Differently Collective. Youth Activism in Italian University Associations

This paper deals with the “ordinary life” of non-institutional university participation and more specifically addresses Italian university student organizations, a neglected entity in youth participation research. We set this case study in a wider research agenda that critically reviews the use of concepts of “second modernity” to interpret contemporary youth participation and focuses on the situated emerging collective forms of youth participation in times of a complicated transition to adult-hood. University student organizations are empirically studied through a longitudinal panel qualita-tive analysis (1st round: 2013; 2nd round: 2016) based upon a non-probabilistic sample of organiza-tions and activists in the cities of Pisa and Florence. Both qualitative comparative analysis and qualita-tive content analysis are conducted. Our situated and exploratory study suggests that the term ‘reflex-ive’ cannot be opposed to the term ‘collective’ when we focus on (youth) participation. The differently collective participatory style of the interviewed youngsters becomes particularly original when the associative strategy includes an emerging economic and professionalizing activity.