Talk or something more? COVID-19 and youth discourses of participation

PurposePolitical participation of young people has been examined, but there is a lack of research about how these participation forms are interpreted and what counts as participation for young people. The study aims to identify discourses of political participation in Hungary, where the COVID-19 restrictions during 2020-2021 have confined young people's everyday interactions and political activism to the online space for an extended period. The authors' asteroid-effect hypothesis suggests that new discourses of political participation have become more widespread, which may have reinterpreted the previous dynamics between online and offline participation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyse the results of six focus groups and eight interviews with young people conducted between 2021-2022 through discourse analysis.FindingsThe qualitative results show that to intellectualise the everyday discourses of youth political participation, extending its classical theories is worthwhile. While online participation has not emerged as a paramount, positive interpretational framework, a new discourse of political participation has emerged, making conversation a fundamental act.Originality/valueWhile the results are limited to Hungarian youth, the strong appearance of participation as a communicative action can have consequences to theoretical approaches of political participation. The authors believe that COVID-19 restrictions had a significant role in this change, because family talks became more politicised.

Asteroid-Effect in Society: The Formation of a Mannheim-type Historical Generation Post-COVID-19

Our conceptual paper argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has created conditions for the constitution of a new historical generation in Mannheimian terms. Current attempts in the sociology of youth to reconcile structure and agency with the concept of generation provide good starting points for interpreting a historical event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. While generations are not to be understood as homogeneous groups, constituting events can be compared to an asteroid that changes the trajectory of each social group. Thus, the concept of asteroid-effect helps us to overcome oversimplifying generational interpretations and to examine the effects of generation-forming events with an eye on structural inequalities. Our study provides an overview of the classical generational theory of Mannheim in light of some contemporary approaches. Based upon existing information, we illustrate how the generation-forming events can be interpreted and how structural inequalities can be considered. © 2022, Polish Sociological Association. All rights reserved.

Generation challenge in the post-covid period

Our study reflects on the social change that has began in the world in late autumn 2019. The Covid-pandemic is an exogenous shock (Illés et al. 2020), an asteroid effect that fundamentally changed normality in the Western world. In our theoretical paper, we argue that generation as a central theoretical and analytical category of Karl Mannheim and the neo-Mannheimian literature, is well suited to describe young people’s changing cultural trends of the post-Covid period. In this context, we believe that the new, historical generation in the Mannheimian sense (Szabó 2020a, Szabó 2020b) can be best understood in terms of cultural value changes. We also examine forms of ’approaching’ and ’assiminilating’ cultural based on age-specific characteristics. © 2021, Hungarian Sociological Association. All rights reserved.