Outline of the Book
The book is divided into two parts—(1) political socialization and its processes and (2) the outcome of political socialization. Different chapters are included to discuss each section. Throughout the subsequent chapters, the ecological theory will be used to analyze the themes that emerged within the Palestinian youth journaling study, and portions of the youth’s journals will be intertwined within this analysis to show concrete examples and narratives of youth’ s political socialization and agency.
The outline of the book is as follows:
Political Socialization and Its Processes
Reconceptualizing Youth Political Socialization: A Theoretical Framework
This chapter discusses the conventional views of youth political socialization that tend to be limited to the school and family environment. This approach dismisses youth agency and other interactions in the ecological theory and emphasizes the adult-directed approach of political socialization. The alternative method of the traditional model of political socialization is based on the ecological theory of political socialization and the reconceptualization of the concept of age. The ecological theory captures the interaction not only in the immediate environment of the youth, but also in the relationship between local and global discourses that assist in forming youth’s perspectives and actions. The interactions are within and between contexts that youth experience in everyday life, which are integrated in political socialization. The reconceptualization of age is an integral part of framing the alternative approach since it redefines age as part of intersectionality, intergenerationality, and life course of an individual. To standardize the meaning of age is to miss the interactions entailed in each individual that is exemplified in different world experiences among youth. These two theoretical frameworks set the stage to create meaning of youth political agency and diffused the exercise of compartmentalizing youth experiences that do not serve in understanding youth political socialization but rather underscores their political agency. In summary, this chapter discusses the existing literature of youth political socialization, the ecological model of political socialization, and the construction of political agency.
