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Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

The PRCA December 2020 census tells us that, in the United Kingdom, the public relations (PR) industry continues to be predominantly female, with 68% of respondents ticking that box. It also highlights a ‘gender pay gap’ of 21%, an increase of 7% from March 2020 and states that ‘this can be explained by the fact that the respondents … are largely in senior roles which tend to be more male dominated’ (PRCA, 2020), thus demonstrating a leadership gap as well as a pay one. Both of the leading PR professional membership bodies in the United Kingdom – the PRCA and CIPR – acknowledge the gender pay and leadership gaps, made starker in an industry dominated by women, and have committed to tackle the disparity.

In this chapter, I build on Liz Yeomans' (2020) work, in which she suggests ‘new avenues for researching neoliberalism and postfeminism in PR’ (p. 44) to examine the ‘apparently progressive moves’ (Yeomans', 2020) by women's networking organisations. I analyse website texts from two women-only PR networking organisations – Women in PR and Global Women in PR – to explore the ways in which they construct their function, purpose and role, and to examine their position vis-à-vis the contemporary postfeminist media culture (Gill, 2007). The research takes a feminist, discourse analytic approach and sheds light on the reality of women in PR as constructed by organisations whose stated goal is to: ‘improve equality and diversity across the industry by increasing the number and diversity of women in leadership roles’ (Women in PR, 2022).

This paper intervenes in existing literature on entrepreneurship and inequalities by proposing a novel reframing of intersectionality as a threshold concept, an important idea that enables us to deepen and progress the understanding of complex subjectivities.

Drawing from education studies, intersectionality is explored through the five key features of threshold concepts: (1) transformative, (2) irreversible, (3) integrative, (4) bounded and (5) troublesome. We offer a set of reflection questions for what we call “doing intersectionality.”

We develop a metacritique of the way in which the concept of intersectionality has thus far been treated in feminist theory and applied in entrepreneurship studies – namely, as the culmination of thinking about difference and inequality, decoupled from its roots in collectivist analysis and Black and anti-racist feminism. The paper invites scholars of entrepreneurial inequalities to both engage and look beyond an intersectional lens to better elucidate the range of historically emergent social hierarchies and systems of power that shape their phenomena of interest.

Through reframing intersectionality as a threshold concept, this paper challenges entrepreneurship researchers to view intersectionality as a foundational starting point for the conceptualisation of complex interactions of social structures, and the structural inequality and power relationships present within their research, rather than a destination.

Based on a lexical analysis of publications on 529 Facebook pages, published between 2013 and 2017, this research explores how Brazilian left-wing activist groups participate on Facebook to coordinate their opposition and engage in social struggles. This chapter shows how activist groups set up two main digital network repertoires of action when mobilizing on Facebook. First, in direct connection with major political events, the platform is used as a media arena to challenge governments’ political actions and second, it is employed as a tool to coordinate mobilization, whether these mobilizations are demonstrations on the street or at cultural events, such as at a music concert. These repertoires of action exemplify ways in which contemporary Brazilian activism is carried out at the intersection of online and offline engagements. While participants engage through these two repertoires, this network of activists is held together over time through a more mundane type of event, pertaining to the repertoire of action allowing the organization of mobilization. Stepping aside from opposition and struggles brought to the streets, the organization of cultural activities, such as concerts and exhibitions, punctuates the everyday exchanges in activists’ communications. Talk about cultural events and their related social agendas structures activist networks on a medium-term basis and creates the conditions for the coordination of (future) social movements, in that they offer the opportunities to stay in contact, in addition to taking part in occasional gatherings, between more highly visible social protests.

Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.