I Guess This Is Activism?

How neoliberal capitalism and pedagogical deideologization constrain the radical possibilities of youth activism

In I Guess This Is Activism? Kevin L. Clay presents an eye-opening account of his experience with Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as an Upward Bound educator. Grounded in Paulo Freire's tradition of critical pedagogy, YPAR has been championed by community-based educators and scholars in the United States as an approach for supporting critical consciousness development and social change with working-class Black and Latino youth. Clay, however, questions whether YPAR can effectively prepare youths to subvert the systems reproducing their material conditions under neoliberal capitalism. Exposing the political and pedagogical limits of YPAR's progressive education model, he reveals how omnipresent neoliberalism undermines youths' radical potential when political education is not prioritized in youth activism.

I Guess This Is Activism? engages Black radical thinkers, including Ella Baker and Fred Hampton, to reveal the faulty assumptions implicit in YPAR's program. Looking deeply into how he and his students navigated questions of community problems and social change at the twilight of the Obama presidency, Clay demonstrates how, in the absence of political education on the structures of race, class, and capitalism, youth activism is always eclipsed by the common sense of the free market.

As working-class Black and Latino youth inherit a society deeply shaped by neoliberal dogma, I Guess This Is Activism? delivers a much-needed reexamination of YPAR and visions for the future of youth activist education.

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