Figuring youth citizenship: Communicative practices mediating the cultural politics of citizenship and age

• We examine various intersections of language, youth, and cultural citizenship.
• Youth’s practices shape and become shaped by citizenship.
• Citizenship is practiced through mundane discursive forms.
• Linguistic practices of citizenship are mediated by ‘figures of citizenship’.

The central aim of this special issue is to bring together linguistic anthropologists whose work addresses how the cultural politics of citizenship intersects with children and youth’s expressive forms in late modernity. Our approach to cultural citizenship is in keeping with discourse-centered, post-structural approaches within cultural and linguistic anthropology. Specifically, we theorize and analyze how children and youth across different nation-states draw on concrete, situated communicative practices to navigate their senses of belonging in evolving state-civil society relations during an era of political economic neoliberalism. The collection attends to the quotidian ways through which youth engender and at times transform particular sociocultural figures of citizenship.