Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Kristen Hope
(University of Bath)
Khitam Abuhamad (University College Cork)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Conflict, crisis and humanitarianism
- Location:
- L2.21
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Dublin
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
Session 1 Friday 10 July, 2026, -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 examines how child protection frameworks fail Palestinian girls in Gaza/Cairo by ignoring the colonial context. It describes a decolonial, care-based methodology using arts and ethnography to amplify girls' voices without saviourism or victimization narratives.
Paper long abstract
Israel's genocide (Albanese, 2024a; 2024b)in Gaza represents systemic violence against Palestinians, culminating a century of settler colonial expansion and erasure (Khalidi, 2024). This violence exposes the powerlessness of international legal frameworks meant to protect Palestinians, revealing the impotence of global systems in responding to what is increasingly recognised as the first live-streamed genocide in history.
This violence disrupts dominant humanitarian narratives which are rooted in liberal, individualistic paradigms that ignore structural and historical contexts (Abebe, 2019; Boyden, 2008), producing "highly normative and context-blind" programming (Hart, 2008, p.2). Consequently, the international child protection regime risks reproducing colonial tropes and enabling saviourist interventions that obscure root causes of suffering (Okyere, 2022). Since "universal categories of protection [...] sever children's experiences from their political and historical contexts," rendering them sites of imperial control (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p.15), these dynamics are especially dangerous for Palestinian children.
What conceptualisations of the future and 'hope' are relevant amid this livestreamed annihilation? My research explores this by examining how Gazan adolescents in Cairo make sense of violence, protection and their futures.
The paper outlines an attempt to craft a decolonial framework grounded in Palestinian feminist ethics of care (Ihmoud, 2023) and political reflexivity (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021), resisting Eurocentric adultism (Biswas, 2023; Cheney, 2019, 2023) through arts-based (Seppälä et al., 2021) and multimodal ethnographic methods (Dicks et al., 2006), while navigating asymmetrical researcher power (Morrison, 2024, p.15) and avoiding both victimizing (Sawhney, 2024) and romanticized resilience narratives (Shwaikh, 2023).