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From Awareness to Action: World Heritage in Young Hands

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At a workshop in Bulange, Uganda, held in August 2021 the focus was on how to engage youth in protecting, preserving, and promoting World Heritage. The goal was to sensitise youth about heritage through learning from past legacies, understanding what elders live with today, and what they will pass on to the future generations. With a focus on the UNESCO World Heritage Kasubi Tombs site (No.1022), this workshop was important because cultural and natural heritage are both invaluable sources for life and inspiration, that require actionable innovations to transmit heritage knowledge, create heritage-related employment, and preserve the moral development of societies, while promoting young people’s cultural and intellectual development in a globalised world. In this blog, I make the case for increasing grassroots funding for youth-led activities to protect and preserve heritage, as well as to integrate information computing technology (ICT) to help disseminate heritage knowledge globally in a variety of digital formats.

Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi (Uganda) © UNESCO

What is World Heritage?

World heritage includes places as diverse and unique as the Pyramids of Egypt, the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Grand Canyon in the USA, or the Kasubi Tombs in Uganda.[i] They are designated as places that are of outstanding universal value to humanity, and as such have been inscribed in the World Heritage List. Nevertheless, these sites face major problems, such as pollution, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, poaching, armed conflict and war, uncontrolled urbanisation, and unchecked tourist development. Young people, as the future generation, still lack knowledge to contribute to the sustainability of heritage in all forms. But they are the ones who can innovate, through local activities, that can offer potential solutions to protect, preserve, and promote Heritage around them. Moreover, they are also skilled at using new digital communications tools, which, if used effectively, can help in implementing concrete solutions to protect these sites.

As a UNESCO initiative, developed in 1998, the World Heritage in Young Hands Educational Resource Kit, for secondary school teachers, advances heritage sensitisation in schools as one approach towards raising awareness among youth.[ii] This has contributed to the transnational conception of heritage protection, preservation, and promotion. While providing a global tool for schools, those not enrolled are, however, excluded from various forms of engagement in preserving local, national, and world heritage. It is important to equally involve out-of-school youth in the protection of our common cultural as well as natural heritage through increasing youth-led initiatives to protect, preserve, and promote heritage.

Varying Forms of World Heritages

The UNESCO Convention concerning the protection of the World cultural and Natural Heritage[iii], describes heritage in varying forms – the cultural and natural heritage. These two, furthermore vary in the forms of tangible and intangible aspects. Tangible cultural heritage is movable and immovable. Immovables include archaeological sites, architectural works, historical centres, monuments, cultural landscapes, historical parks, and botanical gardens as well as sites of industrial archaeology. Movable tangible heritage on the other hand, includes museum collections, libraries, and archives. Examples of intangible cultural heritage include music, dance, literature, theatre, oral traditions, traditional performances, social practices, traditional know-how, crafts, cultural spaces, and religious ceremonies and for natural heritage. Examples of tangible and immovable heritage are natural and maritime parks of ecological interests, geological and physical formations, and landscapes of outstanding natural beauty.

Protect, Preserve, and Promote

In a UNESCO-funded workshop on “Empowering Ugandan Youth through Culture and Heritage” held in Bulange, Uganda, in August 2021, 35 cultural leaders discussed the role of youth in protecting, conserving, and promoting the Kasubi Tombs built in 1882 (UNESCO’s World Heritage Site No. 1022). Utilising the World Heritage in Young Hands Educational Resource Kit, they concluded that:

  • There is a risk that future generations no longer know much about cultural heritage preservation. If youth are not actively engaged in protecting and promoting heritage sites, they will sooner or later be littered with hotels, stadiums, and arcades that exploit the touristic potential of cultural sites.
  • We need to preserve heritage sites as an expression of humanistic values that ancestors created with the intention of telescoping them to the future, allowing generations to interpret their symbolic meaning, and investigate past customs of human interaction globally.
  • Heritage may not immediately appeal to younger generations. Still, knowledge gaps ought to be addressed, and misconceptions dispelled as an inclusive transition to promote an authentic heritage value system among youth.

The Youth Have Their Say

Workshop participants suggested that a regional transnational governance framework under UNESCO be supported, one that would be designed to promote a grassroots-based system driven by all categories of young people to enable them to act beyond awareness in support of promoting heritage. There could be a potential intra-regional role for the African Union in such an initiative.

While alternatives for young people to protect, preserve, and promote tangible heritage sites were made by speakers, it was also suggested that outreach initiatives such as using cartoons to mobilise youngsters in support of World Heritage protection and promotion be used. In addition, it was proposed that families engage young people in extra-curricular events such as excursions to nearby heritage places of interest, youth camps, cultural festivals, and exhibitions, as well as participate in role play activities to recreate traditional social events, such as processions, ceremonies, youth camps and festivals, using tradition to enable, integrate, and promote youth development for continued World Heritage preservation for future generations.

The way forward

Participants recommended various ways to move from sensitisation to action to protect, preserve, and promote world heritage from the perspective of youth engagement. Firstly, nation states should give responsibility for overseeing the security needs of cultural sites to youth through integrating them more into heritage management. While teaching based on the World Heritage kit by practitioners should include more about the provision of security as an essential factor for youth to innovate in relation to heritage related projects, global leaders should also ensure adequate budgets for heritage funds for youth to tap into and protect world heritage.

Moreover, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre should support custodians of heritage sites in transforming the intangible value of heritage sites into written descriptions. In addition, youth learning centres, or interpretive centres, should be constructed by nation states at bigger sites to facilitate the preservation of heritage. Lastly, there is an urgent need for better use of ICT and social media by Ministries of Culture among member states of UNESCO. This will facilitate the digitalisation of knowledge dissemination on heritage across the world, along with inviting youth to engage in diverse and creative ways for promotion, protection, and preservation of world heritage for the future generations.

 

[i] Definition of World Heritage by UNESCO. (see https://whc.unesco.org/en/faq/19/  retrieved on 11 November 2021)

[ii] UNESCO, World Heritage in Young Hands Educational Resource Kit for secondary school teachers (1998). The resource kit complement other initiatives including World Heritage Youth Forums, World Heritage Adventures cartoon series, Training seminars for educators on the use of the resource Kit, On-site skills-development courses for young people, workshops & conferences, and the World Heritage Volunteers initiative.

[iii] Varying Forms of Heritage are described in the UNESCO Convention concerning the protection of the World cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) see https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/. Retrieved on 06/12.2021

   

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Umar Kabanda holds a PhD and a master’s degree in Governance and Regional Integration, as well as a Post Graduate Diploma in Human Rights and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Currently he is the Managing Director of Kalube consults limited and a Policy leader Fellow with the School of Transnational Governance in the European University Institute in Italy.  

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Studying the aspirations of youth can tell us a lot more about their worlds

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Aspiration is an implicit element of development that inspires action for change. Yet there are increasing concerns about the individualised and instrumental use of aspirations in development practice. In a recent special issue of the European Journal of Development Research focusing on youths’ aspirations that I guest-edited along with Nicola Ansell and Peggy Froerer, we argue that aspirations should be recognised as socially produced and as positionings by young people in presents shaped by remnants of pasts and the uncertainty of futures. In this post we detail what’s inside the special issue.

Development discourse is thick with aspirations (Frye 2012; Jakimow 2016). Planning for and bringing about desired change is key to development practice and the longing for a better life constitutes a main driving force for people’s continued engagement with development interventions despite their all-too-frequent disappointments (De Vries 2007; High 2014). Thus, aspiration is an implicit element of the very idea of development.

Yet, increasingly the concept of aspiration has come to feature explicitly in the development studies literature. Reflecting trends in the Global North, this is perhaps most evident in studies focusing on children and youth (see for example: Morrow 2013). Now that some years of schooling have become the norm for most young people the world over, raising aspirations has become a policy mantra to increase learning outcomes, while in other contexts young people’s aspirations are seen as unrealistic because they are ‘aiming too high’.

The academic challenge of working with aspirations is that it may end up promoting ‘individual investment in institutional pathways for self-improvement while protecting these same institutions from blame when these pathways do not lead to the imagined outcomes’ (Frye 2019: 724). At the same time, futures do matter and are unavoidable. This is especially true for children and youth who often spend considerable time in future-oriented institutions such as schools.

These challenges necessitate the need to discuss aspirations more deeply, appraise what it has to offer for studying children and youth in context of development, while also being mindful of problematic uses of the concept. To this end, the European Journal of Development Research has created a Special Issue titled ‘Youth, aspiration and the life course: development and the social production of aspirations in young people’s lives’ that Nicola Ansell, Peggy Froerer and I guest-edited.

We recognised the need to find some answers to basic questions that include:

  • What do we mean when talking about the term ‘aspiration’?
  • How do we conceptualise it from a social sciences perspective?
  • And what is its analytical value in studying young people’s aspirations in contexts of development?

The collection builds on Arjun Appadurai’s (2004) oft-cited text ‘The capacity to aspire’. He pointed out that aspirations ‘are never simply individual’, but ‘always formed in interaction and in the thick of social life’ (2004: 67). We have developed this starting point further on the basis of recent philosophical, sociological and anthropological work on theorising aspiration and desire.

On this basis, the Special Issue takes a critical stance against strands of development research that merely treat aspirations as ‘mental models’ that can be tweaked easily by having people watch certain videos, send them regular text messages, etc. The case in point is the 2015 World Development Report titled ‘Mind, Society, and Behavior’ (World Bank 2015). The World Development Report draws on behavioural economics, neuroscience and social psychology and presents interventions seeking to raise or redirect aspirations as a relatively inexpensive addition to the development practitioner’s toolkit.

The articles in the Special Issue are based on research that problematises the normative and instrumental approach to aspirations that underpins the World Development Report. Rather than judging young people’s aspirations as too high, too low, or of the wrong kind, the authors set out to understand young people’s orientations towards desired futures – whatever these might be, and however these might be expressed. These could be longer-term futures related to desired occupations, but also more immediate futures in which an orientation towards a desired future emerges as important for asserting a particular identity in the present.

Ultimately, we sought to make a balanced intervention in research and practice focusing on aspirations in relation to young people in development. One of the questions that was asked (and answered) is:

How are aspirations socially produced as part of young people’s lives? And what can we learn from this?

Young people’s aspirations do not predict futures. In fact, the work of aspirations is an ever-unfolding dynamic through which possible futures and particular pasts come to have a bearing on the lived moment of the present. Gaining some control over this, however fragile, vague or illusive this may be, is key to making life meaningful, perhaps especially so in adverse and rapidly changing circumstances.

These points were unravelled on the basis of research with widely diverse groups of children and young people, and in relation to varying development issues. The list of contributing articles includes research with:

In addition, two articles focus on youth in China. One concentrates on youth in vocational schools who are often considered as ‘non-aspirational’ (Ole Johannes Kaland), whereas the other focuses on young people who did enter university. This latter illuminates the high price young people end up paying for realising China’s national aspiration of educational expansion (Willy Sier).

And finally, one article moves the lens away from young people themselves and critically discusses development organisations’ knowledge claims about rural youth’s aspirations about farming futures (Ben White).

Collectively, the articles underscore the importance of appreciating aspirations as socially produced, and therefore never just an individual property. In contexts of development characterised by rapid and dramatic change, strategies for realising a realistic future that were valid in the recent past are rapidly becoming irrelevant, obsolete, or may have become closed-off altogether. This emphasises the importance of conducting research with young people themselves and taking seriously their aspirations as they are positioning themselves in presents shaped by remnants of the past and uncertain futures. The Special Issue is a dedicated effort to furthering this research agenda.

This text is a highly condensed version of the editorial introduction of the Special Issue.

References

Appadurai, A. 2004. “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition.” Pp. 59-84 in Culture and Public Action, edited by V. Rao and M. Walton. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

De Vries, P. 2007. “Don’t Compromise Your Desire for Development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian rethinking of the anti-politics machine.” Third World Quarterly 28(1):25-43.

Frye, M. 2019. “The Myth of Agency and the Misattribution of Blame in Collective Imaginaries of the Future.” The British Journal of Sociology 70(3):721-730.

High, H. 2014. Fields of Desire: Poverty and policy in Laos. Singapore: NUS Press.

Morrow, V. 2013. “Whose Values? Young people’s aspirations and experiences of schooling in Andhra Pradesh, India.” Children & Society 27(4):258-269.

World Bank. 2015. “World Development Report 2015. Mind, Society, and Behavior.” Washington: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank.

About the author:

Roy Huijsmans is a teacher/researcher at the ISS.

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COVID-19 | The voices of children and youth in Tanzania’s COVID-19 response

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Rapid research into the effects of COVID-19 on young people in Tanzania reveals high levels of anxiety about the virus as it relates to relationships, economic livelihoods and the community. The research, led by Dr Elizabeth Ngutuku, draws further attention to the need for governments to consider the disease’s wider social and psychological impacts.

Source: Wikimedia Commons under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en. Image contrast altered.

Soon after the first COVID-19 case was reported in Tanzania on 16 March 2020, a series of closures were announced to schools and some businesses to avert the spread of the disease. However, the government changed tack in June, announcing the country had the disease under control. Life seemed to have gone back to the normal with schools re-opening and people returning to work.

In July and August 2020, as part of our advocacy using the findings from our research, ‘Adolescent’s Perceptions of Healthy Relationships in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam’, we carried out rapid research with children and youth aged 10-18 years through essay writing. The resulting 309 essays explored young people’s perspectives on the effects of COVID-19 on their relationships with others at home, their school, the community, technology and with the environment. Their narratives reveal that behind the sense of assumed normality, and assurance that the virus does not pose a threat to the general population, the youth position themselves ambivalently. While their voice on effects of the disease speaks to day-to-day immediate issues of survival, it also jumps scales to touch on relationships between nation states, relations with the government and a relationship with the country’s past.

The disease is ‘everywhere’

Young people noted that the disease permeated all areas of their relationships and equated this to being ‘everywhere and in everything’. Arguing that space itself was ‘sick’, this understanding can be read literally from President Magufuli’s declaration that the disease inhabits inanimate objects, like papaya and even animals such as goats. These voices reveal deeper perspectives when read alongside young people’s relationship with the environment, especially play spaces, trees, rocks and beaches, as shown to be important to youth in our earlier work in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam. Through art-based research and interviews, some of the young respondents explained that when relationships with their parents and siblings soured, they would go out to relax in these spaces or talk to animals.

Such a souring of family relationships was common during the period of school closures. While some acquired new skills like cooking, and bonded with their parents at home, others reported being overworked and the pressure causing constant collisions. Some young people noted that during such periods school normally provided solace through interactions with peers and teachers. Some girls were also looking forward to schools’ re-opening to avoid domestic sexual violence, as reported elsewhere to be on the rise in Tanzania during the epidemic, but other girls explained that staying at home had freed them from being approached for sexual favours by their peers and teachers.

Many young respondents voiced a perceived weakening of social ties, beyond immediate practices such as an inability to hug or greet each other, and playing or receiving visitors. They drew attention to the effects on a core social fabric and collective support. These young respondents remembered a collective past (perhaps drawing on the imaginaries of Ujamaa philosophy), with its emphasis on the care and welfare for others, in contrast to, for example, people during the epidemic who stopped carrying each other’s burdens, or what they called kubebeana mzigo. Drawing on a collective we, many respondents also noted that society’s collective dreams or aspirations (ndoto zetu) had been put on hold, which while going unspecified allude to school closures and an ability to continue their activities in the community.

Economics and politics matters to youth

The youth respondents emphasised the epidemic’s large and small economic effects. While they discussed their parents having lost jobs and livelihoods, and the inability to afford health care, they raised anxieties over there being ‘no longer milk for the small baby [sibling]’ and not being able to ‘ask for a second helping of food’, as they did before onset of the disease.

Moreover, the youth positioned themselves as actors in political relationships. For example, when referencing the diplomatic spat between Kenya and Tanzania over flights and truck drivers, they stated the disease had created enmity between countries, interpreting the closure of the shared border as an attempt by Kenya, which they called a good neighbour, to close itself off from Tanzania. Some noted that their relatives, and especially their breadwinner fathers who rely on cross-border trade, were afraid they would be quarantined in Kenya at their own expense, leaving them behind as carers for the family. This requirement was only reviewed in mid-September 2020.

Despite the atmosphere of the gloom, many young people also celebrated the President like a prophet who supported them with ‘kind words’, assuring them that ‘God could not allow them to die of Corona’. These youth represented themselves as political and cultural nationalists, who unquestioningly obeyed the President’s traditional steam therapy for the virus, as well as his call for the country’s return to faith, health, community and nation through prayer. For others, an obedience to Magufuli’s orders was more guarded, with some youth revealing how their parents forbade them to go to church, despite the leadership urging their attendance.

The youth indeed represented collective prayer in Kiswahili as praying bega kwa bega (shoulder to shoulder) against the disease, for which prevention is alternatively encouraged by the World Health Organization through maintaining social distance. The respondents further represented the perceived elimination of COVID-19 as a sign of good leadership by the government, because cases in Tanzania (which stopped publishing statistics in May 2020) were few compared to the high COVID-19 statistics in Kenya by June.

Listening to youth voices differently through essay writing reveals that behind the façade of a fearless nation fear remains prevalent. Our respondents reported that important political leaders in the community had died of the disease, and their essays revealed a veritable daily fear of their parents’ death. Some reported that they would observe their parents for signs of infection after they returned from work, and one youth in Dar es Salaam noted that he would each day observe his friends throwing a bottle of hand sanitiser to their mother on arrival.

Yet many children nevertheless celebrated their president, the sentiment ‘our president cannot lie to us, we cannot die of Corona’ expressed by many respondents, which can be read as cautiously confident despite their anxiety. It is at the interstices of this apparent guarded optimism that an imperative emerges for the government of Tanzania: they must listen to the wishes and voices of young people and protect them not only from the disease but its multitude of effects.

This post was first published by the LSE’s Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and first appeared here

About the author:

Elizabeth Ngutuku has a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work investigates young people’s experience of poverty, vulnerability, citizenship claims and sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Ngutuku coordinated the rapid research on behalf of Nascent/ISS as part of the APHR project funded by Oak Foundation

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Creative Development | “Do I exist”? Miktivism for Land Rights and Identity in Ethiopia by Tatek Abebe

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Miktivism—the use of music for the purposes of activism and social change—has become a popular strategy of resistance among Ethiopian youth. I use the term miktivism to refer to the practice of employing music to advance causes of social justice by youth who do not claim to be activists, at least not openly. This blog explores an example of miktivism: young musicians deploying what they regard as their talents and resource—music and microphone—to highlight questions of land and identity in the Oromia region, Ethiopia.

Land grabbing in the Oromia region  

The Oromia region is the largest of Ethiopia’s nine federal regions. Its inhabitants, the ethnic Oromo people, account for about 35% of the country’s population. Oromo people inhabit lands surrounding Addis Ababa and also in west, central, and south Ethiopia. Due to its proximity to Addis Ababa, the Oromia region has been subjected to continuous encroachment by industrial and real estate developments driven by Ethiopian and international investors and suffered from land grabbing driven by foreign agri-investments (e.g. Lavers 2012).

Maalan Jira? / Do I exist?

The struggle to retain agricultural land has been at the core of widespread youth protests in the Oromo region during the period 2015-2018. Music plays a key role in these protests and the song Maalan Jira by Oromo artist Hacaaluu Hundeessaa serves as a prime example.

Maalan Jira is a social-political song disguised by love lyrics in Affan Oromo language. The song was released in 2015, at the beginning phase of the youth protests and has had close to 6 million views on the YouTube.

Land grab as an existential threat

Maalan jiraa, maalan, jiraa, maalan jiraa, Yaa Gaa-laa-nee…
Maalan jiraa maalan, caccabsee na nyaatee jiraa
Ani hin jiruu… Ani hin jiruu, Ani hin jiruu… Yaa Ga-laa-ne, Ani hin jiruu Kukkutee na nyaate xurri

Do I exist Galaane? No Galaane I do not exist; they chopped and ate my liver [vital organs].
What is left of me Galaane? They broke up my bones and ate them.

Koo Galaanee tiyyaa, Sululta loon hin tiksuu darabaatti galchiisa, 

My dear Galaane, Sululta cannot let the cattle to graze freely; they have to fence them.

 The lyrics present contemporary land grabs as an existential threat. This is done by drawing an analogy between the human body/anatomy and land as a vital means of existence for the rural population. Hacaalu Hundessa repeatedly expresses that his ‘bones are broken up’, bit by bit, in order to exemplify how agricultural land is slowly becoming a scarce resource for farmers. Phrases like ‘vital organs chopped away’ and ‘eaten up’ represent first of all the grabbing and selling of rural land to investors. These existential metaphors also resonate with one of the most popular chants during the protests: ‘lafti keenya lafee keenya’ (‘our land is our bone’). Secondly, the music video and the lyrics refer to the need to fence cattle because of declining open pastures. Oromo people have a long tradition of letting their cattle unfettered in the field. Cattle is brought home only when they are to be milked or slaughtered. This is just one example of illustrating intensified land grab in the name of development, experienced by local population not as a mere change in livelihoods, but as a compromise to what it means to be Oromo.

Historical repetition of grabbing of Oromo lands

Laal Galoo-too, Gullalleen kan Tufaa, gaara Abbichuu turii, Galaan Finfinnee..see.
Laal Galoo-too, Silaa akka jaalalaa Laal Galoo-too, wal irraa hin fagaannuu Laal Galoo-too, Jarraa nu fageessee.

Look my Galoo, Gullallee belonged to Tufaa, Abbichuu was on the hills, Galaan farmed Finfinnee.
We, the lovers, should have never been separated, but those people separated us.

The main protagonist in the song is a woman named Gelaanee, who is affectionately referred to as ‘Galoo’. Gelaanee also refers to a queen of one of the Oromo clans which was conquered by Emperor Menellik II during his expansion in the 20th century. Following this conquest and resembling contemporary developments, queen Gelaanee’s land became incorporated into Ethiopia’s capital.

Malaan Jira recounts the violent expansion of Finfinnee into Addis Ababa through the gradual pushing away of indigenous Oromo clans. The song laments how—through land grabs—people are losing not just their land but also their rural mode of life. It refers to localities like Gullelle, Abbichuu, Galaan and, Sululta etc; places where Oromo clans lived for generations. These areas are now either part of Addis Ababa or suggested for incorporation into Addis Ababa’s Integrated Development Plan. This development plan, locally known as the master killer plan, is the main trigger for the ‘Ethiopian Spring’.

‘Separation of lovers’

Diiganii gaara sanaa, Gaara diigamuu hin-mallee,
Nu baasaan addaan baanee, nuu addaan bahuu hin-mallee. 
Seeqanii sesseeqanii, kan gar gar nu baasan jaraa—yii
 
They dug that hill, a hill that should never have been dug/destroyed.
They separated us, the people who should never have been separated.
Little by little, they cut us apart [alienated us].

Maalan Jira effectively mobilizes a number of metaphors to express social critique in a guarded manner. For example, the phrase ‘Separation of lovers’ refers to the growing rift between Oromia region and Finfinnee brought about by the allocation of its land for the development of Addis Ababa. The metaphor also stands for the ethnic-based federalism pursued by the Ethiopian government, amplifying differences rather than shared interests. Both the song and music video tell stories of several generations of farmers who went on to cultivate vast areas of land, yet the present generation does not even have a ‘ground to sleep on.’ The music video alludes to systemic dispossession, i.e. the process of political economy altering the material grounds of life as well as the ways in which people struggle for control of social reproduction.

Maalan Jira is a prime example of the miktivism embraced by Oromo youth. It shows how youth mobilize historical references and powerful metaphors, describing the loss of identity, way of life, livelihoods and lands of Oromo people. Yet, by using ‘Galoo’ they can just claim it is an innocent love song. This strategy enables youth to elude the risks engendered by voicing political issues openly.

Reference
Lavers, T. (2012). ‘Land grab’ as development strategy? The political economy of agricultural investment in Ethiopia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39 (1), 105-132.

This article is part of a series on Creative Development.

About the author:

Tatek AbebeTatek Abebe is a professor at the Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (NTNU) where he convenes the MPhil in childhood studies. His current research focuses on generational implications of development/poverty with an emphasis on young people’s lives and transitions into adulthood. He conducts ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in diverse African contexts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Children as experts: rethinking how we produce knowledge by Kristen Cheney

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Children in the rain

Most research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights is adult-led and adult-centred, not only ignoring young voices but denying diversity amongst young people. But a new project co-led by Kristen Cheney of the ISS departs from the premise that young people are the experts of their own lives, giving children and adolescents the chance co-create knowledge. In this article, Cheney details the importance of youth-led participatory research and how this is done through the new project.

It is often assumed that social research is the domain of experts—and that those experts are necessarily adults. Most research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) is adult-led and adult-centred, not only ignoring young voices but denying diversity amongst young people. Information about young people’s sexuality therefore often remains insulated within their peer groups, preventing innovation in ASRHR programming. This too often leads to a deficit or pathological perspective on adolescence in ASRHR research and intervention.

ISS departs from this premise in our latest youth participatory research project, Adolescents’ Perceptions of Healthy Relationships. The APHR project is funded by the Oak Foundation, with the objective to inform their child abuse prevention programming through greater attention to the broader societal, structural factors that provide an enabling environment for the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. The project is led by ISS’ Kristen Cheney and involves Auma Okwany as East Africa lead researcher.

Instead of embracing prevalent adult-imposed models of adolescence, the APHR project departs from the premise that young people are the experts on their own lives. Indeed, we believe that young people are essential co-creators of knowledge, best suited to conduct research on their own thoughts and experiences. They have the best access to their peer groups where vital information is often kept locked away from adults’ gazes. So whenever possible, we conduct youth-led, participatory research. This way, young people become not mere objects of research but co-producers of knowledge about young people’s lives through greater disclosure of more authentic viewpoints.

Conducting research in Oak’s two main project areas, East Africa and Eastern Europe, ISS leads an international team consisting of partners from International Child Development Initiatives (Netherlands), Animus Association (Bulgaria), and Nascent Research and Development Organization (Tanzania). Together, they support young people in Bulgaria and Tanzania to participate in every step of the research, from designing quantitative and qualitative tools to data collection to analysis, dissemination and advocacy. This Circles of Support youth-centered approach provides training for adolescents as young as twelve years old to act as young peer researchers (YPRs), with support for research activities throughout the project—while always ensuring that young people’s considerations take precedence over adults’ opinions (Figure 1). Despite some adults’ concerns that young people might not be up to the task, we consistently find that young people are not only competent researchers, but also capable self-advocates.

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Figure 1. YPRs in Dar Es Salaam discuss important aspects to consider in research on adolescents’ perceptions of healthy relationships (2017). Their input is incorporated into the research design from the start.

Preliminary Findings

Having completed an extensive survey of nearly 2,000 adolescents aged 10-18 across Bulgaria and Tanzania, our approach has proven fruitful for getting at adolescents’ views on what constitutes healthy relationships. We are still collecting qualitative data that will both validate and deepen our understanding of the survey findings, but our preliminary observations from the survey revealed which characteristics and relationships adolescents value most in each setting.

In Bulgaria, responses indicated that adolescents generally value trust and respect most in their relationships. While they reported mostly positive relationships with family—particularly with their mothers—adolescents’ responses indicated that the more problematic relationships were those with peers and others in their school settings.

We are following up the survey to further unpack these results, in order to understand how adolescents define trust and respect, as well as to understand family and school dynamics.

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Figure 2. A YPR in Sofia, Bulgaria, shares her group’s qualitative questions with the group.

In Tanzania, adolescents also reported supportive relationships with their mothers. In addition, they found that religious leaders were important in guiding young people’s behaviour. They indicated that a large part of their understanding of being loved, in various relationships, is someone providing for their needs, both emotional and material. But preliminary survey findings also pointed to widespread abuses toward adolescents—from various people at home, school, or in the community. To some extent, their answers even pointed toward a normalisation of that violence; for example, some pointed out that there were high levels of bullying in school, yet they did not necessarily consider this a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. Some saw excessive discipline from teachers as concern for their learning, while others reported that fighting to defend a friend shows that you are loyal and is therefore ‘healthy.’ The TZ team is currently completing qualitative data collection (Figure 3), which we hope will help us further unpack these responses during analysis.

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Figure 3. A YPR in Tanzania interviews a classmate (2018).

Scholar Activism

Our research team has been providing excellent support to our phenomenal young peer researchers (YPRs). Through our Circles of Support approach, the team in each country has been able to tailor training to the YPRs’ needs and abilities. To ensure that young people’s concerns predominate, we have consulted YPRs at every stage, while constantly checking our own tendencies to want to redirect research toward ‘adult’ concerns. As a result, we are seeing exceptional personal growth as well as group cohesion amongst our YPRs.

Untitled3
Boy and girl YPRs in Magu, Tanzania, come up with research questions together (2017).

For this reason, we consider our participatory approach ‘always already advocacy’. ‘Protection’ is sometimes invoked to deny young people’s participation, but participation can be inherently protective, especially in ASRHR, where knowledge is power. Our training covers basic concepts that help empower kids to know their rights and develop their ASRHR competencies—which they then disseminate to others. Participatory research also fosters more interpersonal communication by modeling healthy relationships within the research process itself (Figure 4).

Headshot 02 17About the author: 

Kristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification.

The Orphan Industrial Complex comes home to roost in America by Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi

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The recent removal of migrant children from their parents at the southern US border has caused great public outcry, but Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi argue that it could become another incarnation of the Orphan Industrial Complex that glorifies ‘child rescue’ and the charitable commodification of children without parental care—one that actually produces orphans for a hungry adoption market through dubious legal means.

What is happening to migrant children is egregious and yet predictable: children separated from their families and moved hundreds of miles away to foster homes—by an adoption agency with ties to US Secretary of Education Betsy de Vos.

To those who are appalled by this move by the Trump administration, the situation is unconscionable and ‘not who we are’ as Americans (though there are numerous historical cases of intentional family separation by the state).

To those of us in children’s studies, however—and particularly those of us who study orphanhood and adoption—it was only a matter of time before the Trump family separation policy crossed paths with the Orphan Industrial Complex.

The Orphan Industrial Complex

The Orphan Industrial Complex (OIC) is the charitable commodification of children without parental care. It is driven by persistent narratives of “orphan rescue” that not only commodify orphans and orphanhood itself but that frequently spurs the “production” of “orphans”, resulting in child exploitation and trafficking (Cheney and Ucembe forthcoming). The OIC includes such activities as fundraising for orphanages, orphanage volunteering, and international adoption.

The OIC has largely been operating internationally, driven by North American and European desires for children and/or experiences with orphans abroad (Cheney and Rotabi 2017). Now that we are seeing young children at the doorstep of the US, the next chapter in a long story of child abduction into adoption is currently being written—this time domestically.

Adoption scholars and children’s advocates have been speculating on social media that the plan is (and has likely been all along) that they move the young children far from their parents at the border, charge an absurd amount for fostering and/or reunification that the parents can’t pay—either because they just don’t have the money and/or are still in detention—then when they can’t pay, the authorities declare the children abandoned and available for adoption. This has happened before, and make no mistake, it is happening as we type. And it is perfectly “legal”, in that the courts are sanctioning these actions; indeed, they are enabling the stealing of children against the will of their parents.

Bethany Christian Services of Michigan, an adoption agency with ties to billionaire Education Secretary Betsy de Vos and a history of coercive adoptions, has placed approximately 80 children in foster care thousands of miles from the southern US border, where some of the parents are detained while other parents have already been deported to Central America. Bethany and other agencies have government contracts to provide so-called “foster care” while reunification strategies are sorted. We submit, why would a large-scale adoption agency be trusted with such a critical and essential task all those miles removed from the location where the child was separated from their parent(s)?

Tackle the enabling environment first

Because the courts are so often complicit in child stealing, it is difficult to actually talk of “illegal adoptions”. That is why Cheney told the UN HRC Council last year that using the law to battle “illegal adoptions” is not enough; we need to address the enabling environment that is undergirded by “child rescue” and “better life” narratives that justify helping ourselves to the children of the poor and desperate. These discourses are also what undergird the OIC, thus perpetuating such violence against children and families. As we know from previous experience, there are people out there who have no scruples about adopting the children separated from their detained and deported migrant parents—many of whom came to the US with their children to protect them from violence and instability at home—and in fact there are whole social movements dedicated to adoption.

Yet, a number of the families crossing the U.S. border are actually eligible to apply for asylum based on societal violence: asylum seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are over-represented in the recent influx. All three countries suffer notorious gang violence and other problems that rise to the definition of persecution when an individual or family is targeted. Ironically, US government policies have fueled poverty and violence underlying the requests for asylum from the region (Costantino, Rotabi and Rodman 2012). Gang violence is just one symptom that has, in turn, pushed some of the region’s most vulnerable people to immigrate northward for safety (Carlson and Gallagher 2015).

Rather than being welcomed at the border as asylum seekers, they are charged with a misdemeanor for illegal entry to the US. To make matters worse, there are credible stories of immigration agents coercing parents with threats of child adoption if they should file for their rights to seek refuge. As the U.S responds to asylum seekers and others with such a heavy and uncaring hand, Federal Judges are now weighing in: a recent court order requires the children affected and in foster care to be quickly reunited with their families. However, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fought the court order—and lost. Nonetheless, this mean-spirited delay of the court judgment being realized inevitably will prolong the waiting game which is a potential means of child abduction into adoption through the courts. All too often, when a challenge to separation finally comes to court, judges have ruled that a child has lived with a foster family for long enough that they have emotionally attached to the new family. On the basis of the best interests of the child, legal judgments favoring adoption rather than returning a child to their parents have prevailed. This has already happened in notorious cases of child abduction into US adoption from Guatemala (Rotabi and Bromfield 2017).

In the case of an organization like Bethany, they typically serve the very hungry adoption marketplace rather than facilitate parent-child. While Bethany can and should mobilize to change its case management model from adoption to reunification, the clock ticks on the family lives of vulnerable children.

The dark side of adoption

It may look like some of the children adjust well to their new homes and families, but let us tell you what is going to happen if we do not stop it: the older children will likely not adjust well to being ripped from their parents and told they have new families, so those adoptions are bound to “fail”, with kids running away, ending up cycling through multiple foster homes, or worse. For younger kids, the memories of their families and the harrowing journey they have made with them will likely fade over time as the children get adjusted to their new homes. But imagine how they will feel as they come of age and learn the true circumstances of their adoptions; that they were essentially stolen at the border from a parent(s) who carried them for thousands of treacherous miles seeking safety from the very violence instigated by the US. Older adoptees have been devasted to learn of such questionable reasons for their international adoptions, and it can lead to a dissolution of their relationships with their adoptive parents as well as incredible emotional difficulties that come with such a revelation: adoptees, for example, have high rates of depression and suicide.

Many adoptee advocates note that adult adoptees are often driven to learn more about their origins, as an integral part of their identities. In fact, origin tourism has become another facet of the OIC, marketizing adoptees’ need to search for their birth families (Dorow 2010, 78). Nonetheless, one of the strongest recommendations to come out of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held at the ISS in 2014 was for preservation of records in adoption so that when the time comes for individual adoptees to search for their original families, they will have access to the vital information necessary.

If we cannot stop this from happening now, we need to make sure this injustice is well documented so that sooner or later, it can be righted, and these children can finally be reunited with their families.

References:
Carlson, Elizabeth, and Anna Marie Gallagher. 2015. “Humanitarian Protection for Children Fleeing Gang-Based Violence in the Americas.” Journal on Immigration and Human Security 3(2), 129-158.
Cheney, Kristen E., and Karen Smith Rotabi. 2017. “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems.” In Conflict, Violence and Peace, edited by Christopher Harker and Kathrin Hörschelmann, 89-107. Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Cheney, Kristen, and Stephen Ucembe. forthcoming. “The Orphan Industrial Complex: the charitable commodification of children and its consequences for child protection.” In Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification, edited by Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Costantino, Rosalin, Karen Smith Rotabi and Debra Rodman. 2012. Violence against women and asylum seeking: Global problems and local practices applied to Guatemalan women immigrating for safety. Advances in Social Work 13(2), 431-50. Available at http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/advancesinsocialwork/article/viewFile/1974/2465.
Dorow, Sara. 2010. “Producing Kinship through the Marketplace of Transnational Adoption.” In Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, edited by Michele B. Goodwin, 69-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rotabi, Karen Smith, and Nicole F. Bromfield. 2017. From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy:  A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers. Abingdon: Routledge.

About the authors: 

Headshot 02 17.pngKristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification.

Headshot_Rotabi_CSUMB_Fall2017.jpgKaren Smith Rotabi is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work at California State University Monterey Bay. She is co-author of From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy: A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers and co-editor of Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices and Outcomes.

Cheney and Rotabi co-organized the 2014 International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy at ISS.

Emancipatory education in practice: perspectives from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas by Veriene Melo

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Emancipatory education is a platform to humanise and redefine the educational process in liberatory terms. Linking theory and practice from this lens can help us explore the role of education as a crucial instrument in the struggle for social change in communities at the margins.

An eye towards liberatory pedagogic practices

The more that traditional schools focus on “one-size-fits-all” curriculums meant solely to prepare individuals for the market, the more they detach themselves from local needs, knowledges, and values. A lack of exposure to critical content about social, economic, and political contradictions in formal education limits people’s ability to challenge the status quo and their attempts to rupture existing hegemonic arrangements.[i] [ii] Moving away from top-down approaches concerned with promoting modernisation processes and exposing notions of oppression and existential violence as authentic and ever-present, emancipatory education advances pedagogic practices that seek to empower individuals to think critically and act upon social and structural inequalities with the aim of transforming their lives and communities.[iii] [iv]

Conceiving education as a cultural act and a two-way process between educators and students based on the co-production of knowledge and critical dialogue, the framework is closely linked to the demands of the community and departs from the experiences and capabilities individuals bring with them to learning spaces. Due to its often more autonomous nature, emancipatory education invites us to embrace non-formal educational platforms as more inclusive learning sites where counter-hegemonic discourses and actions can flourish.[v] From this perspective, the work of civil society organisations can become a source of empowering possibilities and access to democratic life. Results from a case study of a youth program in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil help us bridge the framework’s theoretical and practical dimensions with processes, methods, and experiences reflecting real-world practices.

Realising the potential of favela youth

In the over 750 favelas scattered across Rio de Janeiro, crime and the permissiveness of violence—combined with the chronic lack of services, deep socio-economic deprivation, and a culture of marginalisation of the poor—have, for much of the city’s recent history, confined the majority of its 1,4 million residents to invisibility and intense social exclusion.[vi] As a result, favela youth face serious structural barriers that undermine their social and economic mobility, including exposure to poverty, difficulties moving up the educational pipeline, limited work and income opportunities, and the lack of access to platforms for cultural affirmation. Youths, in particular, are more likely to be out of school and work and are disproportionately impacted by lethal violence and police brutality.[vii]

Within this context, the Networks for Youth Agency program (hereby: Agency)[viii] promotes a capacity-building methodology that supports mostly black and low-income favela youths aged 14-29 in leading actions of social impact by encouraging their protagonism and artistic production. Since 2011, the program—which is now financed by the Ford Foundation and inspires a similar initiative in the UK[ix]—has engaged over 2,500 young people from dozens of Rio favelas, incubating 180 original projects. For a period ranging between two and four months,[x] participants are introduced to several educational instruments meant to stimulate them to cultivate their interests, exercise their analytical and critical thinking skills, and draw from their social history, lived experiences, and cultural identities to advance their ideas.

agenciaproject_crimelab

Linking theory and practice in emancipatory education

An in-depth analysis of Agency points to three aspects of the program’s methodology that are particularly reminiscent of a Freirean emancipatory education. The first involves situating participants as agents of community transformation. Approaching young people as potent individuals and changemakers, the program provides participants with instruments to formulate and carry out initiatives that bear a potential territorial impact, placing them at the heart of local development processes in favelas. The result is an assembling of diverse projects that manage to reach hundreds of residents. From strategies to promote women’s empowerment and youth conflict resolution, to platforms to address education, work, and urban transportation challenges, these localised actions are mechanisms of positive social regeneration that help create a counter-narrative to dominant discourses about favelas and its young residents, which tends to be driven by assumptions of criminality and precariousness.

The program’s bottom-up approach to community development brings us to its second emancipatory education-related dimension of contextualised learning and praxis. The various instruments and exercises applied in the methodology integrate the interests, realities, and demands of young people, creating a dynamic and interactive platform that attract participants to join the learning process as active subjects rather than passive objects. It is, therefore, by first contextualising education to the lifeworld of young people and respecting their dispositions and abilities that Agency can stimulate participants to draw from elements of their social and physical world to advance context-sensitive initiatives that are based on community conditions, resources, and everyday practices.

The third broader linkage to emancipatory education has to do with the adoption of an educational model based on reflective practices and critical dialogue. Agency educators stimulate participants to think critically about their place in the world, their life conditions, and different issues impacting their communities. The advancement of tools that promote a critical analysis of dominant discourses and unequal social structures is, however, meant to go beyond supporting young people in the process of broadening their political conscience and social critique, to encourage them to use that reflection to realise their potential for social engagement by envisioning solutions.

A platform of possibility in efforts to transform education

Conclusions from my analysis of Agency points to opportunities for emancipatory education to play a key role in efforts to capacitate, empower, and more actively engage youth in local development processes via non-formal educational platforms in communities at the margins. The study inevitably also reveals great and multifaceted challenges. For instance, the program must grapple with a series of operational and methodological constraints as well as obstacles pertaining to the social context where it operates. Also, as an incrementalist strategy, there can be no guarantee that Agency’s outcomes are long-lasting—which does not diminish its transformative significance in particular settings and at a particular points in time.

fernando-e-cordao-marinamoreira-agencia

In all, despite its shortcomings, emancipatory education remains a relevant platform of inspiration and hope as we dare reinvent education moved by hopes for social justice and equity. Ultimately, exploring the personal experiences of participants and the local impact of provisions that are helping young people in poor and violence-stricken communities tap into their potential, cultivate a more critical reading of their world, and become agents of social change, is an important step in efforts in identifying and supporting transformative pedagogical initiatives that are bottom-up not only on paper, but also in essence and practice.

[i] Mayo, P. (2015) ‘Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love’ by Antonia Darder. Journal of Transformative Education, 2004, 2 (1), 64-66.
[ii] Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
[iii] Torres, C. (2013) Political Sociology of Adult Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
[iv] Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
[v] Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy (Critical Pedagogy Today Series). New York: Bloomsbury.
Torres, C. (1990). The Politics of Nonformal Education in Latin America. New York: Praeger.
[vi] Jovchelovitch, S. And Priego-Hernández, J. (2013). Underground sociabilities: identity,           culture and resistance in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. UNESCO Office in Brazil and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Souza e Silva, J. (2014). “Towards a New Paradigm of Public Policy in Rio’s Favelas.” Conference on Violence and Policing in Latin America and U.S. Cities. Stanford, CA, April 28-29 2014.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). (2010). Censo Demográfico 2010. Características Gerais da População, Religião e Pessoas com Deficiência. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE.
[vii] Waiselfisz, J. (2015). Mapa da Violência 2015: Mortes Matadas Por Armas de Fogo. Brasília: UNESCO.
Instituto Pereira Passos (IPP) and Instituto TIM. (2017). Agentes da Transformação: Cadernos da Juventude Carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Pereira Passos.
[viii] For more on Networks for Youth Agency (Agência de Redes Para Juventude), please visit: http://agenciarj.org (in Portuguese).
[ix] For information on Agency’s UK version, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/young-enterprise/11489791/How-the-Rio-slums-helped-inspire-a-start-up-revolution.html
[x] The full methodology promoted by Agency lasts a total of four months, but groups who are not awarded the funds to implement their projects leave the program at an earlier phase upon completion of the first two months of workshops.

About the author:

UntitledVeriene Melo is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and a former visiting student at the ISS. For over five years, she worked at the Stanford Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov), participating in policy-oriented research projects on public security, local governance, and youth education with a focus on Rio’s favelas.