- Convenors:
-
Kristen Hope
(University of Bath)
Khitam Abuhamad (University College Cork)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Conflict, crisis and humanitarianism
Short Abstract
Mainstream development often overlooks the complex realities of children and youth in conflict & colonised contexts, reinforcing victimhood & justifying saviourist interventions. This panel explores alternative approaches to research & programming that centre young people’s agency & imagination.
Description
Mainstream development and humanitarian discourse often fail to account for the lived realities of children and youth in conflict-affected and colonised contexts, such as in Palestine and Sudan. These experiences, marked by violence, displacement, trauma, and survival, are frequently oversimplified through victimising narratives that reinforce power hierarchies and justify saviourist interventions (Hart, 2008; Okyere, 2022). Children and young people are routinely silenced, either through assumptions of immaturity or practices of “unchilding” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), producing epistemic violence that excludes them from systems meant to protect. Rights-based approaches that promote participation may inadvertently reproduce Eurocentric understandings of childhood and adolescence, privileging liberal individualism and obscuring collective, intergenerational agency (de Castro, 2022; Taft, 2019). In contrast, child-centred, decolonial approaches may offer more nuanced engagement with children’s everyday experiences of adversity and colonial violence that resist adult-centric tropes (Abebe et al., 2022; Biswas, 2023).
This panel explores how alternative theories and practices can contribute to evidence-based, contextually grounded and politically informed programming with children and youth. We invite contributions that interrogate the theoretical and methodological foundations of research and practice with children and young people in development and humanitarian contexts. Key questions include: What frameworks avoid Eurocentric tropes, counter colonisation and foreground collective, grassroots agency? What participatory methods can engage with young people's realities, perspectives and demands without saviourist bias? How can research inform programming that supports wellbeing, meaningful protagonism and future-making? We welcome interdisciplinary and arts-based submissions, especially those co-created with children and youth, to foster inclusive dialogue and imagine alternative development horizons.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Short Abstract This study examines child weavers in Addis Ababa, highlighting how poverty and unsafe work affect health, schooling, and wellbeing, while showing children’s resilience, agency, and aspirations amid structural violence in Ethiopia’s informal economy.
Paper long abstract
Children’s work in Ethiopia’s informal economy is often framed through depoliticized narratives that obscure the structural forces shaping their lives. Widespread poverty, limited social protection, and urban inequality push children into hazardous labour, reproducing everyday forms of violence that shape childhoods across Global Africa. This study adopts a child-centred, contextually grounded approach to explore the experiences of child weavers in Addis Ababa, focusing on the intersections of work, health, and education.
Using semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and direct observation, the study documents the realities of children, some starting work as young as eight. Long hours, unsafe conditions, and physical strain compromise school attendance, learning, and wellbeing. Common health issues include musculoskeletal pain, headaches, respiratory problems, skin conditions, and psychosocial stress. Economic pressures force many children to juggle work and schooling or drop out, limiting mobility and future opportunities.
Rather than portraying children solely as victims, the study highlights their agency: navigating economic precarity, negotiating family roles, and expressing aspirations for education and stability despite structural violence. Poverty emerges as the main driver, yet children also demonstrate resilience and coping strategies that challenge dominant, Eurocentric assumptions about childhood.
By situating child labour within broader systems of inequality, this research contributes to debates on decolonial, child-centred approaches in development. It underscores the importance of integrated interventions addressing poverty, education, health, and participatory engagement with children’s perspectives.
Paper short abstract
Examines how Syrian refugee youth in Croatia navigate schooling, racism, and securitized borders. Using critical ethnography and collective memory writing, it foregrounds youth political agency, solidarity with Palestine, and refusal of racialized victimhood.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how refugee youth navigate schooling, belonging, and political subjectivity amid overlapping regimes of racialized violence, securitized migration, and colonial war. Grounded in decolonial theory, critical migration studies, critical youth studies, and transnational feminist pedagogies, the analysis understands borders not only as territorial technologies but as racialized, pedagogical, and affective regimes that shape everyday life.
Drawing on two-phase critical ethnographic research with Syrian refugee youth in Croatia, during the COVID-19 pandemic and public mobilizations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the study traces how borders materialize within schooling through language exclusion, surveillance, and racialized disciplining. These practices are situated within Croatia’s active participation in the European border regime, including pushbacks, detention, and the normalization of racialized securitization, as well as the Croatian government's public alignment with Israeli state violence. Together, these dynamics intensify anti-Muslim racism and producing a moral economy in which Arab and Muslim lives are rendered conditionally grievable. Across both phases, schooling, migration governance, and geopolitical alignment emerge as mutually constitutive sites of racialization.
Rather than positioning refugee youth as passive victims of crisis, the paper foregrounds their ethical, accountable and political agency. Methodologically, it advances a decolonial, youth-centered research praxis grounded in collective narration, political consciousness, and intergenerational memory. The paper argues that research and programming with refugee youth must move beyond depoliticized notions of well-being and participation and instead engage young people as ethical subjects actively navigating, contesting, and reimagining life under conditions of colonial and racialized governance.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the post-colonial logics of carceral punishment through the lived experiences of street-connected youth. It demonstrates how youth resist necropolitics -- the politics of death -- to practice a politics of life that resists and challenges their exposure to death worlds.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the everyday costs of necropolitical governance in India’s capital, Delhi. It does so through young people’s lived experiences and accounts of a post-colonial penal system and city that defines them as undesirable and expendable. The paper draws on over 3 years of multi-sited ethnographic and interview-based research with street-connected children and youth, their parents, and state and civil society representatives. The paper asks: What are the carceral logics and punishment practices that produce death worlds for children living and working in state contested spaces in urban India? How do children survive and resist the conditions of life that subject them to routinized violence? The children and youth whose voices inspire this paper, live and work in spaces that are contested and surveilled by the Delhi state. Their experiences of poverty, structural violence and social death are inseparable from their experiences of criminalization by the state, which they navigate in their residential spaces and sites of work and education. I argue that, in doing so, children and youth resist the logics of necropolitics – or the politics of death. They practice its inverse: a politics of life, through strategies of survival and resistance that challenge their routinized exposure to death worlds.
Paper short abstract
Based on phenomenological research with Kashmiri youth studying in Delhi and Kashmir Valley, this paper examines higher education as a contested space shaping identity, belonging, agency and future imaginaries amid conflict and uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines higher education as a contested site of identity formation, belonging and youth agency in Kashmir, a region shaped by prolonged conflict. Drawing on phenomenological, empirical research with Kashmiri youth enrolled in higher educational institutions in Delhi and the Kashmir Valley, the study adopts a comparative spatial lens to analyze how educational experiences are mediated by location, power and regimes of belonging. The study explores how educational spaces are shaped by structural and symbolic forms of violence, including surveillance, regulations, curricular exclusion, and contested belonging. While higher education is often framed with development discourse as a pathway to mobility and stability, the lived experiences of Kashmiri students reveal a more complex reality in which education simultaneously produces aspiration, discipline, alienation and uncertainty. The paper foregrounds youth agency by analyzing how students negotiate identity, navigate institutional constraints and articulate alternative futures under conditions of political precarity. By centring everyday educational experiences, the study contributes to the debate on children and youth in conflict contexts, demonstrating how future-making emerges not only through overt resistance but also through subtle acts of negotiations, endurance and re-imagining. The finding reveals that higher education functions simultaneously as a space of aspiration, discipline, and disillusionment, complicating linear narratives of development. It reimagines development beyond measurable outcomes, highlighting education as a process deeply embedded in questions of power, identity and future making in an uncertain world.