Youth Active Citizenship in Europe:

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Youth Active
Citizenship
in Europe
Ethnographies of Participation

Edited by
Shakuntala Banaji · Sam Mejias
Youth Active Citizenship in Europe
 Shakuntala Banaji · Sam Mejias
Editors

Youth Active
Citizenship in Europe
Ethnographies of Participation
Editors
Shakuntala Banaji Sam Mejias
Department of Media London School of Economics
and Communications and Political Science
London School of Economics London, UK
and Political Science
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-35793-1 ISBN 978-3-030-35794-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35794-8

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 Acknowledgements

The research reported in this book was funded by European Union,

Horizon 2020 Young 5a Programme, CATCH-EyoU - Constructing
AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth: Policies, Practices, Challenges
and Solutions (www.catcheyou.eu) [Grant Agreement No. 649538]. We
also thank all of the individuals and organisations who participated in
the research and made it possible.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Shakuntala Banaji

2 Motivations for Joining and Engaging in Youth

Organisations in the Italian Context 37
Antonella Guarino, Elvira Cicognani and Bruna Zani

3 Youth Organisations as a Developmental Context: A

Developmental Psychological Perspective 63
Clara Mikolajczyk, Katharina Eckstein and Peter Noack

4 Between Emotion and Reason: The Role of Affective

Networks and Events in Sustaining the Daily
Experience of Environmental Activism 89
Joana P. Cruz, Carla Malafaia, José Eduardo Silva
and Isabel Menezes

vii
viii Contents

5 Preaching to the Choir: Patterns of Non/diversity in

Youth Citizenship Movements 121
Sam Mejias and Shakuntala Banaji

6 When Facebook Is (Not) Enough: Hybridity in

the Media and Political Strategies of Leftist Youth
Organisations 159
Alena Macková Macková, Sam Mejias and Jakub Macek

7 The Cost of Intensive Civic Participation: Young

Activists on the Edge of Burnout 189
Mai Beilmann

8 Conclusion: Rhetorics and Realities of Active Young

Citizens Across the European Union 221
Shakuntala Banaji

Index 247
 Notes on Contributors

Shakuntala Banaji, Ph.D. is Professor of Media and Communications

and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Media and Com-
munications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She holds multiple teaching awards, has participated in and run cross-
European projects, and is currently researching the spread of online mis-
information, its connection to social media use, hate speech and dimin-
ished democracy. Recent books include Children and Media in India:
Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change (Routledge, 2017) and the
co-authored Young People and Democratic Life in Europe: Stories of Hope
and Disillusion (Palgrave, 2015).
Mai Beilmann, Ph.D. is Research Fellow in Sociology at the Institute
of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research interests
include youth studies, civic participation, social capital, (social) trust, and
values. Mai has been involved in several (applied) research projects which
focus on youth and youth work.

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Elvira Cicognani is Professor of Community Psychology at the Univer-

sity of Bologna. She is coordinator of the H2020 CATCH-EyoU (2015–
2018) project. Her research interests include civic and political partici-
pation and community health promotion.
Joana P. Cruz holds a Masters in Psychology of Deviant Behaviour
from the University of Porto. She is currently a doctoral student in
the same institution and Ph.D. fellow of the Centre for Research and
Intervention in Education (CIIE). Her research is funded by FCT—Por-
tuguese Science and Technology Foundation, with Doctoral scholarship
reference PD/BD/114282/2016.
Katharina Eckstein, Ph.D. is Research Assistant at the Department
of Educational Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She
received her doctorate in Psychology from the same university. Her
research interests are the development of political attitudes and
behaviours during adolescence/young adulthood, family socialisation
processes, as well as the role of school contextual influences.
Antonella Guarino is a doctoral student of Social and Community Psy-
chology at the University of Bologna. Her main research interest focuses
on the civic engagement and community participation of adolescents and
young adults through quantitative, qualitative and creative methodolo-
gies.
Jakub Macek, Ph.D. is the Head of the Department of Media Stud-
ies and Journalism at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His
research focuses on the sociology of new media with an emphasis on
media audiences and topics of reception of popular and news content,
trust in media and the role of legacy and new media in societal polariza-
tion and political practices.
Alena Macková Macková, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Depart-
ment of Media Studies and Journalism at Masaryk University, and as
a researcher at the Institute for Research on Children at Masaryk Uni-
versity and at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University.
Alena Macková received her master’s degrees in political science and soci-
ology, and doctoral degree in political science. She is a political scientist
 Notes on Contributors xi

and sociologist whose research focuses on the role of new media in polit-
ical and civic behaviour and on political communications.
Carla Malafaia, Ph.D. completed her doctorate in Education Sciences
from the University of Porto. She has been a team member in national
and international projects (funded by the FCT and the European Com-
mission). She is currently a researcher in the CATCH-EyoU project. Her
research has dealt with conflict mediation, youth civic and political par-
ticipation and citizenship education.
Sam Mejias, Ph.D. is Research Fellow in the Department of Media and
Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science.
His research focuses on citizenship, human rights and equity in educa-
tion and media. His current projects include a Wellcome Trust/NSF-
funded study of creative media software and STEM learning, and a
research project in Kuwait exploring citizenship education and rights-
based approaches to educational policymaking.
Isabel Menezes is Professor at the University of Porto. Her research
focuses on educational and community intervention, citizenship educa-
tion and political psychology. She coordinated the Portuguese participa-
tion in IEA Civic Education Study, FP7 PIDOP and Erasmus USR, and
two national projects, currently coordinating the Portuguese participa-
tion in the CATCH-EyoU project (H2020).
Clara Mikolajczyk holds a Master’s from the department of Educa-
tional Psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She is a
research assistant at the Friedrich Schiller University and her research
interests are youth civic engagement and self-efficacy in that context, the
transition of rules and rituals among youth. Currently she works at the
Constructing Active Citizenship with European Youth: Policies, Practices,
Challenges and Solutions (CATCH-EyoU project), she is both working
as an analyst and an organiser and responsible for University of Jena’s
involvement in the project.
Peter Noack is Professor of Educational Psychology at the Department
of Psychology of the University of Jena. He studied at Düsseldorf, Berlin,
and Berkeley. After completing his Ph.D. he worked at the University of
xii Notes on Contributors

Mannheim before he changed to the University of Jena. In several lon-

gitudinal studies he examined development and socialisation in adoles-
cence and early adulthood. A major focus of his work is on civic and
political development in context.
José Eduardo Silva, Ph.D. is Post-Doctoral researcher in the Institute
of Arts and Human Sciences of University of Minho. He collaborates
as editor and reviewer, sustains different artistic and academic projects
with his main research focus on the relationship between theatre, arts and
human development (meeting psychological, social and political dimen-
sions).
Bruna Zani is Professor of Community Psychology at the University
of Bologna. Member of European Community Psychology Association
(ECPA) Board from 2007 to 2017, she is member of the Executive
Council of European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA)
since 2015. Her main research interests are civic and political partici-
pation in young people, evaluation of community projects, theatre and
mental health, and Service Learning.
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 One of the Cidade+ conferences in the municipal library 97

Fig. 4.2 One of the members of the Community + shows the
collective calendar proposal during a warm-up event
held in Porto Innovation Hub 103
Fig. 4.3 A friend of Cidade+ writes on a board the group’s ideas,
partnerships and content related to food 106
Fig. 5.1 MLMS Democracy Café, April 2017 138
Fig. 5.2 MLMS Twitter feeds featuring racialised emojis 140
Fig. 5.3 Momentum Twitter posts specifically engaging with
BAME issues, November 2017 150
Fig. 5.4 Momentum Twitter posts specifically engaging with
BAME issues, December 2017 150

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 1.1 Competing definitions of active citizenship which

structure debates in the literature, modified from
Banaji, S. (2016) CATCH-EyoU, deliverable 2.1 8
Table 2.1 Descriptive data of interviewees for each organisation 45
Table 2.2 Motivations for autonomy, relatedness and competence 46
Table 3.1 Overview of the main and subcategories used in
content analysis 73

xv
 1
Introduction
Shakuntala Banaji

Engaging with the much-contested concept of ‘active citizenship’, this

volume attempts to elucidate the positions and experiences of diverse
communities of young people who are called or define themselves as
active citizens and activists. It does so at a unique moment in European
political history: when a resurgent populist political right is deploying
the rhetorics of racial superiority and privatisation using a range of old
and new digital media to fuel xenophobic nationalism. The economic
neoliberalism that has been the backdrop to multiple financial crises
and austerity measures for many countries in Europe seems, ironically,
to escape unscathed from much of this rhetoric. Meanwhile, ethnic and
racial minorities, migrants and refugees bear the brunt when rhetorics
spill over into violence. In some key cases such as Portugal and the UK,
many young people’s justified scepticism of elite political institutions
and decision-making has seen them abandoning the expected political
cynicism to volunteer, vote and mobilise. They do so in the hope of

S. Banaji (B)
Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics
and Political Science, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2020 1
S. Banaji and S. Mejias (eds.), Youth Active Citizenship in Europe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35794-8_1
2 S. Banaji

combatting climate change, and sustaining or bringing socialist parties

to power. In other key cases, such as the Czech Republic and Italy, pro-
and anti-EU and pro- and anti-migrant sentiments are more divisive
even among young people: some join the Sardines; others join the
neo-fascists. Yet, more widely across Europe, the stigma of inexperience,
apathy and assumed alienation from politics continues to dog young
people’s pro-democratic actions. Their contributions to a range of causes
are belittled in the media, mocked by adult commentators with oppos-
ing political views or co-opted through different disciplinary regimes.
In this context, and for those coming of age in this historical moment,
this volume asks, what is life like for an active citizen with an interest
in the civic and political sphere? How do these young activists think
and feel as they go about their everyday lives? Which types of young
people become activists and what conditions enable them to thrive
individually and collectively in this political atmosphere? And what
practices, relationships and motivations characterise their participatory
movements, organisations, initiatives and groups?
Contrasting the kinds of insights available to political scientists and
sociological researchers of youth participation through ethnography with
those more commonly delivered via large-scale surveys, this introductory
chapter outlines the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of
the ethnographic studies undertaken. Data were gathered across eight
countries—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Por-
tugal, Sweden and the UK—between December 2016 and January
2018 for the CATCH-EyoU Horizon 2020 project. The implications
of normative and critical ways of conceptualising youth participation,
political versus civic life, and the concept of active citizenship (Amnå &
Ekman, 2014; Biesta, 2009; Milana, 2008) will be unpacked. This will
be supported, in part, by drawing selectively on the project’s extended,
systematic literature review which covers more than 700 key texts on
youth civic and political participation, political socialisation, citizenship,
active citizenship and European citizenship (cf. Banaji et al., 2018).
The book departs from an approach that has, in recent years, cen-
tred media, technologies and mediation in an unspecified, benign and
pro-social civic sphere. Several chapters work with different disciplinary
theories from community psychology, development psychology, political
 1 Introduction 3

science, policy studies, education, media and communications and

sociology to examine the practical consequences of the acceptance or
rejection of contrasting normative definitions of citizenship and civic
participation. Contributors from six of our project’s partner coun-
tries—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Germany, Portugal and the
UK—examine the psychological development and the social contexts
of a collective orientation to civic action as it unfolds in our ethno-
graphic cases. Some chapters examine the significance of emotion and
affect in developing or maintaining activist commitment. Others offer
a fresh analytical vocabulary and theoretical lenses for understanding
the significance of optimism, self-care and burnout among young civic
and political activists. These chapters and the theoretical debates and
tensions therein are contextualised and summarised in the remainder of
this introduction. Alongside this, the strengths and weaknesses of the
overall approach as well as the connections between the cases will be
drawn out in a synoptic concluding chapter.

Active Citizenship—A Troubled Concept

At the outset of our project, and resonating throughout this volume,
our consortium of more than forty researchers debated institutional
and normative definitions of citizenship. Some definitions appeared
to encourage an implicitly contractual relationship between (national)
citizens and a boundaried and bordered state in terms of rights and
responsibilities; some positioned young people as apprentices developing
acceptable normative civic skills and capabilities, modelled on adult
citizenship. Yet other definitions—that we will write about as both more
inclusive and more critical—framed active citizenship in relation to his-
tories of injustice, struggles for rights, equity and solidarity as well as in
relation to less benign and more authoritarian regimes. Some discussions
encountered in the literature simply inserted the word ‘active’ preceding
‘citizenship’ with little attempt to unpack the kinds of acts or behaviours
considered to constitute such activity; yet others appeared to suggest—at
least implicitly, by virtue of the actions centred by survey instruments—
that getting educated, being employed and paying taxes are components
4 S. Banaji

of active citizenship. Further sets of definitions insist that active citi-

zenship is comprised of ‘democratic knowledge and values’1 and full
participation in the electoral and civic life of communities and nations
by reflexive and motivated individuals. Few of these definitions deal with
the tension between the legal (citizenship as status) and psychosocial
(citizenship as identity) domains. Almost no writer denies, for instance,
that those who are not or not yet legally citizens—for instance, refugees,
asylum seekers, visitors, residents—may yet perform acts of citizenship.
However, few make explicit reference to this fuzziness—acting as a
citizen without holding citizenship. Most assume a component of loyalty
to and/or trust of nation and government within the parameters of their
definitions. Additionally, most of these definitions fail to deal with the
following possibilities: that political and civic action may be intermittent
rather than sustained; that such actions might be anti-democratic; that
voluntary action requires resources of time and capital; and that citizen-
ship itself might be a contested ‘technology of control’ (Amaya, 2013).
While it is unnecessary to recapitulate in full the arguments we make
in our 2018 paper on the literature about active citizenship (Banaji et al.,
2018), I do wish to draw attention to the key insights we developed
there, and to their relevance for this volume. In summary, we found that

on probing the language of texts that use the terms active citizenship
further … a preponderance of literature assumes a shared normative
understanding of active citizenship as a more active version of ‘good’,
responsible civic and political action, that respects rules and boundaries
set by government[s] and nation state[s]. However, when we analysed
them comparatively, we found that these terms consistently mean differ-
ent things to different scholars and practitioners in different epistemo-
logical and ideological traditions across disciplines… [Meanwhile], the
critical, inclusive and also anti-democratic dimensions of active citizen-
ship as both status and practice remain on the periphery of theory and
literature reviews on young people, citizenship and Europe. Further, there
is a tension between the significant minority of critical reflexive empirical
studies that question the assumptions and power structures underpinning
normative views of citizenship and the majority of informative but some-
what unreflexive empirical studies. (Banaji et al., 2018, p. 263)
 1 Introduction 5

Many scholars in the social, political and psychological sciences have

had a lasting impact on how we think about young people’s interven-
tions in political, social and educational contexts (Hoskins & Villalba,
2015; Prior, 2010; Torney-Purta & Amadeo, 2011). In a paper enti-
tled ‘A Europe of Active Citizens’, The Council of Europe suggests that
‘[a]ctive citizenship [i]s a value-based concept: a European perspective on
active citizenship always should refer to democracy and human rights as
founding elements’ (DARE, 2010). In accordance with this injunction,
Hoskins et al. (2006) define Active Citizenship as: ‘[p]articipation in civil
society, community and/or political life, characterised by mutual respect
and non-violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy’.
Unfortunately, many current European member state practices—such
as the incarceration of refugees, a refusal to house homeless people, an
injunction not to allow asylum seekers to work—are all considered legal
and even democratic without being the least fair or just. Ideas of respect
for state authorities (regardless of their behaviours), for governance and
the law (at any given historical conjuncture, regardless of the fairness of
the law) as well as for private property, as indicators of tolerance and
justice towards others are intertwined with the notion of appropriate
civic socialisation trajectories (Barrett & Zani, 2014). These so-called
citizenship indicators are often measured by instruments and scales or
encouraged via curricula listing actions that might also, as Westheimer
and Kahne (2004), Biesta (2009) and Kennelly and Llewellyn (2011)
have argued, serve authoritarian regimes or dictatorships. Indeed, ideal
pathways for youth and adolescent civic development, and for discipline
and identification with ‘successful’ adult socialisation often appear to be
defined in relation to individualism and neoliberal governmentality—the
ability to get a job, pay the bills, pay taxes, vote regularly, follow and trust
the mainstream news media with regard to austerity and poverty or war
and immigration. These ideas permeate the policy documents we anal-
ysed across the life of the project and even the views expressed by some of
the young, successful, active citizens we interviewed. Some of us found
this to be deeply worrying. We felt that it pointed to an urgent need to
question and rethink many of the staples of scholarship on adolescent
and youth political development/socialisation in favour of a more fluid
and contextual, as well as critical, understanding of what active youth
6 S. Banaji

citizenship might look like. Others were unwilling to acknowledge the

ways in which the concept was being instrumentalised and its bound-
aries policed.
In particular, the notion that higher levels of trust in institutional
politics and mainstream media indicate successful civic and political
socialisation was ubiquitous (Schyns & Koop, 2010; Simmons, 2005).
However, many in our consortium felt that ‘trust-as-a-measure-of-
active-citizenship’ must be interrogated more thoroughly. We based our
reasoning on several tendencies: (1) the conflation of economic and
political critiques of neoliberal and militaristic policies with right-wing
‘conspiracy theories’ (about global warming, immigration as white geno-
cide, and so on) in some scholarship on this issue (Douglas, Sutton, &
Cichocka, 2017); (2) a scholarly and media failure to question the role
played by some mainstream national politicians and media in relation to
the spread of disinformation and misinformation; (3) the delegitimising
of young people’s civic action against austerity and hate speech; (4) rising
hate speech against migrants and refugees; and (5) the undermining of
the European Union itself by mainstream media in several countries2
(Hoskins, Kerr, & Liu, 2016; Mejias & Banaji, 2018). The labelling
of young citizens as cynical, ‘apathetic’ citizens or ‘conspiracy theorists’
(for instance, see the conclusions of Fox, 2015)—and the concomitant
failure to assess what and who conspiracy theorists actually are and
where those putative conspiracies originate—has been critiqued tren-
chantly (Buckingham, 2000; Cammaerts, Bruter, Banaji, Harrison, &
Anstead, 2016; Farthing, 2010) but has not lessened. As such, it tends
to undermine any civic and political actions of young people which
attempt to hold national and local authorities to account.
Indeed, even where the intention is to foster a caring community with
no obvious links to neoliberal economic policies, current civic education,
media and political strategies may not be ‘getting it right’ in relation to
young people. Milana (2008) suggests that ‘[i]nclusion through active
participation, which is at the core of European educational policy,
represents, at present, a communitarian strategy for legitimising the
Union rather than a participatory practice aimed at fostering democratic
processes within Europe’. I have argued previously, and continue to
maintain that a mere instrumentalisation of the notion of ‘participation’,
 1 Introduction 7

which does not prioritise young people’s real experiences, contexts

and needs with regard to democracy, can have adverse consequences
and further damage trust. Alternatively, such unthinking advocacy of
participation-in-itself can create the conditions for an overarching scep-
ticism that ultimately feeds into far-right populism, as has transpired
in several European states and notably, within our project, in the UK
and Italy. Readers would do well, therefore, to be highly alert to ways
in which the term ‘participation’ and its referents (such as the one in
the title of our volume ‘active citizenship’, ‘civic action’ and so on),
as well as ‘trust’ are used (Checkoway, 2011). Although some of the
chapters in this volume do take account of the complex histories of
these terms in relation to the suppression of dissident/critical citizenship
and to the fostering of compliant citizens, others remain more reticent
about unpacking the normative assumptions that underpin calls for
participation and active citizenship.
From the most critical and self-reflexive scholarship in the fields of cit-
izenship education, political science, psychology, sociology, cultural stud-
ies and media and communications (for instance, Amaya, 2013; Banaji,
2008; Biesta, 2009; Isin, 2009; Lee, 2006; Ribeiro, Malafaia, Neves,
Ferreira, & Menezes, 2014), we see emerging a powerful discussion.
This centres on the nature and contexts of young people’s citizenship,
and the various dangers, for actual young people, of strict conservative
and liberal normative formulations of active citizenship and participa-
tion. This nuanced discussion—that neither valorises young people as
exceptionally creative political agents nor stigmatises them for failing to
meet an assumed liberal adult civic norm in terms of their transitions and
development—informs several chapters in this volume. Yet, showing the
strength of prevailing deficit models of youth participation and citizen-
ship, it is present only very occasionally in national policy documents
(Amnå & Ivarsson, 2017) and is almost entirely absent in the national
mainstream media of most European countries. Drawing on this discus-
sion, here, I outline a series of competing and ideologically incompatible
definitions of active citizenship (Table 1.1).
It will come as no surprise to readers that we came to see these com-
peting—and often incompatible—definitions as informing not only the
debates within the scientific literature on citizenship in diverse fields, but
 8
Table 1.1 Competing definitions of active citizenship which structure debates in the literature, modified from Banaji, S.
(2016) CATCH-EyoU, deliverable 2.1
The fulfilment of the responsibility by enfranchised This is a classic, widely held, conservative normative
citizens to earn a living, to pay taxes, to inform definition. It is conservative in that it delinks social
themselves of laws and events taking place in their justice and equity from civic action, and it is normative
respective states and regional legislatures, to in that it excludes a number of other critical or
S. Banaji

participate legally in community life and voluntary dissident positions that would entail breaking a
organisations which do the work of sustaining aspects specific law
of community life regardless of how exclusive the
community and to vote in local and national elections
Informed and intermittent or sustained contribution by This is a simple liberal normative definition. One could
enfranchised citizens of particular nation states to make it less normative and more flexible by removing
debates, organisations, practices and communities the word democratic. It also currently excludes those
which sustain the democratic governance, human who contribute to civic life but are not legal citizens
rights, legal and social life of their own and
neighbouring nations
Any form of intermittent or sustained engagement, This is a non-normative definition which places its
debate and/or collective or individual action made by emphasis on sustained or intermittent action—It is not
a member or members of a nation state or region in normative in so far as it could include far-right
relation to other members of that nation state or activism, extreme religious activism and racism aimed
region which is aimed to change governance or to against minorities by a majority that views itself as the
alter widely accepted legal and sociocultural norms or primary community. It also includes actions by those
practices who do not hold citizenship status but who reside in a
community
Intermittent or sustained action by any member or This is an inclusive critical definition that encompasses
members of a population, whether they hold legal actions by far-right, authoritarian individuals and
citizenship status or not, in supporting each other and organisations, as well as actions by dissident social
undermining, questioning, protesting against, voting democratic youth that break or contest contemporary
for or against and holding to account the policies and laws in certain countries
politics of individuals and bodies who make laws and
govern or set the parameters for economic, military,
cultural, political and social life at local, regional,
national and international levels
Any form of informed, intermittent or sustained This is a critical normative definition favoured by
solidarity, engagement, debate and/or collective or proponents of ‘global citizenship’ or ‘acts of
individual action taken by any member or members of citizenship’. This definition is critical in that it
the globe, region, locality or nation in relation to each envisages the need to take actions which might
other, the government, legislature, corporate sphere, conflict with existing laws of a state in pursuit of
media and civil/voluntary spheres in the world, their democracy and fairness, but it is normative in that it
region, locality or nation, which is oriented towards limits the actions to those that emanate from
upholding the principles and deepening the practices pro-democratic, egalitarian motives
of human rights, dignity, equity and democratic
governance
1 Introduction
9
10 S. Banaji

also the statements and positions taken within our research consortium.
They were also displayed more widely among the young activists in the
civic sphere that we were researching. It is also possible to see how a
dependence on one or another of these definitions precludes a view of
a whole range of youth activities and groupings as civic or as bearing a
relationship to active citizenship.

Binaries of Civic Participation

Much of the literature on psychological citizenship and political social-
isation produced between the 1970s and the present tends to list and
explain behaviours which would be considered normatively civic within
the conservative and liberal traditions outlined above. Discussions in the
progressive critical literature identify a series of interesting and poten-
tially useful binaries in terms of which active citizenship or participatory
civic action can be studied and analysed. These include:

• Old versus new,

• Standby versus active,
• Formal and institutional versus informal, networked and social move-
ment based,
• Apathetic/disengaged versus monitorial/standby,
• Traditional/authorised and serious versus non-traditional, playful,
creative, artistic and ‘D-I-Y’,
• ‘Dutiful’ versus ‘self-actualising’,
• Representative versus direct,
• Civil/good versus ‘impolite’, dissenting and tactical
• Conformist versus non-conformist/critical,
• As-practice versus as-ideal,
• Marginal/excluded/differential versus establishment/elite,
• Social democratic versus authoritarian/populist,
• (Fear of ) ‘radicalisation’ versus (celebration of ) ‘insurgent citizenship’.
 1 Introduction 11

These binary oppositions lie along a set of complex spectra. Some

could apply equally to actions taken by young citizens with authoritar-
ian and right-wing populist views as to those with anti-authoritarian,
social democratic or progressive socialist views. A common mistake
made, for instance, by early techno-optimists was a narrative of new and
emerging media technologies as having some inherent proclivity towards
democratisation. This was understood as being due to their many-to-
many communicative architecture. However, it is a position that has
since been shown by more mature studies in this area to be mistaken
(cf. Allen & Light, 2015; Banaji & Moreno-Almeida, 2020; Pilking-
ton, Pollock, & Franc, 2018). Other binary oppositions, even if taken
at face value—such as those between old and new or institutional and
DIY might reduce one set of inequalities, for instance around age, while
reinforcing another—for instance, between highly educated and less edu-
cated young people. This reinforcing of inequalities where the aim is to
avoid them is demonstrated forcibly in the meta-analysis of survey results
documenting both institutional and non-institutional forms of participa-
tion undertaken by Marien, Hooghe, and Quintelier (2010).
There also exist other problematic binaries—for instance, between
self-care and self-exploitation, or between leaders and followers—which
readers will encounter in the coming chapters, and where even the
most compassionate and critical discussions on these pages sidestep ques-
tions about whether and how organisations can survive long-term with
no management structure, and about the need for collective bargain-
ing over issues such as wages when the initiative involves lots of low-
paid, high-intensity jobs. All of these, taken together, suggest that some
approaches to citizenship may have investigated fundamental aspects of
young people’s interests and experiences of communal civic life in Europe
and provided helpful interventions, while at the same time alienating
some groups of young people further from formal democratic politics.
This now well-documented disenchantment of a significant minority
of young people across Europe with institutional politics and the rea-
sons for their opinions have been discussed by scholars examining young
people’s engagement with or disengagement from democracy and gov-
ernance (Cammaerts et al., 2016; Loncle, Leahy, Munglia, & Walther,
2012) and populism and far-right youth activism (Pilkington & Pollock,
2015).
12 S. Banaji

Critical studies of youth citizenship have moved the whole field of

citizenship studies forward by pointing to inadequacies in current prac-
tice and by reorienting public policy towards young people’s role and
relationship to democracy in inclusive ways. The ethnographic work in
which we engaged necessitated that we put aside some of our own nor-
mative assumptions—be these about altruism, trust or liberalism—when
moving into the worlds of young civic activists. We tried to analyse their
contributions from their own perspective before reintroducing critical
theoretical frameworks. This detachment from normative theories as a
research strategy ultimately reinforced our understanding of active citi-
zenship as a spectrum of historically and geographically inflected orien-
tations to politics and the civic sphere, rather than as a checklist of easily
comparable behaviours.
Across all of the observations and interviews for the many ethno-
graphic cases, the interaction and intersection of different demographic
and experiential factors with contextual factors (history, culture, political
events) inflects young people’s civic and political participation and their
orientation towards active citizenship in different ways. In all our case
studies across the different chapters, discussions with young people indi-
cate that different pathways into civic activism are heavily inflected by psy-
chosocial identities, and change during the life course. These civic pathways
frequently change even during the span of a young person’s adolescence
and young adulthood due to psychological experiences and contextual
factors. Parsing through all of the data from the different ethnographic
cases, it becomes clear that the factors which have the greatest impact on
both the capacity to be and the opportunity to be informed about and
take action in the civic and political spheres include:

• Political contexts: global/national/regional/local events and pro-

cesses—war, borders, austerity, neoliberalism, etc., including changes
in global social attitudes towards dissent and inequality; and laws
regarding protected characteristics,
• Historical and economic processes and events: the global rise and
networking of extremist and far-right groups, international pan-
demics, the austerity agenda and privatisation of services by national
governments, the influx of refugees due to conflicts outside the EU,
 1 Introduction 13

and changes in laws/criminal justice systems globally (e.g. the decrim-

inalisation of homosexuality, the abolition of apartheid in South
Africa),
• Governance and policies: rights and protections in law, welfare and
the economy,
• Community and culture: attitudes and values, group
positioning and security, diversity with regard to lan-
guage/race/gender/religion/sexuality/disability, civic and political
associations,
• Peers: neighbourhood friends, school friends, subcultures and online
networks,
• Families: nurture styles, emotional and economic security, carers’
attitudes and values, role models and family politics,
• Schooling: School ethos, teaching styles, teachers’ attitudes and values,
cultural security, role models and pedagogic environment,
• Media: media formats, linguistic and ideological monopolies, avail-
ability of alternative values through media, historical traditions of
dissent/free speech, media nationalism, misinformation, and access to
social media,
• Personal contexts: disability, crises such as bereavement, sexual harass-
ment, addiction, rape, arrest, or police harassment, other forms of
trauma linked to migration or forced migration, racism or sexism,
educational success/failure, mental health issues of self, a partner or
a family member as well as positive experiences of travel, mentoring
and relationships.

It would be unusual for these circumstances not to be intersectional: fac-

tors such as race/class/gender/ethnicity/religion combine with other fac-
tors such as language/sexual orientation/disability/migration to position
young people differentially with regard to political and civic power. In
these circumstances, a typology of active citizenship emerges, although it
should be noted that the positions in this typology are not fixed, and that
young people might move between them at points in their lives.
14 S. Banaji

A Typology of Active Citizenship

1. Generally disenfranchised/excluded due to an intersection of inter-
nal or external factors (trauma, illness, bereavement, abuse, addiction,
extreme poverty, geographic displacement, other social constraints
such as gender-based violence). There are groups of young citizens
like this across all European member states, however ostensibly devel-
oped. Many of these are conscious of their exclusion, but have no
means or energy to combat it.
2. Generally inactive/passive/disengaged due to a combination of
internal and external factors (which does not preclude occasional civic
activity such as voting or joining organisations or gangs) and also may
amount to conformity with local norms and subcultures as these are
not challenged. Some just ‘can’t be bothered’, others can be consid-
ered to be on ‘stand-by’ (Amnå & Ekman, 2014) until an issue that
touches them personally arises. There is considerable overlap between
this type and the first type.
3. Generally active in dutiful and conformist ways (adhering to the
civic and political roles and rules placed by authorities in school,
family, community, religious leaders, government and mainstream
media—also occasionally to rules and roles imposed by peers:
gangs/sport groups) also could be occasionally passive/standby/silent
and occasionally questioning/critical on a particular issue. Judging
by the evidence from surveys, examined for instance by Hoskins and
Villalba (2015) or carried during our own research (cf. Banaji &
Buckingham, 2013; Cammaerts et al. 2016), this ‘type’ forms by far
the broadest category of young people across most EU member states.
They are usually respectful of authority and of peers, accept given
notions of success and received wisdom on economics or on what
constitute rights and free speech. It is common for those in this cate-
gory to be unreflexive and/or uninformed about laws and the histories
of these laws, unless told to be sceptical by authority figures. This
category of youth also includes a small subcategory of young people
who join apparently non-conformist pro-democratic organisations in
adolescence and adhere to the rules and values of these organisations
 1 Introduction 15

uncritically as they get older. Mainstream media and marketers target

this group repeatedly and address them as a primary audience for
neoliberal citizenship, as do many youth civic organisations.
4. Generally active in anti-democratic and authoritarian ways
(i.e. questioning the conventional roles and rules endorsed
by pro-democratic non-conformists, and by mainstream
school/governmental authorities/mainstream media but from a
perspective that challenges the logic of democratic rights and the
value of tolerance and equality). Actions might be violent or threat-
ening, and often include online trolling, hate speech against women
or ethnic, sexual and religious minorities and the dissemination
of hate speech through alternative media, which may or may not
be normalised by mainstream media (Puuronen & Saari, 2017).
Motivations may be religious or secular. The actions of people in
this category generally target particular out-groups or ‘others’ and
seek to enhance the rights and political influence of the members
of the in-group. People active in these ways tend to appeal to group
identities such as religion, race and nation—and to view themselves
as ‘true’ representatives or ‘true patriots’.
5. Generally active in pro-democratic, anti-authoritarian and non-
conformist ways (i.e. questioning the conventional roles and rules
endorsed by family/school/governmental authorities/mainstream
media). In this category are young citizens who are frequently quiet or
standby or conformist at one level (i.e. gender relations in family, hier-
archy in educational institutions) while critical and active in another
(i.e. copyright, trade union movement, environment, police violence)
or vice versa (Collin, 2015; Harris, 2014). This category also includes
considered disengagement, satire, creative and playful engagement,
illegal actions and spectacular stunts that challenge inequality, and
long-term, considered civil disobedience. Young people in this
category also often have group identities in relation to subcultures.
6. Generally very active (hyper-active) in progressive, pro-
democratic and anti-authoritarian ways3 that seek to change per-
sonal relationships, society and institutions in fundamental ways to
make them more balanced and egalitarian. In this category are young
people who pay attention to issues of justice, fairness and equity at
16 S. Banaji

different levels (personal, familial, community, work-place, locality,

national, global) and to intersecting factors such as gender, race,
ethnicity, language, age, faith, religion, disability, social class. This
category of young people is highly informed about a range of issues
and works through an appeal to humanity and international prece-
dent rather than national laws and rights, which may, nonetheless, be
invoked for practical reasons. Hyper-active young citizens tend to be
cast as leaders or to support those who lead in civic organisations; they
experience burn out more often than those in other groups. Being
pro-democratic in this group does not preclude questioning how
individual nations deploy democracy, how individual religions curtail
rights, or how particular ideals of democracy may be strengthened. It
may include discussions of economic citizenship and resource redis-
tribution. It may include warranted or unwarranted, legal or illegal,
non-violent or violent direct action. It may include actions that seem
conventional and dull (such as logging media events and discourses,
attending multiple public meetings, doing extensive community work
or running a rights and advice centre) or highly creative protests.

If we are able to view ‘active citizenship’ as separate from a liberal norma-

tive checklist, we are more likely to be able to see the porosity between
categories of citizen and types of civic action, and the potential for move-
ment between them. Such a detaching would also make it easier to be
aware of the dangers in calls for participation in and of itself as evidence
of active citizenship, since many forms of participation are neither egal-
itarian nor democratic, and frequently tend towards exclusionary and
authoritarian goals (Banaji, 2008; Pirro & Rona, 2019). Depending on
the circumstances, actions that are unjust or inhumane (such as groups
which ‘defend’ white neighbourhoods against an influx of refugees) could
be perceived by some citizens as forms of active citizenship.
Eschewing a checklist of ‘intrinsic factors’ that reveal the scale of
someone’s active citizenship allows us to absorb the implications of
conflict and contradiction: just because some young people are pro-
democratic, anti-authoritarian and non-conformist, does not mean
that they are either particularly confident or particularly effective.
Our ethnographic work suggests that outside of the few charismatic
 1 Introduction 17

characters who come to lead some organisations, some highly effective

democratic-oriented young active citizens might also be poor delegators,
perceived as controlling and/or intimidating to novices, and frequently
overwork themselves to the point of breakdown. None of this should
prevent an evaluation of the wider repercussions of their active citi-
zenship and engagement. Likewise, some individual young people who
are generally conformist might engage in effective campaigns for social
change which benefit wider groups in society. Each of the chapters in
this book analyses an important aspect of the trajectories of those who
get given or who take for themselves the label ‘active citizens’. As most
of the chapters in this volume speak to and engage with the concerns of
existing literatures in youth studies, the next section seeks to draw out
the continuities and connections between these bodies of work and ours.

Contemporary Youth Studies: Insightful

Departures for Active Citizenship
From the work of the Chicago School in the United States in the mid-
twentieth century to that of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, youth studies has
long concerned itself with the connections between youth subcultures,
street cultures and collective consciousness. When it first began, that
work was, in fact, a much-needed antidote to youth studies’ previous fix-
ation on highly structured and apparently uniform transitions to adult-
hood. However, as with all major areas within interdisciplinary youth
scholarship, aspects of this cultural studies turn fast became a new ortho-
doxy which celebrated the creativity, politicisation and agency of subcul-
tural activities. It did so at times without analysing, for instance, the
very different starting points, goals and impacts of different youth cul-
tural formations or the very different costs to youth communities of their
public and essentialised association with particularly stigmatised forms of
subcultural production (notably ghetto rap and hip hop or bhangra).
At the turn of the (twenty-first) century, commentaries that once
explored the ways in which working-class, and primarily white, young
18 S. Banaji

people used participation in cultural production to resist ascribed nega-

tive identities and build alternative ones were already being critiqued as
too reductive. Celebratory commentators were even accused of entrench-
ing both whiteness and masculinity as essentialised traits of youth sub-
culture (Nayak, 2003). In the light of these critiques which took place
mainly in the Anglophone sphere, it is interesting to note quite simi-
lar civic subcultural stratifications among some of the young European
activists discussed in chapters in this volume. Unquestionably, a seri-
ous engagement with (white) feminism in the 1980s and 1990s meant
that (white) girls and young women too found themselves a place within
the literature—albeit still within the ‘resistant’ paradigm which generally
defined subcultural practice in opposition to capitalism and patriarchal
authority, erasing putative exclusions, contradictions and co-options.
Anita Harris’s work on girls’ lifestyles and citizenship (Harris 2008; Har-
ris & Roose, 2014) moves beyond some of the earlier reductive defini-
tions of subcultural resistance to examine the role that cultural partici-
pation and infiltration plays in building and expressing young women’s
and young Muslims’ quasi-political identities and identifications. Harris’
and her co-authors’ more post-structuralist work is alert to the nuances
of consumption and context in young people’s political identifications,
behaviours and beliefs, while still paying heed to the ways in which social
class and race structure at least some young people’s life pathways and
choices. Their work is hugely relevant, for instance, in our attempts to
understand the motivations behind youth active citizenship as we pro-
ceed through this volume, and in the ways that some young people’s
activism demands a re-centring of feeling and affect in politics.
More recently, Alan France’s work with a range of other scholars has
pushed youth studies into a more serious consideration of the effects of
neoliberalism on the economic and political contexts of young people’s
identities and choices. This work reintroduces the notion of transitions—
in opposition to a uniform shift to cultural identities and production.
However, while transitions may now be defined as differential, contex-
tualised, fractured and interrupted by social changes outside the hands
of young people—they are said to remain central to the experience of
being a young citizen, active or otherwise, because of the generational
effects of austerity. The focus in such work on the ‘proletarianisation’
 1 Introduction 19

and precarity that young people have been subjected to en masse across
Western nations since the 2007 economic crisis (France, 2016; France
and Threadgold, 2016) resonates strongly with the concerns of several
chapters in this volume. In particular, Chapters 4, 5 and 7 that deal with
the narrowing choices of youth active citizens who do not come from
privileged backgrounds, and the lack of ‘diversity’ with regard to class
and race when sustained engagement is predicated on self-financing, are
all the more poignant when read in relation to France’s notion of differ-
ential expectations and experiences of citizenship at a time of rampant
neoliberalism. In France’s words, the ‘political ecologies’ of youth citi-
zenship and the organisations which address and deliver social change
matter for youth citizenship because ‘the institutional arrangements that
organise and deliver social policy are also instrumental in shaping the
youth experience’ (2016, p. 31). For instance, it matters to young peo-
ple when an organisation that claims to represent their interests con-
ceptualises citizenship—and the challenges of neoliberal political, social
or environmental change—as territorially bounded or global, and when
civic action is conceived of in local, national or transnational ways.
Addressing the realm of young people’s active citizenship through the
concept of ‘lived citizenship’, Kallio, Häkli, and Bäcklund (2015) engage
with ‘the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and rela-
tional modes of practicing political agency’. They use an empirical analy-
sis of Finnish child and youth policies to address the participatory obliga-
tions that local political actors strive to fulfil in territorially bounded ways
as against the more spatially plural attachments and channels of young
people in mapping their lived experiences, networks and attachments,
which they describe as ‘shifting assemblages’ (2015, p. 104). Such dis-
cussions of spatiality and territoriality are of utmost importance for the
subfields of environmental, green and/or sustainable citizenship in which
many of the young people in the case studies in this volume are engaged,
as are the connections of liberal and neoliberal definitions of active citi-
zenship. Take, for instance, the question of whether a young person can
address environmental degradation and climate change through private
and individual dutiful ‘green’ behaviours alone (recycling, refusal of car
ownership), whether they should take political action at a national level
20 S. Banaji

through voting for a party which commits to behave in certain envi-

ronmental ways or by urging the boycott of environmentally unfriendly
products or services, or whether they should address their collective
protests to transnational bodies via their local political actors in the man-
ner of the global youth climate strikes. The answers to this question have
at their heart different understandings of and methodological and ide-
ological approaches to the politics of active citizenship as discussed ear-
lier in this introduction and as analysed in the chapters of this volume.
To paraphrase David Farrugia and Bronwyn Wood: the spaces of active
citizenship initiatives and youth organisations ‘offer particular ways of
relating to others, or affordances that provide the possibility for enacting
particular social experiences as part of the embodied experience of place’
and young people’s citizenship practices can be ‘more richly understood
when we view them through a longer lens of time (historic) and space,
and see these as mutually constitutive’ (2017, pp. 214–216). The penul-
timate section of this chapter details the methods of our interdisciplinary
endeavour, contextualising our attempts to use ethnography to address
both spatial and temporal aspects of youth active citizenship (includ-
ing around issues of ethnicity, race and gender), while the final section
presents the structure of the book.

Methods
As several of the authors discuss, before we diverged into the specific areas
of interest in each chapter, all the chapters in this book were initially built
around two research questions: (1) How is active citizenship conceptu-
alised and embedded in the everyday contexts of young people across
the EU? and (2) What features of these contexts and of youth participa-
tion can explain the depth and breadth of active citizenship, belonging
and engagement? As will be evident from the extended discussions above
and below, while neither of these questions assumed that the notion of
‘active citizenship’ was transparent or unproblematic, they both necessi-
tated a thorough analysis of young people’s own perceptions about their
civic contributions and activism, and a comparison of these with existing
definitions, models and typologies.
 1 Introduction 21

We conducted multiple parallel ethnographies in different countries

with a large number of young people who are by and large active. To
do so, we needed to situate our work within initiatives, movements or
organisations which attracted and were run by civically active young peo-
ple or those who self-described as activists. Our early debates about what
constitutes a ‘successful’ initiative were extensive and based on a wide sur-
vey of hundreds of more and less active civic and political youth organ-
isations, initiatives, social movements and groups, and at least thirty in
each country. From sports groups and student unions to refugee action,
LGBTQ+ collectives and climate justice movements, we examined their
statements of principle, the length of their existence, their models of sus-
tainability, their breadth and reach as well as their internal and external
structures with regard to democratic practice, weighing these up to get a
sense of what ‘success’ looked like both subjectively, to the groups them-
selves (as exemplified in the issues and actions they celebrated online, or
advertised themselves for) and from a scholarly vantage point across time
and the vast breadth of existing civic initiatives.
Our initial systematic mapping of the youth civic field resulted in
the inclusion of a number of groups with a cross-generational appeal
which were directly feeding into nationalist, populist, authoritarian and
far-right rhetorics and politics. All of those groups viewed themselves as
civic, as active citizens with an interest in the common good of their fel-
low citizens—frequently, as the only authentic active citizens. Several held
strong racist views on the importance of white rights and on the need
to minimise migration and to ‘repatriate’ migrants of colour and non-
white communities. Others were openly and directly agitating against the
European Union. Aware of the work taking place for aspects of the Euro-
pean MYPLACE project4 on far-right populism, memories of authoritar-
ianism and youth activism, and of the likely requirements for researchers
working with such groups, we made a group decision to exclude openly
racist and far-right populist groups and initiatives from our extended
ethnographies. Aligning most closely with the critical normative defini-
tion of youth active citizenship—which fits with Isin’s (2009) designa-
tion of ‘activist citizenship’, while aware of its limitations for understand-
ing the growth of far-right populism, our cases focus on the efforts and
22 S. Banaji

experiences of young citizens who at least appear to commit overtly to

democratic and inclusive policies and politics.
The high-pressure, close-knit groups of engaged and/or highly active
young people whom we observed, interviewed and worked alongside
allowed us unique access to motivations, personal values and organisa-
tional practices, ideologies and funding models. In addition, we observed
their interactions under pressure, the kinds of projects they undertook
among young refugees, the homeless, young voters, civic consumers
and everyday citizens. Connecting the opening debates on the tensions
at the heart of neoliberal consumer citizenship, policy and governance
(Kennelly & Llewellyn, 2011) to the practicalities of youth citizen
initiatives in contemporary European societies, this chapter discusses
the ways in which both individuals and groups negotiate privacy and
publicness, paid and unpaid labour, the imperatives to participate, and
the exhaustion, overwork and stress experienced by ‘hyper-active’ citizens
who shoulder the heaviest load of keeping youth activist organisations
and networks alive.

Data Collection

Between November 2016 and February 2018, our researchers spent

extended periods of time (several days per week over the course of several
months) and more intensive periods in certain months, with the selected
case study organisations and initiatives, and in particular with key indi-
viduals in those organisations. Although some of us were more observer-
participants than participant observers (Gold, 1958), we took field notes
at meetings, fairs, social events, protests, pedagogic weekends, training
sessions and other mobilisations. This work included the generation of
action diaries, the collection of policy documents, leaflets, minutes, pho-
tographs and videos made by and about the initiative, organisation or
network involved in active citizenship. Throughout this period, we took
notes and asked questions in interviews and during participant observa-
tions about the contexts and types of issues which most motivate specific
young people to participate in different national contexts and at global,
EU, national, regional or local levels. We engaged the organisations, key
 1 Introduction 23

informants and, on occasion, the participants/initiatives’ members in dis-

cussions about our topics. These included the conceptualisation of and
respect awarded to young people as citizens and activists in their coun-
tries; the intersection of their national, regional and European identities,
the ways in which expectations of participation were set and met in their
initiatives, the ways in which familial and generational patterns played
out in their own lives, the limitations and barriers to their own sustained
civic action, and the ideological and organisational dimensions of moti-
vation to continue or leave active citizenship.
As we have argued at length elsewhere, ethnography and participant
observation as methods offer multiple benefits for social science research
(cf. Banaji, Mejias, & Velez, 2019). First, these methods allow for rich
description, analytical depth, and can answer complex questions about
intersecting internal (psychological) and external (sociological) factors
in active citizenship (Brewer, 2000). Second, observing the practices of
European youth democratic citizenship through the lived experiences of
young people—for instance in relation to Estonian history with Rus-
sia, the referendum on Brexit in the UK, and the aftermath of auster-
ity and privatisation in Greece, Portugal, Sweden and the UK—gives us
a rigorous and theoretically flexible way of assessing the impact of his-
torical processes and political decisions. Third, ethnography allows us
to preserve the communicative rights of young people in their everyday
spaces by listening to and recording their voices and stories about active
European citizenship in the way they wished to tell them. Following Black
(2007), this also included the emotions that they expressed about their
citizenship and their organisations/initiatives, an aspect which is often
paid scant attention in quantitative sociological research on politics, the
civic sphere and youth participation.

Analysis

The raw data on which our chapters in this volume are based consist,
therefore, of copious field notes taken by the researchers, transcripts
of face-to-face semi-structured or extended biographical narrative inter-
views with key activist informants who work in the organisations or who
participate in events and activities or in demonstrations and protests.
24 S. Banaji

Each of the ethnographic research teams employed a different method of

nomenclature which was in line with the agreement and ethical frame-
work used in that country: this will be evident from the different con-
ventions of recording the data of key informants in different chapters; in
some, we recorded age, and/or other demographic characteristics. In oth-
ers, the team had specifically agreed not to, in order to prevent easy iden-
tification of individuals. With permission, we also gathered photographs
of organisational activities and spaces, excerpts from minutes, meeting
agendas and other paraphernalia which might prove useful. All of these
were catalogued and evaluated for their informational content, ethical
permissions and research significance around particular themes:

• How are power relations within the initiative/organisation/group

manifested—i.e. in which kinds of structures, horizontality, voice, etc.
• How do these power relations link to wider social power relations and
how do these power relations influence and inflect individuals’ active
citizenship?
• How are key strategic decisions in each organisation/initiative being
made?
• Are there hierarchies of hard work with some doing most skilled and
unskilled activities every day and others dipping in and out, and if so
how does this affect the sustainability of the different initiatives?
• How are the young activists at the core of these civic initiatives emo-
tionally engaged and committed at different levels and in different
dimensions of the organisations’ work?
• What types of events, processes and relationships have a motivational
outcome for individual young citizens?

As a large group of researchers across Europe doing contemporary ethno-

graphies on the same issues with youth civic organisations, we carried
out the analysis following the method which is common to analysis
of data generated through ethnography by coding the data into large
chunks with ‘basic themes’ and ‘organising themes’ (Attride-Stirling,
2001) drawn from our collective repertoire of themes, that told sto-
ries (vignettes) or specifically ‘spoke’ to the questions above and to most
 1 Introduction 25

pressing aspects of the overarching research questions. With the impor-

tant exception of our decision to exclude right-wing religious and/or alt-
right/far-right initiatives whose goals included white ethno-national or
racial purity, we kept an open mind, theoretically. We did not try to
force the data to fit into preconceived definitions of active citizenship
from the reviewed literature, from longitudinal survey data or from the
various typologies we had examined and agreed on. Through a form of
inductive category coding and comparative coding (Glaser & Strauss,
1967), we uncovered many patterns—for instance about motivation,
gender, leadership, hierarchies, hyper-activism, friendship, emotion and
burnout—that confirmed, or contradicted and nuanced earlier studies,
and the findings of our other empirical research.
As systematically as possible (given the different national research con-
texts and different types of initiative observed in the different countries),
we discussed and compared these in each case. To the extent that we were
also guided in our analysis of the data by a desire to develop and refine a
typology of youth citizenship, we also carried out a form of what could
be termed typological analysis. We were aware of the potential biases in
this system, and so ensured that it was always secondary to our primary
inductive coding. It was this initial analysis which led to the many per-
suasive insights in the following chapters about the relationships between
different aspects of individual civic motivations, power and politics, age,
opportunities, and group practices and behaviours.

Ethics and Reflexivity

Ethnographers must reflect on their power and take a clear and unequiv-
ocal ethical stance with regard to their research subjects (Benedict, 2005;
Boas, 1920; Dey, 1993). We must also be aware of the complexity of
gaining consent in observational situations where events are unfolding,
new members are entering and leaving rooms, there are brief encounters
with users of an organisation, initiative or network, and coming forward
to name oneself as a researcher would in itself upset the balance of the
events unfolding. We tried to ensure that the organisations themselves
26 S. Banaji

would inform their members and participants of our ongoing research,

and we adhered to the highest standards with the organisations.
Young people in participant organisations and networks were asked
to read, circulate and keep an information sheet detailing the research
team’s commitments with regard to data, privacy, consent and publica-
tion of information and a consent form signed by at least two active
members of the organisation/group/social network/network was col-
lected and stored securely by the researchers. Being aware that ‘consent’
is not in itself proof that participants have correctly understood the impli-
cations of the research, during ethnographic observations and interviews
we asked key participants to reiterate how they understood the research
and their involvement in it (and our involvement and participation with
them) and what they saw as potential implications, for instance, whether
they felt pressured to give consent by their organisations and wanted
to withdraw at any point, or whether they wished us as researchers to
ask different questions, conduct ourselves differently or absent ourselves
from particular moments. In this book, all active youth participants who
have requested to be anonymised have been given alternative names,
and identificatory details have been altered to maintain confidentiality
and prevent accidental re-identification. In some cases, organisations too
have been anonymised. This careful attention to the nuances of their
feelings about the ethnographic work most frequently resulted in deeper
and stronger bonds with us as researchers, and in increased trust.
Building trust with our research subjects and research informants was
one of the key roles researchers undertook by spending extended periods
at the outset of the research getting to know the various key members
of the organisations we were researching and explaining our own back-
grounds and interest in a variety of fora—i.e. to managing committees,
to the democracy forum, to interns and volunteers in the organisations,
at meetings and other venues. We had to ‘prove’ ourselves as both respect-
ful of their ethos and spaces (Hodkinson, 2005), as well as knowledge-
able enough about their respective causes—be these environmentalism,
or getting young people into higher education, democratic participation
or youth rights—to ask sensitive questions. However, we also had to ask
questions in a way that challenged the key informants to reflect on their
 1 Introduction 27

own positions within organisational hierarchies and our positions as ‘out-

siders’ who were asking to be guided.
In order to ‘give back’ to the research subjects and informants, as
researcher participants we asked if there were ways in which we could
contribute to or join in with activities. On several occasions, we were
asked to do this. Some of us volunteered time at events, helped out with
moving things in physical spaces, stood in if someone was ill or absent, or
simply provided a sympathetic ear to listen to debates and ideas that were
about change or organisational issues. Time was also of the essence; and
if we were patient, we generally found that most of the case study initia-
tives, and especially the core members or founders who worked closely
with us, came to regard us as worthy confidantes. In one or two cases,
however, organisations themselves could not commit to the time required
in allowing access or did not feel that our project had anything to offer
them, and so withdrew from the project after a few months.
In addition to the withdrawal of organisations mid-way through
the research, our researchers encountered many issues and complexi-
ties during the course of the ethnographies in different countries. Some
were confronted by issues to do with work-life balance and timing. As
researchers, we also found ourselves invited to social spaces and being
asked to give considerable amounts of time and emotional energy late in
the evenings, which was only possible for some and not others. In social
spaces, we became sometimes quite close to the various factions or friend-
ship groups within the initiatives and organisations and got a better sense
of the role played by socialising and friendship in their cohesion. How-
ever, juggling these kinds of contributions with our role as researchers
and often as parents was not always easy.
There were times when we felt we needed to pull back, and could not
be expected to endorse, or show support for, every aspect of an organisa-
tion. We were scholars and some of us were also activists, we frequently
aligned with and respected the organisational or movement goals; but
we were not cheerleaders for the initiatives in the same way as some of
their key personnel felt they had to be. Sometimes, when asked what
we thought about a decision or aspect of an organisation, we found our-
selves having uncomfortable conversations. Interviews and notes indicate
that in some places, such conversations involved drawing attention to an
28 S. Banaji

unthinking gendering, and in others, they involved pointing to a lack of

attention to issues of disability or racial inequality and absence of class
diversity. These tensions do, at times, reveal themselves in the chapters
that follow.

The Structure of This Book

Following this synoptic introduction which has problematised key terms
and laid out the context and methods of the underlying ethnographies,
the book is structured in two parts—the first, comprising Chapters 2–4,
is broadly influenced by and grounded in psychological theories and the
second, comprising Chapters 5–7, is broadly oriented towards theories
drawn from sociology, cultural studies and communications.
Extending discussions of efficacy and motivation from the introduc-
tion, in Chapter 2, Antonella Guarino, Elvira Cicognani and Bruna Zani
argue that understanding the multiple motivations for joining youth
organisations and associations can help civic and political organisers to
support young people’s voices and to engage those who might not other-
wise become involved or who might be alienated by logistics, tone, pace
and opportunity. Calling on Johnson and Morris’s critical work on active
citizenship (2010), these authors suggest that an understanding of civic
motivation can also provide opportunities for action on social issues rel-
evant to different groups of young people. Using 24 original narrative
interviews from ethnographies with three different Italian youth organi-
sations, the authors analyse how youth motivations for involvement are
related to close peer relationships while motivations for remaining in
the organisations are linked to positive emotions experienced in differ-
ent phases of organisational life, and in particular via a sense of civic
efficacy and via strong, politically but also personally nurturing cross-
generational relationships.
In Chapter 3, Clara Mikolajczyk, Katharina Eckstein and Peter Noack
take as their starting point the claim that most adolescents can act in
more autonomous ways than they did as children and, as a consequence,
that their active exploration and examination of different topics and con-
texts, including civic and political ones, increases. Using Havighurst’s
 1 Introduction 29

(1948) notion of developmental tasks, Mikolajczyk, Eckstein and Noack

argue that young citizens have to cope with different developmental tasks
over the course of a lifetime. In this view, each developmental task influ-
ences the upcoming ones through skills which have or have not yet
been acquired. Contextualising their approach with regard to debates
discussed in the introduction on motivation for civic participation in
Chapter 2 and the role of emotion in civic participation in Chapter 4, the
authors examine the role of youth organisations from a developmental
psychological perspective. In particular, by drawing on an ethnographic
case study conducted among young people in an environmental organ-
isation in a medium-sized town in Germany, they evaluate the extent
to which youth organisations provide what can be considered adequate
and stimulating experiences to meet the needs of assumed ‘developmen-
tal tasks’ in adolescence
In Chapter 4, Joana Cruz, Carla Malafaia, José Eduardo Silva and
Isabel Menezes use their in-depth ethnography of a Portuguese NGO
working around climate change to study the role of emotions and affec-
tive bonds among young civic activists. Previous literature on this topic
suggests that the ‘professionalisation’ of NGOs engenders a reason-based,
cognitive role which tends to generate hierarchical structures and tighter
rules governing decision-making processes. These structures, the authors
argue, inhibit and are antithetical to the more horizontal, pluralist, crit-
ical and actively non-conformist positioning that trigger many young
people’s engagement in and with the climate change NGO in the first
place. Their chapter explores the tension between what Flam and King
have called ‘the established and the questioned’ (2005, p. 8) which fosters
conflict in both cognitive and emotional terms. In revitalising this con-
tested space, emotions seem to play a central strategic role in the group’s
political action, both as a sustenance to endure activism and as a strategy
to foster social change. The analysis in Chapter 4, which is at the heart
of this book, specifically focuses on the role of ‘friendship networks’ as ‘a
community building strategy’ around action against climate change. The
discussion of emotion in this chapter links directly with the discussions
of emotion, friendship and burnout in Chapters 2 and 7 and regarding
motivations for action and the contradictions between unpaid volunteer
work and intense professional overloads.
30 S. Banaji

Chapter 5, which we have found ourselves writing in the aftermath

of the Brexit referendum at a time of immense upheaval in the UK
civic and political sphere, deals with an issue to which many youth civic
organisations pay lip service but that tends to find little purchase in the
literature: racial, ethnic and class diversity among young civic volunteers
and activists. Drawing both on Marxist and Foucaultian understandings
of discourse and power, it is possible to see how a common discur-
sive refrain among many youth civic bodies is the empowerment of
marginalised populations through the giving of voice. Yet, even in the
UK where multiculturalism has had some purchase for a number of years
and where the kind of unthinking Eurocentrism of much of continental
Europe has been brought into question by a fierce anti-racist movement
between the 1970s and the 2000s, young people from Black Asian and
Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities almost appear to belong to ‘civic
subcultures’ (Sanchez-Jankowski, 2002). Based on ethnographies with
two British civic-political initiatives that target young people—youth
political participation charity My Life My Say and the Labour Party
campaign group Momentum—we explore the uncomfortable dynamics
of diversity in these settings. We find that rhetorical positions and mate-
rial outcomes of organisational commitments to diversity are greatly at
odds and often entail extra pressures on and the constant performance
of diversity work among already-marginalised activist youth. Issues are
complicated by the ways in which ‘diversity’ itself has become a buzz-
word imagined in deeply individualistic, instrumental and neoliberal
ways (Ahmed, 2007) in order to rob it of its critical force.
In Chapter 6, Alena Mackova, Sam Mejias and Jakub Macek draw
on two ethnographic studies of youth-led leftist organisations: the Czech
Idealists and British Labour Party campaign group Momentum, which
was also the subject of Chapter 5. Exemplifying issues pertinent to all
our other European cases, this chapter focuses on intertwined media and
political strategies employed by the young activists in these organisa-
tions. Building on the work of Henry Jenkins (2006) and Laura Ian-
nelli (2015), the chapter specifically asks: What are the roles of differ-
ent forms of media in the communication practices and political agency
of these avowedly political organisations? The analysis of ethnographic
 1 Introduction 31

material gathered at key political moments in 2017 illustrates the inten-

tional professionalisation of the communication repertoires employed by
young active citizens who wish to be at the cutting edge of mediated pol-
itics and public opinion. Importantly, the organisations’ strategies reflex-
ively combine the use of new and old media and their associated logics to
reach their political goals through addressing and encouraging the par-
ticipation of their target audiences.
In Chapter 7, Mai Beilmann takes the fraught subject of activist
burnout as her central theme. As a way of framing her case, she follows
Brown and Pickerill (2009) in arguing that civic movements and organ-
isations themselves often foster a culture of impassioned overwork in
order to maintain certain levels of identification with a cause, and points
to the view of feminist scholar Kennelly (2014) who argues that young
women’s sense of civic guilt frequently drives them to over-tax themselves
within organisations in ways that women also do in domestic situations.
Quite simply, the costs of very intensive civic participation are over-
load and burnout regardless of the importance of the cause. Beilmann’s
insights into the lives of extremely committed young activists are based on
a wider reading of the literature in conjunction with an extended ethno-
graphic case study undertaken with Estonian youth organisation, DD
Academy, a non-profit managed, shaped and created by young people
for young people, which aims to popularise and defend the concept of
an ‘open society’. The chapter highlights the tensions between the DD
Academy team’s deep emotional engagement and commitment to the
organisation’s goals and their intense, unpaid voluntary workloads that
result in fatigue and burnout, as well as an ultimate lack of sustainability.
However, as I suggest in the concluding remarks, it also begs questions
around unionisation in the non-profit and activist sector and assumes
that issues of wage inequality and unequal workloads in youth activist
organisations can be solved without recourse to struggle and collective
bargaining.
Chapter 8 offers concluding remarks which tie together the collective
insights of the preceding chapters with regard to issues that cut across
the different cases. In doing so, it draws on some new material from the
underlying data sets, but also draws attention to gaps and absences in
our own work, and directions for future research.
32 S. Banaji

Notes
1. http://lllplatform.eu/policy-areas/xxi-century-skills/active-citizenship/.
2. This is categorically not to deny that ‘conspiracy theories’ do exist on
both the political left and the right of the political spectrum.
3. While conformity implies following or going along with the practices
and laws of any given state or other authority at a particular time, with-
out much questioning, there are, of course, non-conformist citizens who
question even the basis for democracy, rather than using their critique to
argue for stronger democracy. That is why we qualify this type in terms of
‘progressive’ ideas since we did not encounter the anti-democratic young
people during these case studies. While we certainly did come across some
young people whom we could regard as ‘dissident’, the style of thinking
which questions and is critical of decisions and laws that are being enacted
but does so in the hope of increasing the democratic base and people’s
civil and human rights is also not something that can be defined clearly
as ‘dissident’.
4. https://myplaceresearch.wordpress.com.

References
Ahmed, S. (2007). The language of diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (2),
235–256.
Allen, D., & Light, J. S. (Eds.). (2015). From voice to influence: Understanding
citizenship in a digital age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Amaya, H. (2013). Citizenship excess. New York: New York University Press.
Amnå, E., & Ekman, J. (2014). Standby citizens: Diverse faces of political
passivity. European Political Science Review, 6 (2), 261–281.
Amnå, E., & Ivarsson, J. (2017). Perspectives of policy makers on EU and on
youth active citizenship. Catch-EyoU Blue Paper. Retrieved July 20, 2019,
from http://www.catcheyou.eu/theproject/publications/wp3bp/.
Attride-Stirling, J. (2001). Thematic networks: An analytic tool for qualitative
research. Qualitative Research, 1(3), 385–405.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Charles i of Anjou, 1282-1285.
Charles ii of Anjou, 1285-1309.
[Purg. v. 69. vii. 126; xx. 79; Par. vi. 106; viii. 72; xix. 127-
129; xx. 63; Conv. iv. 6; V. E. i. 12.]
Robert of Anjou, 1309-1343.
[Par. viii. 76-84, 147; Epist. vii. 7; perhaps the ‘Golias’ of
Epist. vii. 8.]

KINGS OF SICILY[42]
Peter iii of Aragon, 1282-1285.
James ii of Aragon, 1285-1296.
Frederick ii of Aragon, 1296-1337.
[Purg. iii. 116; vii. 119; Par. xix. 130; xx. 63; Conv. iv. 6; V.
E. i. 12.]

KINGS OF ARAGON
James i, 1213-1276.
Peter iii, 1276-1285. (Also King of Sicily after 1282.)
[Purg. vii. 112-129.]
Alfonso iii, 1285-1291.
[Purg. vii. 116.]
James ii, 1291-1327. (King of Sicily from 1285 to 1296.)
[Purg. iii. 116; vii. 119; Par. xix. 137.]

FOOTNOTES:
 [42] The Angevin sovereigns of Naples retained the title “King
of Sicily and Jerusalem,” the Aragonese ruler of Sicily being “King
of Trinacria.”
 INDEX OF NAMES
(See also Tables of Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, and Bibliographical
Appendix)

Alighieri, Dante, on the “Sicilian” poetry, 4, 5;

birth and family, 6, 7;
boyhood, 9, 10;
biographers, 11;
first love, 12, 13;
youth and friends, 14, 15;
probable visit to Bologna and military service, 15, 18, 19;
loss of Beatrice, 20;
philosophic devotion, 20;
moral aberrations, 21;
friendship with Forese Donati, 22, and with Betto Brunelleschi,
22;
supposed loves, 22, 23;
marriage, children, and debts, 23, 24;
first steps in political life, 25-27;
embassy to San Gemignano, 27;
possible visit to Rome, 29;
Priorate, 31;
subsequent political acts, 32-34;
embassy to the Pope, 34-35;
accusations and sentences against him, 36-38;
his undoubted innocence, 38;
first period of exile, 39-40;
at Gargonza and San Godenzo, 40;
breaks with the Bianchi, 41;
goes to Verona, 43;
probably at Bologna, 43;
possibly at Padua, 44;
in Lunigiana and the Casentino, 44, 45;
writes to the Florentine people, 45, 46;
possibly at Paris, 46, 47;
in the advent of Henry of Luxemburg, 48, 49;
letters and fresh sentence, 50, 51;
probably at Pisa, 52;
does not accompany the Emperor against Florence, 53;
renewed wanderings, 53;
admonishes the Italian cardinals, 54;
at Lucca, 55;
rejection of amnesty, 55;
new condemnation to death, 56;
at Verona, 57;
at Ravenna, 58, 59;
probable visit to Mantua and Verona, 58;
last days at Ravenna, 59;
his embassy to Venice, 59;
his death, 60;
his works, 61-63;
publication and diffusion of the Commedia, 64;
his commentators, 64, 65;
influence of Guido Guinizelli, 67, 68;
the Vita Nuova, 10-14, 20, 61, 67-81, 82-86, 88, 96, 98, 99, 111,
120, 181, 201;
the Rime or Canzoniere, 15, 21, 22, 35, 38, 45, 62, 82-93, 96-
98, 104, 107, 108, 122, 127;
the Convivio, 10, 20, 38, 39, 45, 48, 61, 62, 70, 72, 80, 81, 82,
85-88, 94-101, 102, 108, 114, 117n., 146, 155, 166, 167,
184, 192, 194, 195, 214;
De Vulgari Eloquentia, 4, 5, 21, 36, 38, 44, 62, 63, 81, 87, 88,
90-92, 102-109, 128, 152, 181;
the Monarchia, 62, 109-120, 142, 147, 167, 184, 189, 208, 210;
the Letters, 15, 19, 32, 46, 47-52, 53-55, 62, 110, 120-127, 147;
the Epistle to Can Grande, 58, 62, 127, 129, 136, 146, 167, 194;
the Eclogues, 59, 63, 128, 130-134, 144;
the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra, 58, 63, 134-135;
the Divina Commedia, its completion, 59, 60, 62-64;
publication and diffusion, 64, 65;
 earliest commentators, 64;
language, 106;
ethical and mystical, 128, 129;
letter and allegory, 136-138;
title, 137;
metrical structure, 106, 138-139;
sources, 139-141;
symbolism of Virgil and Beatrice, 141-143;
date of composition, 143-145;
time, 145;
Inferno, 146-164;
Purgatorio, 164-192;
Paradiso, 192-221
Abati, Bocca degli, 161
—— Durante degli, 10, 24
Acquasparta, Cardinal Matteo da, 32-33, 36
Adam, 103, 191, 214, 219
Adam of Brescia, 160
Adimari (Florentine family), 23
Adolph of Nassau, 100
Adrian IV., Pope, 110
—— V., Pope, 178
Aeneas, 114, 147, 155, 169, 208
Agostino, 205
Aguglione, Baldo da, 51
Alberigo, Frate 144, 161
Albert of Austria, 30, 48, 100
Albertus Magnus, 1, 95, 141, 205
Aldobrandesco, Omberto, 173
Alexander the Great, 115
Alighieri, family, 6, 25
—— Alighiero di Bellincione (Dante’s father), 6, 9, 14
—— Antonia, 23n., 60n.
—— Beatrice, 23n., 60n.
—— Bella, 10
—— Brunetto di Bellincione, 7
—— Francesco, 10
—— Geri del Bello, 7
—— Giovanni, 23n.
—— Gemma Donati, 23, 58, 60n., 127, 132
—— Jacopo di Dante, 23, 56, 58, 60n., 64
—— Lapa Cialuffi, 10
—— Pietro di Dante, 12, 23, 56, 58, 60n., 64, 127.
—— Tana, 10
Alighiero (son of Cacciaguida), 7
Altoviti, Palmieri, 32, 36, 37, 52
Anastasius, Pope, 155
Anchises, 169, 208
Anne, St., 219
Anselm, St., 206
Antaeus, 161
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 1, 5, 80, 141, 150, 151, 152, 155, 172, 192,
205, 206
Argenti, Filippo, 154
Ariosto, 140
Aristotle, 1, 14, 39, 80, 89, 95, 97, 100, 141, 150, 152, 176, 214,
215
Arnaut, Daniel, 90, 107, 182
Augustine, St., 117, 129, 141, 172, 200, 219, 220
Augustus, 109, 113, 115
Averroës, 99, 152

Beatrice, traditionally identified with Bice Portinari, 12, 13, 14;

her brother, 15, 78;
her death, 20;
Cino’s canzone on, 21;
Dante’s wanderings from her, 21;
in Dante’s work, 61, 62;
in the Vita Nuova, 69-79;
reference to her in the Convivio, 81, 84, 86, 89, 93, 98, 99, 111;
her symbolism in the Divina Commedia, 141, 142;
sends Virgil, 148;
her part in the Earthly Paradise, 187-191;
guides Dante through the spheres of Paradise, 194, 199-216;
her glory in the Empyrean, 218-220
Bambaglioli, Graziolo dei, 65, 119
Bacci, O., 60n.
Barbadoro, B., 32n.
Barbi, M., 11, 23n., 56n., 82, 83, 93n., 127
Bardi, Simone dei, 12
Bartoli, A., 11
Battifolle, Countess of, 125
Bede, St., 205
Becchi, Lippo, 36
Belacqua, 168
Bella, Giano della, 24, 25, 28
Benedict, St., 212, 219
—— IX., Pope, 43, 122
Benvenuto da Imola, 15, 44, 65, 156, 187
Bernard, St., 129, 185, 187, 197, 198, 203, 207, 209, 217-221
Bertran de Born, 107
Biagi, V., 135
Biondo, Flavio, 48, 63, 121
Biscaro, G., 133n.
Blacatz, 169
Boccaccio, 11, 12, 14, 15, 23, 26, 35, 40, 44, 46, 47, 58, 60n., 63,
65, 69, 74, 83, 101, 102, 109, 112, 118, 121, 122, 127, 130,
132, 144, 151n.
Boëthius, 20, 94, 141, 205, 217
Bonagiunta, 181
Bonaventura, St., 1, 141, 206, 213, 220
Boncompagno, 102n.
Boniface VIII., Pope, 4, 24-26, 28, 29, 32-35, 36-38, 41-42, 46,
111, 159, 179, 217
Branca d’Oria, 144
Briareus, 160
Brunelleschi, Betto, 22
Brunetto di Bellincione. See Alighieri
—— Latini, 14, 89, 97, 157
Bruni, Leonardo, 12, 14, 18, 31, 34, 40, 43, 46, 53, 63, 74, 120,
121
Brutus, 163
Buondelmonte, 6
Buoso da Duera, 161
Buti, Francesco da, 65

Cacciaguida, 6, 7, 29n., 40, 208, 209

Caccianemico, Venedico, 133n., 145
Caesar, 109
Cain, 160
Calboli, Fulcieri da, 41, 133n.
Cammino, Gherardo da, 100
Cante de’ Gabrielli, 36
Capaneus, 157
Carducci, 132
Carlo Martello, 27, 204
Casella, 15, 21, 87, 167
Cassius, 163
Cato, 114, 167
Cavalcanti, Cavalcante, 155
—— Guido, 13, 15, 28, 31, 32, 58, 68, 73, 74, 76, 85, 104, 108,
155
Celestine V., St., Pope, 24, 168
Cerberus, 153
Cerchi, Vieri dei, 19, 27, 30, 40
Charlemagne, 110, 116, 209
Charles I. of Anjou, 3, 4, 8, 15, 16, 170, 178
—— II. of Naples, 18, 27, 32, 49, 178, 204
—— of Valois, 33-36, 178
Charon, 149, 154
Chaucer, 94
Christ, 115, 116, 147, 186, 213
Ciacco, 144
Cicero, 20, 150, 155
Cimabue, 6
Cincinnatus, 114
Cino da Pistoia, 15, 21, 53, 63, 85, 91, 93, 104, 107, 108, 123
Cipolla, C., 116n.
Clement IV., Pope, 3
—— V., Pope, 46, 48, 52, 54, 116n., 126, 143, 145, 179, 217
Clemenza, 204
Colet, J. (on Dionysius), 215
Colonna, Sciarra, 41
Compagni, Dino, 25, 34, 35, 43
Conrad III., Emperor, 7
Conradin of Suabia, 9
Constance, Empress, 2, 201
Constance of Aragon, 16
Constantine, 109, 116, 210
Corazza da Signa, 34
Croce, B., 137
Curio, 124
Cyprus, King of, 210

Daniel, 120, 129

Dante. See Alighieri
Dante da Maiano, 84
David, 120, 173, 210
Della Torre, A., 56n.
Del Lungo, I, 20n., 35n., 45n.
Diedati, Gherardino, 34, 36
—— Neri, 34
Dionysius, 141, 197, 205, 207, 211, 215, 216
Dominic, St., 205
Donati, Corso, 22, 25, 27, 28, 31, 33, 46, 145, 180, 201
—— Forese, 23, 85, 180, 201
—— Foresino, 127
—— Gemma, See Alighieri
—— Manetto, 23, 24
—— Nella, 180
—— Niccolò, 127
—— Piccarda, 201
—— Teruccio, 127
—— Ubertino, 23
Donatus, Aelius, 206
D’Ovidio, F., 139n.
Durante, author of the Fiore, 63

Elisei (family), 6
Ephialtes, 160
Eve, 219

Federzoni, G., 139n.

“Fioretta,” 84
Folco, 204
Francesca da Rimini, 58, 153, 161
Francis, St., 92, 205
Frangipani, Cardinal Latino, 16
Frederick I., Emperor, 2, 49, 110
—— II., Emperor, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 48, 100, 104, 109, 155, 170, 201
—— of Aragon, 32

Gabriel, St., 203, 213, 219

Gambara, Gherardino da, 41
Gentucca, 55n.
Geryon, 158
Gherardini, Andrea, 33, 38
Gianni, Lapo, 15, 31, 85, 104
Giants, the, 160
Giotto, 6, 44, 58
Giovanna (“Primavera”), 71, 76
Giovanni del Virgilio, 56, 59, 63, 130-133
Giraut de Borneil, 92, 107
Godfrey de Bouillon, 209
Gratian, 205
Gregory I. (the Great), 99, 197
—— VII. (Hildebrand), Pope, 2, 110
—— X., Pope, 15
Griffin, the mystical, 187, 188, 190
Guarnerio, P. E., 139n.
Guidi, the Conti, 51, 125
Guido, Fra, of Pisa, 64, 127
—— Novello da Polenta, 58, 59, 64, 132
—— Novello (dei Conti Guidi), 8
—— del Duca, 174
Guinizelli, Guido, 5, 67, 68, 71, 76, 77, 85, 88, 104, 182
Guiscard, Robert, 209
Guittone d’Arezzo, 5

Hauteville, House of, 2, 16

Henry III., King of England, 170
—— VI., Emperor, 2
—— VII., Emperor, 47-53, 62, 100, 109, 112, 121, 123-125, 130,
143, 179, 217
Hezekiah, 210
Horace, 140
Hugh Capet, 42, 178
Hugh of St. Victor, 205

Ilario, Frate, 54
Illuminato, 205
Irnerius, 2
Isaiah, 92, 120, 127
Isidore, St., of Seville, 154, 205

Jacopone da Todi, 176

James, St., 214
Jeremiah, 20, 120, 127, 146, 215
Joachim of Flora, 206
John the Baptist, St., 219
—— Chrysostom, St., 206
—— of Damascus, St., 213
John the Evangelist, St., 186, 214, 219
—— XXI. (Peter of Spain), Pope, 206
—— XXII., Pope, 54, 118, 210
—— of Paris, 117n.
Joshua, 209
Judas Iscariot, 163
—— Maccabaeus, 209
Judith, 219
Justinian, Emperor, 59, 109, 202, 203
Juvenal, 140

Kipling, Rudyard, 107n.

Lacaita, J. P., 65
Lana, Jacopo della, 51
Leah, 183-186
Lippo de’ Bardi, 15
“Lisetta,” 93n.
Livi, G., 80n., 92n., 144n.
Livy, 141
Louis of Bavaria, 60, 118
—— St., of France, 3
Lucan, 140, 162, 163, 167, 169
Lucia (St. Lucy), 148, 171, 219
Lucifer, 149, 150, 160-164
Luzzatto, G., 35n.

Malaspina (family), 44
—— Alagia de’ Fieschi, 178
—— Currado, 170
—— Franceschino, 45
——Moroello, 123, 151n., 178
Malavolti, Ubaldino, 35
Manfred, 3, 4, 8, 16, 104, 168
Marco the Lombard, 175
Margaret, Empress, 125
Martin IV., Pope, 181
Mary the Blessed Virgin, 20;
Beatrice under her banner, 77;
symbolises Divine Mercy, 148;
the Queen of Mercy, 170;
examples of her life, 173, 177, 186, 201, 203;
her Assumption in the Stellar Heaven, 213;
her glory in the Empyrean, 219;
her intercession for Dante, 220
Matelda, 74, 184-188, 192, 218
Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, 8, 185
Mazzini, 104, 114
Medusa, 154
Mechthild of Hackeborn, 185
—— of Magdeburg, 185
Merlin, 85
Meuccio, 15
Milotti, Fiducio dei, 132
Minerbetti, Maso, 35
Moncetti, G. B., 134
Monferrato, Marquis Giovanni of, 108
Montefeltro, Buonconte da, 20, 168
—— Guido da, 99, 159, 168
Moore, E., 20n., 134, 145, 163n.
Moses, 219
Musaeus, 169
Musciatto Franzesi, 42
Mussato, Albertino, 132

Nathan, 206
Niccolò da Prato, Cardinal, 42, 122
—— Pisano, 6
Nicholas III., Pope, 15, 158
Nogaret, William of, 41

Oderisi, 174
Ordelaffi, Scarpetta degli, 41, 49
Orlandi, Orlanduccio, 37
Orlando, 209
Orosius, 141, 205
Orsini, Cardinal Napoleone, 46, 126
Ottimo Commento, the, 22, 35, 64, 185
Otto, Emperor, 109
Ottocar, 170
Ovid, 141
Palinurus, 169
Parodi, E. G., 63, 143, 191
Paul, St., 120, 129, 148, 180, 187
Pazzi, Carlino dei, 41, 145
Perini, Dino, 58, 131, 151n.
Peter, St., Apostle, 187, 213, 215
—— of Aragon, 16, 18, 170
—— Comestor, 206
—— Damian, 212
—— of Spain. See John XXI.
——the Lombard, 205
Petrarch, 47, 52, 125, 134
Philip the Fair, 32, 42, 178
Phlegyas, 154
“Pietra,” 22, 89
Plato, 94
Plotinus, 220
Poggetto, Bertrando del, 119
Poggi, Andrea, 11, 127, 151n.
—— Leone, 10
Portinari, Bice. See Beatrice
—— Folco, 12, 15
—— Manetto, 15, 57, 78
Pucci, Antonio, 134
Pythagoras, 85

Quirino, Giovanni, 144

Rabanus Maurus, 206
Rachel, 183, 185, 219
Rahab, 204
Rajna, P., 138n.
Ranieri di Zaccaria, 56
Rebecca, 219
Renoardo, 209
Rhipeus, 152, 210, 211
Ricci, C., 133n.
Riccomanni, Lapo, 10
Richard of St. Victor, 129, 141, 183, 205, 220
Robert the Wise, King of Naples, 49, 52, 56, 117n., 124, 130,
133n.
Romano, Cunizza da, 204
—— Ezzelino da, 3, 204
Romena, Alessandro da, 122
—— Oberto and Guido da, 122
Romeo, 203
Rossetti, 10, 57, 68, 76, 107, 181
Rudolph of Hapsburg, 16, 100, 170, 204
Ruggieri, Abp., 161
Rustico di Filippo, 85
Ruth, 219

Saladin, 152
Salterelli, Lapo, 37
Salvani, Provenzano, 9, 174
Sapia, 174
Sarah, 219
Scala, Albuino della, 44, 57
—— Bartolommeo della, 43
—— Can Grande della, 43, 57, 58, 62, 63, 121, 127, 130, 132,
144, 147, 208
Scartazzini, G. A., 11, 13, 21
Sennuccio del Bene, 53
Serravalle, Giovanni da, 47
Shakespeare, 26, 163
Shelley, 60, 96, 134, 210, 231
Siger, 205, 206
Signorelli, Luca, 155
Sinon, 160
Solomon, 119, 205, 207
Sordello, 169, 170
Spenser, 107n.
Spini (family), 29
Statius, 140, 179-183, 186, 189, 192
Swinburne, 107n.

Tiberius, 115
Torraca, F., 45n., 123n.
Tosa, Baschiera della, 43
Toynbee, P., 122n.
See Bibliographical Appendix
Trajan, 109, 173, 210
Tundal, 139, 170

Ubaldini, the, 41
Uberti, Farinata degli, 8, 155
—— Tolosato degli, 43
Ugolino, Count, 125, 161
Uguccione della Faggiuola, 46, 54-57
Ulysses, 160

Veltro, the, 93, 147, 191, 203

Vernani, Fra Guido, 119
Vernon, W. W., 65
Vigna, Piero della, 156
Villani, F., 11, 60, 127
—— G., 9, 11, 17, 29, 46, 102, 121, 125
Villari, P., 50
Vincent of Beauvais, 180
“Violetta,” 84
Virgil, 140-143, 147-149, 153-164, 169, 175-188, 211, 218
Visconti, Nino, 170

Wicksteed, P. H., 95, 98n.

William of Orange, 209
—— II., King of Sicily, 3, 210
Witte, K., 21, 98, 143, 157

Zeno, San, Abbot of, 177