Description
Around the world, children and youth are disproportionately impacted by conflict, violence, disaster, and crises. Yet their persistent exclusion from both policy and academic considerations is notable. Children and youth are rarely seen as competent actors, and even more rarely as having expertise about their own lives and circumstances.
In recent years, there has been increased academic attention to the roles that young people can play in responding to the most pressing global issues; and concomitantly, more attention on policy and practices to ensure that interventions, engagements and supports foreground considerations of risk mitigation and protection as well as enabling environments for their participation. However, while international studies has increasingly recognised the value of careful, reciprocal attention to communities and populations traditionally rendered marginal in the discipline; the exclusion of young people has persisted.
Taking up BISA’s theme of ‘whose international studies?’, this roundtable brings together established and emerging scholars whose work builds an international studies with and for young people. Contributions expose the ageist and often paternalistic power relations that shape our discipline and the institutions and places in which we research. Participants draw on research projects concerned with young people and migration, disasters, peacebuilding, transitional justice, militarisation and governance practices to think differently about the relationships and sites of knowledge we take seriously in international studies.
