1 - Introduction: Young people, radical democracy and community development

Summary

The rationale

This book contributes to the ‘Rethinking Community Development’ series from the perspective of young people and community-based practitioners involved in emancipatory struggles and practising gestures of solidarity. It thereby contributes to developing accounts of practices of radical democracy and solidarity within the field of community development, and in common with other volumes in this series, critically re-evaluates community development – to rethink what community development means in theory and practice. Young people are often to be found at the forefront of democratic actions which seek to shift hitherto accepted norms of community. In this book, we are interested in this dynamic of change and unsettling. We are also interested in the relationship between young people's activism which is self-organised and that which is supported by youth workers or others acting as community development professionals. The book's aims are set out as follows:

• • To show how a focus on ‘youth’ can contribute to sharpening understandings of community development.

• • To foreground conceptualisations of radical democracy within the rethinking of community development.

• • To link developments within new youth social movements to the work of youth workers and community development practitioners and thus contribute to rethinking this relationship.

This book is being completed in the middle of the Glasgow COP26 as the young activist leader Greta Thunberg declares the summit an exercise in greenwashing by the Global North. This serious economic, social, political and ecological emergency is the immediate and inescapable context for a book which brings together chapters concerned with the community-and world-building practices of young activists in anti-capitalist social movements, with chapters by and about community development work by practitioners whose work has been led by their engagement with young people. As with other volumes in this series, the intent is to make a contribution to the rethinking of community development away from authoritarian populist tendencies and towards a radical democratic practice. In the first book of the series (Meade et al, 2016) the editors clearly identified the tensions within the term ‘community development’ and wrote of the dialectical nature of its progressive/regressive meanings. The current volume is certainly caught by that dialectic, as it pushes at the boundaries of thinking/feeling/acting ‘community’.

Youth studies scholarship has underlined the problematic nature of transitioning to adulthood in our global neoliberal societies.