Life course and protracted transitions into adulthood have a significant explicative power in respect to young people’s relation to politics and civic engagement. Life cycles, better than age, may explain a progressive interest in politics and a growing engagement in political issues along the successive steps and transitional processes of individuals: from high school to university; from education to work; from initial sentimental relationships to stable partnerships and new household formations. The protracted transitions perspective helps the understanding the contemporary average delay of each of this transitional processes and respective implications in young people’s autonomy and completion of citizenship rights and duties. However, these two perspectives will have a different contribution in the present abstract proposal. It will help to build the understanding of a specific group of young people, and more specifically of the individual trajectories or careers (Fillieule 2001) of their members into deeply involved activists, through a process started in secondary education, changed though their enrolment in tertiary education and finally transformed by their difficult and precarious integration in the labour market. This proposal is based on a set of interviews and ethnographic research undertaken with Precarious Inflexible, part of the qualitative work done between 2012 and 2013 for the international project MYPLACE, financed by the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission.

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