Activism, emotion, and genre: Young adults’ composition of Urgent Action Letters

•For student activists, emotional commitment to political work may be a product, not a prerequisite, of joining activist groups.•Genres such as Urgent Action Letters enable student activists to acquire, adapt, and perform the emotions crucial to their political work.•Student activists may learn to embody activist identities more fully by learning to adapt more conventions of more activist genres.

This article examines how members of a high school-based activist group compose Urgent Action Letters (UALs). In this genre of letter, the writer petitions a government official to uphold the human rights of a specific individual. Using tools of ethnography and discourse analysis, the article considers how group members employ the conventions of the UAL genre. By working in this genre, it is argued, members perform and learn to perform identities and emotions appropriate both for petitioning government officials and for affirming membership in the group. That is, the UAL genre functions for the group both as a means of pressuring governments and as a means of cultivating the identities and emotions of human rights activists.