How is youth mobilisation best understood and analysed? In the context of a city such as Barcelona with a complex history and relation to nationhood, this raises questions relating to multilevel governance. Three years after the rise of Fridays for Future, which recently decided to stop striking in Barcelona due to low attendance, this also raises questions about social movements and their lifecycles.

On 12 December, AHCD researchers Yanina Welp, Maria Mexi, Christine Lutringer, and Laura Bullon-Cassis presented preliminary findings of their project “Mapping Youth Political Participation” at a Barcelona workshop hosted and co-organized by Pompeu Fabra University (and, more specifically, Eduard Ballesté) and AHCD. 

The workshop brought together over 25 researchers working on seven projects that similarly explore youth mobilisations through various angles. These included, for example, the project TRANSGANG, which looks at transnational gangs as mediation agents, as well as others that focus on youth engagement for climate or on youth lives in urban peripheries.

The AHCD project, in turn, looks at the connections between youth climate and labour protests on the one hand, and local democratic innovations on the other, in four European countries including Spain. In a segment of the workshop, Yanina Welp delved into her fieldwork in Barcelona, noting its unique features in the area of democratic innovations.

WATCH a panel presentation that features the four project researchers HERE.