Supporting Youth: Strengthening Cultural Identity and Promoting Social Justice

Dear Colleagues,

Cultural identity is key to understanding our interactions with the self and others. It provides a platform via which to make sense of the world and can shape how a young person views and values their engagements with parents/carers, peers, education, health, legal and welfare services. Cultural identity is multifaced and intersectional. That is, an individual contributes multiple areas of culture to their identity, and this then creates a broader sense of who they are, how they connect, and where they belong. Such cultural intersecting identifiers include those based on gender, socioeconomic status, religion/spirituality, ability, language, indigeneity, sexuality, color and ethnicity. This Special Issue of Youth aims to understand the role that cultural identity plays in promoting social justice. For many young people, they are able to thrive in their social contexts. For many others, they are held back by areas of exclusion and marginality that occur due to aspects of their intersecting identities. We welcome papers that examine the inclusion that is made possible when cultural identity, especially in its intersecting forms, is meaningfully utilized and mobilized for social justice outcomes. This may include holistic youth programs that are designed to enhance cultural diversity and its differences in achieving individual, group work and/or community development goals, case management models that privilege the exploration of diverse identities, educational initiatives in local schools that co-op the support of diverse local communities, health models that promote diverse lived and living experience, policy action that is responsive to diverse youth needs, critical theories that can be used to assist in engagement with diverse young people, including cultural humility, and opportunities for diverse young people to undertake leadership roles and responsibilities.

Through this Special Issue, the ability of the inclusion of cultural identities to strengthen social justice practices will be highlighted, and the structural and systemic inequalities that perpetuate areas of marginality will be considered. By supporting the diverse cultural identities of young people, their families, friends and wider community to have critical conversations regarding cultural diversity and its differences, societies could learn to embrace eclectic and engaging approaches that promote social justice.

Prof. Dr. Jioji Ravulo
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cultural diversity
• intersectionality
• cultural humility
• social justice
• models of care
• case management
• youth development
• holistic approaches
• lived experience
• social systems