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The article presents findings alongside the films produced during a year-long process of co-creating a film festival with the youth of Bhuj, India resulting in the formation of a youth collective amidst identity based divides in the city.

Paper long abstract

The article presents findings from a year-long process of co-creating and curating a film festival with 25 youth from a small city Bhuj, located in the western state of India. This article argues that the hyperindividualism associated with the young generation or the gen Z as they are called, is due to the lack of collectives, communities and spaces they can safely belong to. The Internet often becomes a space filling the void that their homes, neighbourhoods and cities can’t. In a city like Bhuj, where your caste and religion defines your everyday life, where could a divorced, Muslim, dropout like Sherbanu even cross paths or engage with an upper-caste Hindu male, student like Ashwin?

Through weekly gatherings, the youth came together to quietly uncover the city. Each week they learnt about the city by breaking it down into parts. Who carried the city’s waste? Where does their water come from? Or how food both unites and divides them. This process of discovery led to the formation of Kutch Yuva Navnirman Samaj (KYNS) grandly translated as "Kutch Youth Redevelopment Council," but it's often a space for newfound friendships and community—as they gently quietly notice what they truly want to transform.

We will also present 3 of the 14 films, collectively conceptualised, shot and edited by the youth. From lack of privacy for young muslim women, to asking who Bhuj belongs to, these films shed light on how the youth see themselves and their role in making and shaping their cities.

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Based on PAR with African slum dweller collectives, this work analyses the contributions of marginalised youth to urban social movements’ theory and practice. It proposes a tripartite conceptualisation of youth and links it to social movements literature and action towards alternative urban futures.

Paper long abstract

In the past decades, specialised scholarship in social movements has grown, furthering the debate around definitions, modalities of action, contextualisation, and comparison. This body of literature is yet to grapple with the subjective narratives and potential of marginalised youth as emancipatory actors within social movements, particularly from urban Africa. Conversely, questions around youth continue to captivate scholars’ imaginations - with the lives of the young and marginalised in cities studied through multiple dimensions (economic, social, political, intersectional), and a diversity of lenses (conceptual, categorical, phenomenological, developmental, ideological). But there persists a lingering characterisation of youth, and particularly African youth, both as a developmental stage (a time-in-itself), and as a paradoxical reality (‘makers or breakers’). This paper moves beyond work to date to examine marginalised youth’s participation in social movements in urban Africa, and the causes that mobilise them. Through the analysis of findings from participatory action research processes with young co-researchers from slum dweller collectives in two African cities, this work highlights the multiple and diverse contributions of marginalised youth to urban social movements’ theory and practice. Based on a co-produced, practice-based analysis, this work proposes a tripartite conceptualisation of youth; as a dialectical becoming (as opposed to a linear process); as a possibility (beyond a phenomenon or a reality), and as a complex time-for-itself (rather than a paradoxical time-in-itself). Through studying youth’s urban experiences and collective mobilisations to improve their realities, we then link this conceptualisation to social movements literature and action towards alternative urban futures.

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The paper presents preliminary findings from a recent fieldwork in Nigeria and reflects on the analytical potential of youth life stories for understanding the origins and continuities of political activism, towards shaping renewed development and democratic futures in Africa.

Paper long abstract

How do early-life experiences of development failure shape trajectories of activism across protest movements and electoral politics? Many southern contexts are marked by prolonged development and democratic challenges, including rising poverty and inequality, conflict and instability, human rights violations, and everyday injustice. These constitute the origins of the exasperation of activists who continue to advocate for development and democratic renewal in the region. Against the backdrop of the literature on political socialisation, life histories, everyday socio-economic development, and the interrelations between social movements and elections, this study uncovers the biographical foundations of youth activist dispositions and how they are carried across contentious realms – between movements and elections. In contrast to existing unidirectional interpretations of the relations between movements and elections, and to the treatment of both realms as analytically separate domains, this study reveals the continuities and overlaps between street protest, civic mobilisation, and electoral participation. Essentially, it situates prolonged development and democratic challenges as a constant denominator across past and present youth realities and activism. This study adopts a life-story and biographical narrative approach to examine the life courses of individuals with sustained activism across movement and electoral realms in Nigeria. Their stories reveal the origins, internalisation, and perpetuity of structural conditions, as well as how those conditions mediate the transformation of disillusionment into action over the life course. These revelations highlight the value of African youth-centred life stories for capturing the long temporal junctures and logics through which development challenges, sustained activism, and democratic aspirations intersect.

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In Mathare, Nairobi, water tanks are political currency as politicians gift them to youth in the guise of empowerment for support. This paper examines how clientelist politics drives the hybridisation and fragmentation of water infrastructure and metabolic flows.

Paper long abstract

In Nairobi's Mathare informal settlement, water tanks have emerged as critical political infrastructure that mediates both patron-client relations and urban water metabolism. Drawing on qualitative social network analysis, field observations, and in-depth interviews, this paper examines how politicians, from local assembly members to parliamentary aspirants and even the President, deploy water tanks to consolidate youth support by mobilising youth groups through entrepreneurship and economic empowerment discourses.

In Nairobi's informal settlements, characterised by enduring inequality and multiple forms of state neglect and deprivation, water tanks are increasingly functioning as political currency in patron-client exchanges. Politicians strategically engage youth groups heavily involved in water provision (both legal and illegal), framing infrastructure gifts as enduring symbols of public service. Meanwhile, the state exercises strategic forbearance towards informal water activities, selectively tolerating them to secure political allegiances.

I argue that water tanks, legitimised through decades of youth empowerment policy frameworks, further fragment and hybridise Mathare's metabolic flows while simultaneously reshaping the settlement's governance dynamics. The analysis demonstrates that urban informality operates as both a site of marginalisation and a resource for political control.

Contributing to Urban Political Ecology debates on heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, this research traces the social and political networks mobilised through water tanks as both symbolic and material resources. By examining how political discourse mediates metabolic relations, the paper offers new insights into the governance of essential services and illuminates the distinctive politics of infrastructure in informal settlements.

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Collectively produced videos share lessons about the challenges and strategies used by youth groups to engage in urban governance and housing struggles, developed by young leaders from informal settlements in Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Benin, India, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Paper long abstract

As cities in Africa and Asia grow, young people hustle to find pathways for a flourishing life. In sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of people are under the age of 30. Over 60% of the world's youth live in the Asia-Pacific region. These regions have also the highest number of people living in informal settlements, facing not only inadequate housing and infrastructure, but also constant criminalisation and exclusion.

Young people in informal settlements are often invisibilised, but they are finding ways to organise, exchange knowledge and learn, produce media, mobilise and bring about changes in their neighbourhoods and cities. This presentation will share the outcomes of an audiovisual exchange conducted with young representatives from Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Benin, India, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines, showcasing their experiences of renewing future leadership in housing and urban movements.

The videos and discussion will reflect on the challenges young people face to engage in housing and urban governance, including institutional exclusions that operate at the intersection of gender and other forms of inequality, the lack of tools and formal spaces, and the economic and social hardship they face. Then, it offers some reflections on the key strategies they are mobilising, including: exchanging knowledge and learning, to train and become trainers of others; collecting data and producing knowledge about their communities; collectively mobilising within and beyond their communities; changing narratives, finding their own voice through media production to challenge official perspectives about marginalisation; and becoming expert-activists, engaging with and beyond formal processes of decision-making.

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Paper short abstract

We analyse an NGO-led program of nurturing a sense of lived citizenship among youth in a small, peripheral Indian city. Connecting self, place and citizenship conceptually, we argue that engaging immediate social worlds deeply enables youth to develop a robust lived citizenship.

Paper long abstract

Young people experience citizenship in partial and informal ways, rather than as something fully guaranteed by institutions (Isin, 2009; Wood, 2012). Given the mutuality of self and place (Casey, 2013), we approach citizenship as a process that develops through the interplay between a young person’s evolving sense of self and their everyday urban life (Hall et al., 1999). This conceptualisation elucidates the multi-stage process for nurturing the desire, knowledge and capacity for civic engagement among local youth that Hunnarshala, an NGO in the small, peripheral Indian city of Bhuj, has pursued since early 2024. Youth form a socially fragmentary and politically marginalised constituency in urban India (Mungekar et al., 2025) and often have only ‘thin’ knowledge and understanding of the worlds they inhabit and take for granted. In response, Hunnarshala has sought to facilitate a deeper engagement of a cohort of local youth (drawn through an open process) with their place-worlds. These youth—mostly from marginalised communities in the city—have been trained in civic media for engaging, articulating, and debating their understandings and aspirations for their own and wider social worlds. Based on year-long qualitative research and participant observation, we argue that engaging place has catalysed a robust, critical and situated sense of self and agency in the cohort, evident for instance, in the phenomenological depth and acuity of intersectional critiques in their short films. At the same time, Hunnarshala’s crucial role in this process raises important general questions about the role of mediation between self, place and lived citizenship.

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Paper short abstract

Informality has become the normal economy through which youths’ urban lives are sustained, and mobility ensured. Against narratives that frame informality as disorder, the paper foregrounds youth agency and ingenuity. Through social networks, youths coordinate trade beyond formal regulation.

Paper long abstract

Formal employment is becoming increasingly difficult to secure in Zimbabwe, leading to an influx of youths in the informal economy, even as the state criminalises many of the livelihoods on which young people depend. This paper critically examines the supposed formal mapping and governance of urban spaces versus youth informality in Harare, Zimbabwe. Youth survival in the informal economy occurs amidst prolonged economic crisis, mass unemployment and “waithood” or prolonged transitions into socially recognised adulthood. This paper situates youth involvement in informality within broader debates on youth mobilisations, urban futures, and development in the Global South. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Harare’s central business district and transport hubs, the study demonstrates how youths, particularly young men, actively rework the city through practices such as touting, informal transport operations, and foreign currency dealing. The informal sector, once considered the domain of the less educated, is now being joined by college graduates. A few young women in Harare join public transport touting, which was exclusively reserved for men. Against narratives that frame informality as disorder or deviance, the paper foregrounds youth agency and ingenuity. Young people mobilise dense social networks, operate in teams, and use social media such as WhatsApp and Facebook Marketplace to advertise, sell goods, and coordinate movements, often beyond the reach of taxation and formal regulation. These practices coexist with, and are shaped by, everyday negotiations with power: selective police crackdowns, routine bribery, political protection, and collaborations with authorities that blur the boundary between legality and illegality

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The paper is based on an extensive field work done with migrant youth in the rural areas of Chhattisgarh, India, which explores how their access to digital means and social media have been re-shaping their aspirations and migration trajectories.

Paper long abstract

Situated in the broader literature of youth migration in the urban informal sector, this paper aims to bring out the interrelatedness between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ India through mapping the worlds of rural youth, and highlighting the role of ‘digital connectedness’ in shaping the urban aspirations and migrations of the rural youth.

The paper is based on extensive field work done with migrant youth in the rural Chhattisgarh, India, involving a quantitative survey of 1048 youth migrants, followed by in-dept interviews with few selected youth migrants. The study explores how their access to digital means and social media have been re-shaping their aspirations and migration trajectories.

The paper narrates three case stories of youth migrants, which show that the migratory patterns of the youth, unlike their predecessor, does not follow a typical migration corridor or livelihood imagination. With their social media networks, they are able to find work and destinations which are unconventional. While this makes them more agentic in their migration process, it also imparts precarity and passivity in dealing with difficult situations at work. Given the ease of securing a job through social media, the youth, whenever confronted with harassment at the work site, ‘exits and moves to a new destination’. Such a transient engagement does not allow them to have any ‘voice’ over their rights at workplace. Thus the paper brings out the contradictions between a digitally empowered ‘agentic’ youth who is able to make choices for their livelihood, yet is ‘passive’ in securing their rights.

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This paper helps us understand how intersectional subaltern identities provide the traction for the emergence of new valmiki youth. I argue that a new model of ‘coeval populism’ has surfaced in contemporary India, which blends both the old and new vocabularies of subaltern assertion.

Paper long abstract

Concerning subaltern political mobilisation, scholars like Partha Chatterjee (2004, 2011) have pointed to a rupture in modes of claim-making with the State, viz., the binary between civil and political society. Though in recent years, numerous scholars (Martin 2013, Nilsen 2018 and Bhattacharya 2021), have drawn our attention to the intertwining of both cultural insecurities and economic precarities. In this paper, I draw upon ethnographic vignettes to trace how the emergence of neighbourhood associations and youth associations in recent years in marginalised, dalit neighbourhoods (i.e., Valmikis in Delhi) have both unsettled and re-invented old modes of subaltern mobilisation i.e., community leadership through pradhans. I analyse two critical events (i.e., Valmiki Jayanti and Sanitation Workers’ Strike) and map the twists and turns that emerge in intra-community relations among Vamikis in Delhi. By analysing the differential efforts taken by two different kinds of subaltern community leaders among the Valmikis i.e., pradhans and Resident Welfare Association (RWA) chiefs, this paper demonstrates why and how local significations and adaptations matter to understand the emergent polyvalent discourse of populism in contemporary India.

In so doing, at a theoretical level, I contribute to the intersectional understanding of subaltern identity formation and the traction that the emergence of new valmiki youth has provided to the discourse of subaltern caste assertion (Kumar and Martin 2025). I argue that a new model of ‘coeval populism’ has surfaced in contemporary India, which blends both the old-school, classical trope of ‘welfarist populism’ and the new-school, contemporary model of ‘aspirational populism’.

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This paper examines how urban youth use educational aspirations to negotiate inequalities and imagine secure urban futures. Drawing on qualitative study, it highlights strategies, constraints, and the transformative potential of youth-led efforts to expand tertiary education in the Global South.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates the ways in young individuals residing in Colombo's low-income and informal urban settlements utilize their educational aspirations as a strategy to shape their future trajectories amidst a backdrop of uncertainty and inequality. Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with both youth and parents, the study scrutinizes how aspirations function as a form of mobilization, both personal and collective within environments characterized by precarity, informality, and limited institutional support. Utilizing Bourdieu’s theoretical constructs of habitus, capital, and field, in conjunction with an intersectional perspective, the analysis elucidates how class, gender, ethnicity, and religion intersect to create varied opportunities and constraints. The findings underscore an aspiration–achievement paradox: although young individuals express strong ambitions for tertiary education, these aspirations are continually reshaped by financial hardship, exam pressure, safety concerns, cultural expectations, and uneven access to academic capital. The mobilizations of young women are frequently constrained by gendered safety norms, while young men navigate pressures to enter informal labor markets. Despite these challenges, youth exhibit resilience, creative strategizing, and everyday forms of mobilization, such as negotiating family expectations, seeking informal learning spaces, and leveraging peer networks. By situating Colombo as a Global South urban context influenced by informality and postcolonial urban development, the paper contributes to discussions on youth agency and urban futures. It posits that aspirations themselves constitute a significant form of mobilization through which young people challenge structural inequalities and envision alternative futures. These insights bear implications for policy interventions aimed at supporting marginalized youth in rapidly transforming Southern cities.

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Empirical scholarship examining how youth engage with urban governance institutions remains limited, particularly in Nepal. This paper addresses this gap by investigating urban governance of Dharan, Nepal--a country comparatively under-researched in urban and youth studies in South Asia.

Paper long abstract

Youth participation in local development and decision-making processes is widely recognized as a critical condition for fostering sustainable, inclusive, and resilient urban futures, as emphasized in the Sustainable Development Goals and youth policy frameworks across the Global South. Young people contribute distinctive capacities to governance through innovative ideas, plural perspectives, and alternative modes of civic engagement, frequently driving grassroots activism and social movements that seek to enhance accountability, social justice, and inclusivity in urban contexts. Despite this normative recognition, empirical scholarship examining how youth engage with urban governance institutions remains limited, particularly in South Asia. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on Nepal, a country comparatively under-researched in urban and youth studies in South Asia. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Dharan, a mid-sized city in eastern Nepal, the study examines how young people experience and negotiate participation within local urban governance institutions, the extent to which community-level planning practices enable or constrain meaningful youth engagement, and the alternative forms of mobilization through which youth seek to influence urban development trajectories. The findings demonstrate that while Nepal’s local governance frameworks formally endorse inclusive participation, young people face significant structural and institutional barriers to effective involvement. Municipal decision-making spaces remain dominated by adults, senior citizens, and established political actors however young people actively contest these exclusions by engaging through non-traditional and informal avenues, including digital advocacy networks, neighborhood-based volunteer initiatives, creative and cultural collectives, and issue-specific campaigns addressing urban service delivery, environmental degradation, pedestrian safety, and public space governance.

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How Hindu nationalist networks offer Indian university students material security through transactional and emotional belonging, shaping who belongs in contested urban campus spaces.

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As Indian universities become sites of intensified political contestation, young people navigate institutional precarity through affiliations that promise material security alongside ideological belonging. Drawing on interviews with university students across genders, caste, class, and regional backgrounds, this paper examines how Hindu nationalist politics and networks shape youth claims-making within urban campus spaces.

The paper explores how the framework of the 'good Hindu citizen' operates as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion within universities, determining whose claims to institutional resources, i.e., hostel accommodation, safety, social networks etc. are legitimated. For students from North East India, South India, and non-dominant caste backgrounds, negotiations of belonging reveal how Hindu nationalism creates internal hierarchies even among those ostensibly included in the nationalist project. Political affiliation becomes transactional: youth trade loyalty and participation for tangible benefits that enable their survival in competitive institutional environments.

This research complicates narratives of youth activism as inherently progressive by revealing how insecurity and institutional gatekeeping drive young people towards organisations or groups that offer both material advantages and symbolic belonging. Universities emerge as contested urban spaces where regional, caste, and class differences shape who can successfully perform the 'good Hindu citizen' identity and access institutional support structures.

By examining ethno-nationalist mobilisation from within, the paper contributes to understanding how youth solidarities form not only through shared progressive visions but through pragmatic negotiations of power in institutional contexts where formal mechanisms of support prove inadequate.