Political citizenship experiments: young people’s quotidian politics and (a)political subjectivities in East Asian liberal arts universities

Abstract

Higher education spaces are where ideas about citizenships, social norms, and values are mediated between state and youth citizens. In recent years, there has been a rise of new American-style liberal arts initiatives in East Asia, and yet little attention paid to the interface between liberal arts education and youth politics in this region. This article draws upon qualitative research conducted between 2017 and 2019 at two liberal arts universities in Shanghai and Singapore to examine how students fashion political subjectivities and meanings within the spaces that they live and learn in. It argues for a capacious conceptualisation of youth politics to analyse political subjectivities and sentiments as enmeshed in a relational field tied to wider-scale understandings of social movements and progressive ideals. To do so, conventional framings of universities as sites of political mobilisations need to be recast as sites of political citizenship experiments.