In much youth research, policy and service delivery the very idea of youth voice and participation is an uncontested ‘good thing’. Indeed, a ‘youth participation’ agenda is a key element of most contemporary community and government youth programs. Yet, as a number of others have suggested, what this ‘good idea’ looks like in everyday policy and practice seems to be a more complex, ambivalent, and contested thing. For example, how do we understand the politics that decides Which youth voices get to speak? Who is heard? Who is left out?.
Together with my colleagues, Peter Kelly and Seth Brown, we have just published an Open Access article – Young people and the ‘biocultural politics’ of voice in the Anthropocene – in the journal Children’s Geographies.
In this paper we contribute to rethinking some of the key frameworks that underpin ideas about young people’s voice and participation, and associated concerns with agency, embodiment, and the more-than-human in the context of the profound earth systems crises that characterise the Anthropocene event.
In doing this work we reference a place-based, longitudinal project in the Greater Geelong region, and tell the story of one young trans* man’s embodied experiences of finding his ‘voice’. Drawing on Peter Kraftl’s (2013) development of a ‘more-than-social’ concept of young people’s voice and agency, and Samantha Frost’s (2016)conceptualisation of humans as ‘biocultural creatures’ who live and thrive in ‘biocultural habitats’, we argue for the need to constantly grapple with questions of scale and scope, materialities, and the entanglements between the human and more-than-human in seeking to explore a ‘biocultural politics’ of young people’s ‘voice’ in the Anthropocene.
The article is available for free download from this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2025.2576893