school and the challenges of promoting a critical political understanding of the structural roots of social problems are discussed.

This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the 'marketization' of messages and practices. These challenges are managed with reference to the groups' civic values through two sets of practices: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to 'political' content and 'individual' action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article brings into debate young people's meaning-making of climate justice in different geographic regions, and explores the roles of political, social, economic, and education actors in supporting youth's climate agency in their communities. Design/methodology/approach: After selecting two schools located in Northern Portugal - in countryside/rural and in coastal/urban contexts - we conducted two focus group discussions with young students (aged between 16 and 18) and sixteen interviews with local stakeholders (policy-makers, economic agents, activists, and scientists). We performed content analysis, using climate justice's dimensions as analytical axes. Findings: The data analysis reveals that young people do not feel heard in schools or in policy-making processes on climate. In contrast, adults unanimously recognize the importance of having more youth voices but fail to identify opportunities for youth participation in local climate policymaking. In addition to procedural and intergenerational dimensions, issues of recognitional and distributional climate injustice are identified by youngsters in their regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the Collaborative Climate Laboratories (CiCli-Labs), a participatory research methodology that bridges citizenship, science and politics. This methodology is grounded on young people’s knowledge and experience about their communities and seeks to develop a strategy for co-designing climate solutions with local stakeholders. Carried out in schools, the CiCli-Labs engage scientists, activists, business owners, and politicians in discussing climate problems identified by young people. By bringing together different positionalities that emerge from people’s diverse social roles, the CiCli-Labs aim to foster conditions for democratic citizenship and climate justice, embracing the necessarily conflicting yet binding dimensions of politics that can produce transformative and reciprocal learning. Additionally, it responds to the growing demand within educational research for community-based approaches capable of tackling the shortcomings in promoting youth agentic power in participatory designs, often marked by one-off events and youth-washing practices. The CiCli-Labs’ methodology builds on community profiling, through which students identify climate-related issues that work as catalysts for broader dialogues with local actors, challenging traditional adult-centric power dynamics. The methodology evolves through a sequential design based on the adaptation of participatory tools and methods: i) Climate Problem Tree; ii) Climate Social Cartography; iii) Pros-and-Cons Circuit; iv) Solutions Funnel; v) Climate Speed Dating; vi) Hands on Earth and Eyes on Clouds. The methodology was implemented in eight schools in northern Portugal, involving more than 300 students (grades 8 to 12). We discuss the rationale and practicality of the CiCli-Labs while mobilising empirical illustrations of the methodological process and participants’ perceptions about it, thereby contributing to furthering the problematisation of democratic research practices with young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Civic and political participation are the vehicles through which citizens of democratic societies engage in the public sphere, identify and address matters of public concern, and monitor governments’ activities. While the civic and the political are often regarded as two sides of the same coin, that assertion deserves questioning in times of an expanding voluntary sector and shrinking participation in institutional and electoral politics. Based on an ethnographic study in a large volunteer organization in the north of Portugal, this article discusses the complexities of civic and political participation, namely whether it is possible to be civic without being political. The article shows how an emphasis in caring for the other and promoting volunteers’ personal development coexists with indifference regarding political issues, and how high levels of motivation and engagement concur with resolving (or smothering) conflict through a strong investment in affective bonds, rather than open discussion. Finally, the article examines the role of religion in creating collective identity and simultaneously legitimizing a depoliticized approach to social intervention, thus exploring the paradoxes and limitations that may lie in the way of wishing to change the world without engaging in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]