Simonova I.A.

Modern youth is characterized by a high degree of diversity and increasing mobility, which is reflected, among other things, in the multiplicity and fluidity of collective youth actors who declare their interests, rights and needs. Communities and solidarity arise and soon disintegrate, and specific practices associated with them are reproduced in new contexts. The “scattered” politicization of youth is also felt in the expansion of the repertoire of its socio-political activities, which can be implemented today not only in the hierarchy of official public institutions, but also in the horizontal plane of autonomous “grassroots” initiatives on the principle of D.I.Y. (Do it yourself), which creates the problem of describing and systematizing these phenomena. The purpose of the presented work is to offer tools for describing modern phenomena of youth politicization: to give an idea of the concept of the format of politicization, to characterize the features of more traditional (institutional) and modern (self-organizing) versions of it. The research is based on the principles of social topology, social heterology, and some post-operatic positions. The work is theoretical in nature and is based on the analysis, generalization and systematization of the theoretical positions, however, presented assumptions of the study and the findings associated with analysis of an essay on the political identity of youth (n=21), with the results of the interviews with young people aged from 12 to 33 in 2017 (n=17) and from 14 to 30 in 2019 (n=10), as well as an analysis of the activities and statements of the youth in social networks. The text reveals the concepts of the format of politicization, presents the features of modern political institutions and formats that they offer, and justifies the methodology of D.I.Y. as a theoretical framework for the study of non-institutional formats of politicization.