Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency. By Risa Applegarth. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2024, 190pp. (paperback). ISBN: 978-0-8142-5899-6. US List: $32.95
Risa Applegarth’s Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency reframes social and ideological constructions of youth in the face of national or global pressures. The book uses expressions of rhetorical agency to bypass existing social judgements on the symbolic power of youth activism. Applegarth combines complex conceptions of not just activism and agency to do this, but also explores expressions of temporality, reflexivity, and memory to reshape existing perceptions on childhood development. She achieves this by reversing existing media narratives on youth political engagements and adapting them through a “demonstration of youth engaging in rhetoric using their words and bodies to influence attitudes and induce actions” (3).
The book consists of three central case studies of youth activist initiatives over the last three decades. The case studies are comprised of rhetorical analysis, qualitative interviews, and review of historic source materials. Each is compartmentalized within a chapter, but combined they move to resolve two compound research inquiries. The first is concerned with understanding how young people navigate the interplay of symbolic power and material constraints to achieve rhetorical agency. The second is more reflexive and relies upon how memory highlights the significance and strategies of youth activism in retrospect.
The first chapter case study, “Agency as Embodied: Durable Activism for Peace,” moves to establish both the parameters for agency as an embodied experience, and how childhood mitigates rhetoric. Applegarth’s chosen study concerns the 1995 New Mexico Kids Committee’s efforts to erect the Children’s Peace Statue in Los Alamos to commemorate the children’s lives lost in nuclear warfare. The committee was comprised entirely of kids, who designed and collectively funded the making of the statue. Their efforts to install it at the city of the Manhattan Project were ultimately thwarted by the town council.
In retelling the events of the children’s efforts, Applegarth draws on some of the tenets of rhetoric to construct a narrative around how adults subverted the initiative and denounced their endeavor on the grounds of presumed innocence. At the time of the council hearings, it was imputed that the kids were exploited; their agency was not as activists but as tokens for it. Applegarth endeavors to rewrite this narrative with material drawn from interviews from the committee’s former members. She discusses how shared memories of embodied activities enacted another form of collective power.
Applegarth harnesses another perspective on power in the second chapter, “Agency as Perspectival: Vulnerable Undocumented Activism.” The chapter examines the felt vulnerabilities of four undocumented immigrant students who publicized their undocumented status during a four-month walk along the “trail of dreams,” from Miami to Washington, DC. The 2010 walk was envisioned as a metaphor, or transformative action, wherein the student’s bodies were a site for performance, symbolizing their burdens and placement in the United States. Judith Butler’s ideas on bodily vulnerability are referenced by the author in relation to the walk, wherein Applegarth posits that this sort of exposed activism both engendered the self as rhetoric and forced audience engagement. The activists’ retrospective experiences are also accounted for wherein the temporality of the past and present are situated as mechanisms for their own perspectival agency. Here, perspectival agency functions as a sort of perpetual reviewing of lived events for the purposes of reflexively recreating meaning.
The third chapter, “Agency as Capacity: Disruptive Activism for Gun Reform,” develops notes on reflexivity; only in this case, reflexivity is largely used as a framework for discussing the cyclicality of media, political, and public responses to gun violence. The case study follows the activities of the youth-led March for our Lives initiative, which followed the 2018 Parkland High School shooting. It elevates expressions of embodied agency, modes of learnt experiences, and ideas relating to transformations of the self through organization.
Through a series of youth-focused activist initiatives, Applegarth analyzes how students created, sustained, and evolved their efforts. She likens these to methods of reclamation and responsive communication, nurtured by temporal concepts such as momentum and movement. She also revisits related themes from the first chapter, particularly when these could be connected to the potential potency for youth rhetorical agency that often is diluted by adult commentators. This is, of course, an underlying theme throughout the book, which moves to reconceptualize general constructions of youth and childhood as agencies for change. Applegarth’s conclusion brings these concerns to the forefront through a myriad of examples mostly oriented towards global climate activism rhetoric. She argues that, by recognizing the rhetoricity of young people, both scholars and adult activists would have more constructive dialogues. Or as observed in her chapter about the undocumented, “we will always see things differently but must operate now to work toward, rather than wait for, future change” (98).
The book successfully situates youth as equitable activists who both embody and advance expressions of rhetoric. Applegarth shows childhood to be a constraint that both limits and facilitates their agency. Where Just Kids is less effective, however, is in its applications of rhetoric theory. Noted scholarly contributions are introduced on a cursory level but the text itself does not make clear why a cornerstone of the research was dedicated to rhetoric over another theoretical frame, such as actor network theory or intersectionality. With that said, scholars on the subject would easily be obliged to bridge this gap independently. Applegarth’s book would be best suited for students and academics in the fields of childhood development and social justice. It would also be formative and instructive for policy makers and activists working on the ground level.
