Imagining Alone: The Necessity of the Atomized Self among Stigmatized Youth

This chapter discusses how underprivileged youth ‘do society’. Building on ethnographic work among stigmatized youth, we show how the youth experience lack of recognition as the main characteristic and problem of society. We show, first, how institutional politics and other conventional means of influence was not the go-to strategy for most of our informants. Instead, we identify three ways in which the youth navigate unrecognition: (1) self-transformation – changing oneself into ‘a respectable citizen’; (2) opting out – flipping the finger to ‘the system’; and (3) subversion – critiquing the valuation schemes of society. We argue that all strategies operate with individualistic tools of public action, and instead of collective mobilization, the politically active youth adopted individualistic means of activism to achieve their goals for being recognized as valuable.