Youth worldlessness and civic participation online and at school: Exploring Arendt’s philosophy

This paper seeks to explore the possible contribution that thinking with Arendt can bring to understanding the nuances of school-aged young people’s civic participation. Using Arendt’s work on responsibility, political presence and the notion of worldlessness, this paper will explore how young people’s social media interactions can serve as a way to foster a more critical sense of civic participation and political agency in education. This paper comprises three main sections. Firstly, there is a critical discussion on how the notion of ‘public sphere’ may help to conceptualise school as an important site for youth political and civic participation and engagement, even when Arendt’s position in education is that the school should not be touched by politics, in this way the paper uses Arendt to think against Arendt to position the school as a ‘space of appearance’. Secondly, the notion of what I term in this paper youth worldlessness is developed by using Arendt’s (2018) theory to frame for understanding the everyday exclusions and displacements experienced by research participants and how citizenship education struggles to serve as an outlet for them. Thirdly, the paper analyses the role of young people’s social media engagements by examining data from a qualitative study with British young people, ranging from 15 to 18 years of age.