De Gruyter Handbook of Youth Activism

Cihan Erdal earned his PhD in Sociology at Carleton University in 2025 and was awarded the Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement for his doctoral work on youth activism. Dr. Erdal’s broader research areas include youth cultures, social movements, democracy, coalitional politics, contemporary experiences of time and temporality, collective memory, political phenomenology, citizenship education, curriculum studies, and ethnographic methods. Erdal has been serving as an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and as the coordinator of the Centre for Urban Youth Research at Carleton University. He is also the founding director of the Istanbul Youth Research Center, a non-governmental organization specializing in critical and justice-oriented research on young people. Jacqueline Kennelly is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Centre for Urban Youth Research (CUYR) at Carleton University. Dr. Kennelly’s current research focuses on activist and homeless young people’s experiences of democracy, citizenship and public life, schools as sites of youth homelessness prevention, and the experiences of young people who have left homelessness.