Boundaries, transitions and hope: young people navigating uncertain futures

Author: Kate Pincock

The XI Conference on Childhood Studies was held this year in Joensuu at the University of Eastern Finland. The theme of the conference was ‘Childhood and Boundaries’, inviting researchers to reflect on what it means ‘to grow and live on boundaries’. Contributions sought to open up new ways of looking at childhood and its meanings in today’s world, wherein the social, political, legal and practical boundaries of childhood are being renegotiated in relation to changes in internet access, gender norms and mobility.

For young people in lower- and middle-income countries in particular, the material and symbolic boundaries between childhood and adulthood are being shifted by migration. Migration is increasingly a key part of youth transitions for young people who are encountering the loss of traditional pathways to adulthood and perceive that migration offers a means to a better future. At the conference, we presented longitudinal participatory research from Lebanon, where the past six years of extreme economic and political fragility have compounded several decades of inequality and precarity. Even prior to the liquidity crisis that caused a severe economic crisis in 2019 and was exacerbated by the Covid—19 pandemic, Lebanon’s history of conflict, occupation, sectarianism and corruption had sown the seeds for political disenfranchisement and distrust among many young people, culminating in waves of protest. Disillusionment with the possibility of social change in Lebanon has been exacerbated by growing youth unemployment and repeated educational disruptions due to Israeli hostilities. Migration is increasingly thus part of young people’s perceptions of what is possible.

Conceptually, the idea of ‘waithood’ has offered a lens for recognising the protracted transitions that young people in materially constrained contexts must navigate, wherein migration offers a strategy for pursuing otherwise truncated transitions to adulthood. However, as our presentation observed, the multiple overlapping crises faced by young people in contexts such as Lebanon do more than just shift the goalposts. In such conditions, young people’s very sense of identity and belonging are challenged, and existing mechanisms for support and care are being stripped away. Migration ambitions reflect young people’s hope for a better life, their disillusionment with possibilities in their present realities, and a sense of betrayal, injustice and paralysis. Actual opportunities to migrate, nonetheless, are shaped by gender inequalities, a shifting legal and policy environment, and practical material support. Young women are largely shut out of migration opportunities in the Middle East unless accompanied by families due to norms that restrict mobility and concerns about gender-based violence; for many adolescent girls, mobility therefore is not even part of an imagined future, let alone a feasible exit option.

Such findings suggest the need for work on youth mobility and migration to recognise the multidimensional nature of structural precarity and the unequal distribution of its effects, as well as how to respond to these dynamics. A keynote speech by Professor Pekka Mertala from the University of Jyväskylä echoed these concerns, which are often obscured within research that focuses on young people in the global North. Reflecting on his own work on the use of digital technologies to collect information about young people, Professor Mertala discussed both the opportunities and risks inherent in young people’s increasing inhabitance of virtual spaces. Access to the benefits of datafication, AI, digital infrastructure and other aspects of our virtual world are not only unequally distributed, he observed; the advantages that they offer to some often come at the cost of reinforcing and widening social and economic inequalities for children and young people, both within and between countries.

Focusing our attention on young people’s lived experiences offers a way to both identify how boundaries shape young lives, and how we might respond to boundaries when they undermine young people’s well-being and rights. For example, in the other keynote speech of the conference, Professor Helen Stalford from the University of Liverpool drew attention to the vast amount of legal and sociological research documenting the distressing experiences of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the UK – but also the failure of this body of evidence to effect change. An explicit reframing of these practices as constituting acts of violence rather than just a ‘hostile environment’, she proposed, both more accurately captures the harms inflicted on children through such systems and invokes the responsibility of states such as the UK to adhere to their legal obligations regarding children’s rights.

Alongside the keynote speeches, and acknowledging the proximity of Joensuu to the Russian border, were two moving presentations by Oleksandra Romantsova (Centre for Civil Liberties) and Oksana Lebedeva (NGO Gen) on the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war on children and young people. Documenting the displacement, military recruitment, forced adoption and deliberate targeting of Ukrainian young people as part of the ongoing conflict, these presentations also emphasised the importance of psychosocial interventions to address the trauma and loss that young people have faced, and cultivate hope in a peaceful future.

Hope is, however, not an individual feeling; it is better understood as a verb, in recognition that hope requires collective action at all levels to provide both the conditions and possibilities for future life – and not just perseverance by young people in the face of multifaceted oppression and disadvantage. In Lebanon, unequal opportunities for the pursuit of strategies for future-making among young people involved in GAGE research over time reflect structural inequalities that are being reinforced by ongoing crises. Young people’s hopelessness thus underscores both moral and political failures at the national and global level regarding young people’s futures. Addressing the injustices that underpin young people’s migration aspirations – in Lebanon and elsewhere – is key to fostering real hope.