Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency

A sweeping and innovative study that places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions and transformations in American politics.

Even though the voting age is 18, children in the United States are both crucial subjects and actors in democratic politics. Young people have been leveraged for important political causes again and again--from the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade in which civil rights leaders mobilized thousands of school kids in protest marches to the 2018 "family separation" policy in which Trump officials sacrificed migrant children as bargaining chips in its push for border control.

In Democracy's Child, Alison L. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor focus on the reciprocal relationship between children and politics by placing young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions, and transformations in American politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, they show that the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. Yet, these movements reflect a long history of youth political mobilization and leadership, including Progressive Era labor organizing and 1960s civil rights and anti-war activism. Gash and Tichenor examine childhood as a potent category that combines with gender/gender identity, race, class, immigration status, or sexual orientation to produce powerful systems of privilege or disadvantage. Further, they argue that children also are crucial subjects of government and adult control, inspiring contention in nearly every realm of public policy, such as education, social welfare, abortion, gun control, immigration, civil rights and liberties, and criminal justice.

A sweeping and innovative study, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape.

Alison Gash is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the substantive intersections of law and social policy and their capacity to both reify and reform systems of exclusion-particularly those affecting BIPOC, Queer, and low-income communities. She is the author of Below the Radar: How Silence Can Save Civil Rights (Oxford, 2015) as well as numerous articles on legal advocacy and collaborative governance published in Law & Social Inquiry, JPART, and a range of other peer-reviewed journals. She has received multiple awards for her teaching, research and social justice advocacy including the Christian Bay Award, the Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy and the Martin Luther King Award for Social Justice. Gash is a frequent public lecturer with One Day University and contributor to outlets, including Politico, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, Slate, Washington Post, Fortune, The Conversation, and National Public Radio.

Daniel J. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Social Science and Wayne Morse Center Senior Fellow at the University of Oregon. A scholar of immigration policy, social movements, and political history, he has published nine books, including Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control and Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements and the Transformation of American Politics. His research awards include the American Political Science Association's Gladys Kammerer Award, Jack Walker Prize, Mary Parker Follette Award, Polity Prize, and Charles Redd Award. He has been a fellow at Princeton's School of Policy and International Affairs, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Abba Schwartz Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, a research scholar at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, and was named to the inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows in 2015. He has testified and provided expert briefings to Congress on immigration law and policy, and provided commentary and essays for National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Utne Reader, and The Nation.