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The participatory action research project described in this chapter took place with an established campaigning and research organisation in Manchester. The young activists who were part of the work were all living without legal status in the UK, and had all been failed by the asylum system and cast as the ‘abject’ (Tyler, 2013) and unwanted. Building upon decades of protest against racist and ‘othering’ polices in Britain (Copsey, 2016; England, 2019), the project illustrates a powerful example of young people who are very much on the margins, neglected and disbelieved by the state, and vilified by wider society and deliberate distortions of what it means to ‘seek asylum’, coming together to activate and find a voice in public to call for justice and change. Utilising Voloshinov’s (1929/1986) method of ‘language creation from below’ to create a shared understanding of their experiences in the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ (Goodfellow, 2019), the young activists engaged in consciousness-raising together to explore the commonality of their lives as ‘(young) people seeking asylum’. Rejecting the dominant ideological sign of ‘asylum seeker’, they created a play, ‘Faceless’, to depict the reality of their experiences, to present a counterstatement (Voloshinov, 1929/1986), in the public sphere (Fraser, 1990), and to exercise what Castells (2015) refers to as ‘counterpower’.

The young feminists in this chapter were part of several feminist groups in Manchester, analysed in this ethnographic case study as part of Manchester’s feminist movement. The young women described their motivations for ‘be(com)ing feminist’ as ‘personal-political’ and ‘political-personal’ journeys (Hanisch, 1970) that came about because of individual and group experiences of gendered disadvantage and a recognition that the needs of women, and women’s equality, would not be achieved in current political and democratic arrangements that favour a focus on the ‘common good’. While the young women campaigned for several causes (abortion rights, safer streets, sexual objectification, and so on), their frustrations with the mainstream neglect of women’s issues were the key drivers for self-organising for political action. The aim of their activism was to dismantle (or at the very least diminish) the patriarchal social order, and their participation and activism focused on women’s issues and rights and the need to create a ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that addresses their group needs, differences, and specificities.

In this chapter, the authors aim to recontextualise the local picture of youth participation in Manchester in a wider European perspective. First, because the research framework was a comparative European research project and, second, because the relevance also of local research depends on the degree to which it provides general insight into a phenomenon. The authors share with the editors and the other authors of this book the aim of questioning dominant understandings that limit youth participation to institutionalised forms and to young people’s involvement in existing practices and processes predefined by others, in most cases adult professionals like educators, youth workers and policy-makers. Based on the identification and discussion of three aspects related to the recognition of young people’s practice as participation in formal, non-formal and informal settings, the current authors want to use their views from the outside to shed light on the tensions and ambivalences of youth participation that do not become obsolete by applying a wider notion of participation.