HOW YOUNG ACTIVISTS RESPONDED TO THE FIRST WAVE OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS IN ITALY: VARIATIONS ACROSS TRAJECTORIES OF PARTICIPATION*
This study explores how young activists in Italy responded to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic using sixteen longitudinal qualitative interviews conducted in 2018 and 2020. Our fieldwork suggests that the Covid-19 crisis did not resonate with any significant shift in the trajectory of participation. At the same time, three major empirical observations with regard to time reappropriation, care practices, and digital activism were made, all of which worked in different ways according to the interviewees’ trajectories of participation. This research extends beyond the Covid-19 crisis and contributes to the literature on political participation by providing a way of investigating how activists respond to critical events in different ways depending on their trajectories of participation.
Contributor Notes
† We are grateful to the reviewers and editors of Mobilization, Andrea Pirro and Lorenzo Zamponi for their inputs on previous versions of this paper. We also want to express our gratitude to the young activists in Bologna for consenting to be interviewed two times, giving their time, energy, and patience. Stefania Voli has helped us during the first round of interviews. Data presented in this article, in part, have been gathered within the project “Reinventing Democracy in Europe: Youth Doing Politics in Times of Increasing Inequalities” (EURYKA). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 727025