Youth civic engagement literature has suggested that the consistently low voter turnout among the youth demographic is because they are either apathetic to the world around them or they participate in other forms of civic engagement that they deem more practical, such as volunteering. Moreover, to build trust with the community, police services have turned to community policing programs and community consultation to establish a collective responsibility for community well-being and safety. This thesis project explores the dynamics and characteristics of the Ottawa Police Service’s Youth Advisory Committee as a youth engagement program. Further, these dynamics are analyzed regards to its potential to implement a democratization of the police service. In this way, the project uncovers the bureaucratic tensions that may impact the program’s full potential to involve the youth community in the police service. This project has the practical goal to learn more about the characteristics and dynamics of the Youth Advisory Committee within the Ottawa Police Service as a powerful police institution in order to improve other similar initiatives.

Thesis advisor: Jacqueline V. Lerner / In the United States, young people have the power to change the country, and they are exercising this power every day in many different ways (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2021). Beyond the contributions that youth civic engagement makes to societal well-being (Flanagan & Levine, 2010), it also contributes to young people’s own positive development (Lerner et al., 2015). Given these societal and individual benefits, it is important to investigate the correlates of youth civic engagement. Guided by positive youth development perspectives, my three independent but related dissertation studies examine the contextual correlates of civic engagement among young people. Study One investigates how different family characteristics and school characteristics separately and interactively predict adolescent civic engagement. Study Two examines thriving as a potential underlying process through which engagement in youth development programs promotes adolescent civic engagement. Study Three focuses on social media as a platform for civic actions, including those aiming to redress inequalities (i.e., critical actions), among White, cisgendered and heterosexual American young adults. Together, results from the three studies suggest the important role of growing up in ‘civic contexts’ in the development and sustainment of civic engagement among young people. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

The voices, perspectives and experiences of girls and young women in history, political and civic education remain rare, and those of girls of color are even rarer still. This dissertation reports on the results of a qualitative study exploring girls’ perspectives on and experiences of citizenship in the Toronto area. Through the use of document analysis, semi-structured interviews; and photovoice, this study suggests that the girls easily identify traditional gendered expectations in their families, schools and in the society at large. At the same time, the girls often make deliberate choices to defy these expectations, carve out their own paths, and serve as advocates for gender equality, social justice and engaged citizenship. This study focuses on the voices of girls and the ways in which concepts of gender enhance, shape and inhibit civic action within schooling. Despite an increased emphasis on education for active citizenship in education more broadly, this study provokes serious questions about what girls are learning about their roles in society and how concepts of gender affect the ways young people understand and enact their citizenship roles. There are new fields of research in the areas of youth civic engagement, citizenship education, feminist and girlhood studies, all of which informed my understanding of these ‘citizen-girls’, however they still often remain separated and inadequately consider the intersections of multiple identity factors as well as the relationship between individual agency and the societal structures that construct dominant values. This study has important implications for educators and policymakers, suggesting a need for more spaces and opportunities both within the classroom, and outside the school, for girls and boys to critically engage with the messaging they receive about gender, democratic participation and citizen engagement. Furthermore, these girls’ experiences also suggest that we must broaden our definition of citizenship and civic participation in order to better reflect the myriad new forms of citizen expression being used by girls and young people in modern societies today.

The voices, perspectives and experiences of girls and young women in history, political and civic education remain rare, and those of girls of color are even rarer still. This dissertation reports on the results of a qualitative study exploring girls’ perspectives on and experiences of citizenship in the Toronto area. Through the use of document analysis, semi-structured interviews; and photovoice, this study suggests that the girls easily identify traditional gendered expectations in their families, schools and in the society at large. At the same time, the girls often make deliberate choices to defy these expectations, carve out their own paths, and serve as advocates for gender equality, social justice and engaged citizenship. This study focuses on the voices of girls and the ways in which concepts of gender enhance, shape and inhibit civic action within schooling. Despite an increased emphasis on education for active citizenship in education more broadly, this study provokes serious questions about what girls are learning about their roles in society and how concepts of gender affect the ways young people understand and enact their citizenship roles. There are new fields of research in the areas of youth civic engagement, citizenship education, feminist and girlhood studies, all of which informed my understanding of these ‘citizen-girls’, however they still often remain separated and inadequately consider the intersections of multiple identity factors as well as the relationship between individual agency and the societal structures that construct dominant values. This study has important implications for educators and policymakers, suggesting a need for more spaces and opportunities both within the classroom, and outside the school, for girls and boys to critically engage with the messaging they receive about gender, democratic participation and citizen engagement. Furthermore, these girls’ experiences also suggest that we must broaden our definition of citizenship and civic participation in order to better reflect the myriad new forms of citizen expression being used by girls and young people in modern societies today.