Short Abstract

This panel rethinks political socialization by examining how everyday spaces (families, schools, universities) shape political dispositions in African contexts. It asks how experiences of authority, inequality, solidarity and belonging become politically meaningful.

Long Abstract

Political socialization is usually understood as the acquisition of attitudes, values, and preferences that shape individuals’ political opinions and behaviour. It can also be approached more broadly as the process through which individuals acquire ways of perceiving and interpreting the social world, including its hierarchies, inequalities, and relations of authority and domination. Political socialization therefore need not occur only where politics is explicitly discussed or practised.

Research on political socialization, including in African contexts, has largely focused on explicitly political objects and spaces such as elections, partisan transmission, civic culture, governments, parties, and trade unions. Yet relationships to politics are also shaped in spaces not conventionally understood as political, such as families, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, and neighbourhoods. These spaces are too often treated as backdrops to political life rather than as sites where political dispositions are formed.

This panel shifts the focus towards these everyday spaces, with particular attention to families, schools, and universities, and asks how experiences within them contribute to the formation of political dispositions among children and young people. We are interested in how dispositions initially acquired through social experiences (such as dignity, obedience, honour, solidarity, or distrust of authority) may subsequently be appropriated, resisted, or reinterpreted as political. These processes are also shaped by the political regimes in which these spaces are embedded. Authoritarian and hybrid regimes extend its logics beyond formal political institutions into domestic, educational, and everyday spaces. How do such contexts shape what can be transmitted, or expressed and what remains unsaid?

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