Author: Emine Fidan Elcioglu | Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
Excerpts from the introduction:
There is a widely held misconception that young people are politically disengaged. This is based on narrow measures like voter turnout. But this overlooks the fact that many young people are deeply curious, especially when politics is understood more broadly: as a way to make sense of society, power and everyday life.
My findings build on my earlier research, conducted with second-generation Chinese and South Asian Canadians, where I found that many of them turned to conservative ideas to access feelings of dignity and belonging. For them, embracing meritocracy wasn’t about denying racism — it was a way to prove they’d succeeded by Canada’s rules.
In this new study, I wanted to understand what shapes that gap — what makes some students more likely to see power as structural, and others more likely to see it as personal or cultural.
I found that young people now form political beliefs through two competing knowledge systems: a hollowed-out university, and YouTube’s attention economy. In the university classroom, students learn to connect experience to systems like racism or class inequality. On YouTube, other students encounter simplified stories or common-sense clichés.
The result is a generation pulled between critique and clarity, where YouTube offers answers that feel true.
I mean, university itself tries hard to create the perception of a meritocratic system through its testing and filtering mechanisms. You can go through a complete undergrad degree not only without having the inequities around you pointed out, but the opposite - having a strenghtened feeling of meritocratic success. I know I did. Unlearning that took many years and a lot of luck. Of course some programs wouldn’t let you get away like that but the curriculum contradicts many of the university’s processes. I wish a specially crafted minor in humanities was mandatory for every university grad but also a version of such curriculum should be taught even in high school. A pipe dream.
I find it’s full of grifters on all sides and everyone thinks their side doesn’t have them because the point of a grifter is they say the shit you want to hear.
No one fact checks, goes into complexities, or wants to discover anything bad going on in their camps, so it’s the perfect time to make money off them…
