My Story: Discussing How Important Youth Social Movements Are for Feminism

MB discusses how important youth social movements are when it comes to exploring ways that feminism can be implemented in the future.

Transcript: 

OBOS Today: I’m curious because you’re, you know, studying government and you want to be, you know, one day implementing policy and you, yourself, has studied feminist theory so, because that includes, that consists of like seeing certain trends. So, I’m wondering like what kind of trends do you think we’ll be seeing in the future or what kind of policy implementations do you think, you know, we could all benefit from, from what you know now?  

MB: I think, I think that for me, the reason why I, I personally am more a policy, or like I’m interested in policy is because I think that that can make the most concrete change. But I do not think that that’s the only way to make change. So, I think one thing that I’m really interested in is social movements and I think that one thing that I’ve actually been studying is the idea that social movements now, specifically for the youth, look so much different than in the past and one thing that kind of is different is the ability to horizontally organize.

So, you basically take an idea and everyone in this movement believes in this one idea, but there’s so many different facets of that movement outside of just one, you know, one leader, one idea– we do it this way, we’re advocating for this, so I think that specifically with the youth, like I think that youth movements and horizontal organization and social media mobilization, like those things will be more pushed into positions where people can influence– the youth can really influence elections or policy so I’m really excited to see where that goes and one thing that you know like, I think it was, was it Thailand had a lot of youth movements um with the situation with their king in the past, so I think the Thai youth protests also provide a really interesting blueprint [laughs] for some American youth movements as well. I mean, obviously we’re not necessarily rebelling against a monarchy, for example [laughs] but, 

OBOS Today: But everyone has at some point [laughs]. 

MB: Exactly, but I think that not necessarily organizing in that way, but I think horizontal organization or horizontal youth movements or like that kind of structure paves the way for that diversity of opinion that me and you were talking about, and I think—

OBOS Today: Yeah. 

MB: That way one group doesn’t dominate the conversation, which is crucial.