The civic legacies of disaster for youth political agency

Abstract

Disasters are considered pivotal in young people's lives, yet their civic legacies have been neglected. We examine how youth political agency is shaped through experiences of disaster, drawing on in-depth interviews with young people over a decade of successive disasters in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Our study demonstrates that the legacies of disaster for youth agency extend well beyond the narrow spatial-temporal boundaries that often frame disaster response and recovery. We trace the multiple emergent forms of youth political agency in Christchurch, which we describe as ‘react’, ‘reassess’, ‘(re)kindle’ and ‘retreat’, and identify an action-focused politics of ‘doing’ that emerged among some young people in the spaces opened by disaster. Through our analysis, we caution against one-dimensional framings of youth political agency in disaster, such as those that position it as uniformly positive or as useful resource. We argue such approaches hold the potential to essentialise young people and conform their action to the disaster management status quo, while also obscuring the possibilities embedded in their agency. We therefore call for nuanced analysis of the multiple, ambivalent and open-ended legacies for youth political agency that develop in the contested spaces of disaster and compounding crises.