Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a book project that bridges the habitual spectacularization of youthful agency in Youth Studies and the research on everyday struggles of young people.

Paper long abstract:

The suggested paper presents a book project that tries to bridge gap between the habitual spectacularization of youthful agency in Youth Studies and the research on everyday struggles of young people, by examining politics in both revolutions and bedrooms, and theorizing the divide. The book focuses on young people's political engagements in contemporary Africa, but explicitly wishes to expand the horizon to the political in less obvious ways, including apathy, consumption, dreams, desires, and material struggles. The book's conclusions will suggest that the dichotomous separation between spectacular/romanticized and mundane is an unhelpful distinction, and rather, we will advocate an expansion of the scholarly interest in youth research to include the contextual and political in any study of life-worlds.