Generations of Care: An Ethnographic Account of Youths' Social Generativity and Civic Engagement in Shashemene, Ethiopia

This ethnographic study investigates how youths in Bulchana Woreda of Shashemene city, a place affected by volatile conflict, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious setting, actively regenerate social cohesion through everyday practices of care, cooperation, and morality. The paper argues that youths are relational social actors, arguing that the dominant narratives of youth as an active demographic category are associated with violence. It conceptualizes youths as social subjects whose agency is fundamentally shaped by and defined through their ongoing interactions, connections, and interdependence with other society members. Drawing on Giardiello’s social generativity and Kearns and Forrest’s dimensions of social cohesion, the study analyzes how youth-led activities are produced through care amid persistent social tension rather than through shared identity or consensus. The findings reveal that generativity operates as moral labor of emotional efforts, not given consistent attention or credit, and is structurally restricted rather than just participation. Youth activities also temporarily eradicate ethnic, religious, and political divisions, and their capacity to sustain cohesion was limited by unemployment, politicization, bureaucratic mistrust, and gender inequality in recognizing and giving them authority. Foregrounding youths’ fragile nature of generativity, relational and procession, this study contributes to the anthropological debates on youth civicity, social cohesion, and moral agency in the urban context of Africa. It argues for rethinking youth as active producers of moral and social life under conditions of uncertainty rather than a social problem to be managed.