Conscientisation and Radical Habitus: Expanding Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice in Youth Activism Studies

Abstract

Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a useful tool to understand people’s everyday behaviours, dispositions and habits. However, this theory struggles to explain how some people diverge from the social norms that structure their habitus. This article proposes an extension of Bourdieu’s theory of practice by incorporating Freire’s conscientisation, that is, a theory of how individuals develop a critically conscious awareness through engagement with the world around them. Here, we use young people’s engagement in activism as a case study to show how these two theories can work together. We analysed previous youth activism research articles to explore how the theory of practice and conscientisation can explain the representations made of young people’s activism. Combining the two theories allows an explanation of how and why the young people in the studies that we reviewed took pathways of alternative actions from within their habitus. We argue that by adding Freire’s conscientisation to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, young people’s activism can be understood as the development of a generational radical habitus.

Australian Politics and Policy: 2024

“…has not yet been published for the 2019 election, in 2016 LGBTI representation stood at 3 per cent in the House of Representatives and 5 per cent in the Senate (compared, for example, with the UK, which had 6.9 per cent LGBTI representation in the House of Commons after the 2017 election). 66 Studies of electoral systems across the world have shown that proportional representation systems (as in the Senate) have a positive effect on the election of female candidates, compared with majoritarian systems with single-member electorates (as in the House of Representatives). 68 This can be seen in the Australian…”

“…First practised by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg in 2018 before spreading globally, the school strike movement saw young people mobilising to call for more ambitious and urgent policy action on climate change. 66 The movement, led and driven by young people (who are largely excluded from conventional political participation, such as voting) were protesting to express their concerns about a warming planet. As a result, significant media coverage of the protests increased the issue salience of climate policy in the public sphere.…”

“…In the mid-2010s, the Commonwealth extended income-contingent loans to all VET students; at the same time as the state of Victoria made VET funding contestable and open to the private market. This created a 'perfect storm' of unscrupulous private providers enticing students into low-quality courses, 66 leaving them heavily in debt with little learning to show for it. Other states also suffered damage to VET during this period, as they embraced their own versions of Victoria's market-based reforms.…”

Underground Artistic-Creative Scenes Between Utopias and Artivisms

“…Therefore, it is important to reflect upon the concept of radical habitus, which arises when agents deal with new experiences that break with their previous expectations or norms, causing them to alter their worldview, thus creating new types of arts of existence and resistance. Alexander et al (2022) state that many young activists began their activism by worrying about environmental causes; however, after seeing the different impacts of their activism, they went on to engage in other activisms related to racial and economic inequalities. This idea can be applied to our cases in the sense that music and music production have given rise to an involvement, from an activist point of view, with other causes, such as feminism, precariousness and Indigenous people.…”