“People give and take a lot in order to participate in things:” Youth talk back – making a case for non-participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Common typologies frame youth participation as something that exists at different hierarchical, or linear, levels or stages. In these models, non-participation is positioned as something negative or not addressed at all. Scholars have critiqued these typologies for ignoring contextual specificities and complexities, nuances, and power dynamics inherent in participatory processes. In this article, I draw from narratives of young people to productively theorize what non-participation might engender for thinking about and enacting participatory processes. In this study, I asked stakeholders at a youth-led HIV prevention and harm reduction peer-education program to take and discuss photographs that reflected their ideas about youth engagement. I provide a thematic analysis of how young people understood and navigated their participation in complex and self-determined ways. I put their narratives in dialogue with critical scholars’ writing on settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and willfulness to tease apart why and how young people’s comments on non-participation offer a sophisticated counter-hegemonic understanding of the “call to participation” and its discursive and material effects. Last, drawing on the work of Indigenous theorists who advocate for a politics of refusal, I argue that young people’s refusal to participate (or to participate on their own terms) may be an act of resistance – especially for young people whose bodies are regulated on a daily basis. I conclude by making a case for non-participation as a conceptual tool to disrupt and refuse hegemonic, linear theories of change and invite practitioners working with young people to do the same.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".