“If You’re Not at the Table, You’re on the Menu”. Continuities and Transformations in the Meanings of Political Participation among Young People across Gender, Age and Migratory Backgrounds

Building on debates on youth political participation and “polycrisis”, this article inves- tigates how young people in Italy understand political participation. Empirically, it draws on the qualitative component of the YEP! Youth Equality Participation project, analysing four focus groups and thirty semi-structured interviews conducted between May 2024 and June 2025 with young peo- ple aged 18-35 in Lombardy. The findings show that young people do not reject established mean- ings of participation, such as collective action, civic responsibility and social change, but reinterpret them through precarious futures, marginalisation and constrained agency. Participation emerges through five interconnected families of meaning: claim-making against injustice, identity work and belonging, protection of futurity, emotional navigation, and care, mutual aid and everyday resis- tance. These meanings are situated: migratory background, gender and generation do not generate separate understandings of politics, but accentuate specific dimensions of participation. For young people with migratory backgrounds, participation is closely linked to recognition, representation and symbolic citizenship; for young women activists, to voice, power and caring political spaces; and for the youngest participants, to resistance against disillusionment and the absence of meaningful spaces. Overall, the article argues that youth political participation should be understood as a mul- tidimensional and situated process through which young people negotiate belonging, recognition, agency and futurity