Flanagan, Constance A.

Early Influences

Flanagan largely attributes her career interests in the field of youth civic engagement to her own developmental experiences. She grew up in a large family, the daughter of “Social Gospel Catholic” parents who were active in the civil rights movement and instilled the value that life's purpose is to attend to the needs of others. As a young person and, later, young mother in the 1960s, Flanagan was drawn to many of the emerging social movements that included so many young people at that time: the antiwar, women's, and environmental movements. It was through these experiences that she became interested in childhood and adolescent formative experiences that lead young people to become engaged in pressing political and social issues. She entered the developmental sciences with a goal to pursue a scholarship that would both help to understand the development of civic engagement and help to apply this knowledge to facilitate the engagement of young people in issues of social justice and change.

Flanagan's work has been influenced by Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework for understanding the interactions of structural conditions and developmental processes. Her early work with Jacquelynne Eccles explored the family economy (specifically, unemployment) and the ways these structural forces interact with interfamilial dynamics to influence adolescents' beliefs, values, and motivations (Flanagan & Eccles, 1993). Since that time, she has continued to bridge the developmental and social sciences, using an ecological framework to understand adolescents' civic development, often through mutlinational collaborative work.

Theoretical and Conceptual Contributions

Flanagan's work is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing mainly from developmental science and sociology but also relevant to anthropological and political science inquiry. Her scholarship addresses the ways that young people's formative developmental experiences influence their views of themselves in their social order and consequentially affects their participation in social change. Flanagan's work fills gaps in both the developmental and sociological literatures by addressing the ways that social structural and social justice issues influence and are influenced by individual formative experience. In her work, she brings the moral underpinnings of social justice and the development of social responsibility into critical social scientific inquiry.

Flanagan explores the developmental mechanisms of engaged citizenship through her theory of the social contract (Flanagan, 2000). Central to this concept is Flanagan's conception of being “political” in a democratic society, which includes a broad notion of having a sense of the “public good” and participating in resolving contentions with a sense of social justice and fairness. In this sense, the politic and the civic assume similar meanings in accordance with the roots of the words polis (meaning “citizen” in Greek) and civis (meaning “citizen” in Latin), which imply a dynamic between individual and social responsibility and action. Understanding the social contract requires an analysis of the tensions between individual and social responsibility within the context of social trust (Bowes, Flanagan, & Taylor, 2001).

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