Citizens of Nowhere Land

Abstract

Injunctions for young people to participate in democratic life become more emphatic as voting rates in Western democracies decline and a growing disenchantment with traditional political life becomes apparent. In this context, city spaces and private property have been central to representations of the public sphere in which young people enact their participation. Crucially, young people have frequently been framed within televised spaces either as belligerent intruders or as a feral underclass. Theoretically, given the emphasis on information seeking, trust and news consumption as one of the cornerstones of civic life, the links between citizens' political, social and spatial positioning in relation to news products is of crucial importance. Via an analysis of experiences of news by diverse young citizens, the article decentres the technologies of watching or reading news and repositions the relationships between political news seeking, trust in journalism, meaning-making and socio-economic status within a framework of local experiences of politics and civic life. Crucially, it sheds light on the question of how groups of excluded youth conceptualise their own status in relation to the state, the nation and news media, and their critical comments about representation.