(SCY1a) Sociology of Childhood and Youth I: Precarity, hope and making change
Monday Jun 17 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm (Eastern Daylight Time)
Wong Building - WONG 1050
Session Code: SCY1a
Session Format: Paper Presentations
Session Language: English
Research Cluster Affiliation: Sociology of Childhood and Youth
Session Categories: In-person Session
Much research in child and youth studies focuses on challenges in young lives, including vulnerability, inequality, discrimination, marginalization, worry, and hardship. While seeking to recognize and appreciate these challenges, researchers in the sociology of childhood and youth frequently recognize that such challenges do not wholly define the lives of children and youth who are living with precarity: there is also hope, joy, innovation, creativity, participation, and activism. The papers in this session all examine hope in the face of precarity, and the possibilities for thinking about and making change. Tags: Children And Youth, Equality and Inequality
Organizers: Rebecca Raby, Brock University, Hunter Knight, Brock University; Chair: Mehdia Hassan, University of Toronto
Presentations
Greg Yerashotis, Trent University
This article examines the learning experiences of urbanized immigrant youth who took part in an outdoor education component of a Sport-for-Development (SfD) program. Operated through an intersectoral partnership between the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto from 2017-2019, youth spent multiple weekends at the Hart House Farm, a University of Toronto-owned education facility located on the Niagara Escarpment. Drawing from participant-observation, focus group interviews and photo voice, we analyze if, how, and why participation affected youth at personal, social, and political levels. The findings of the study speak to calls from within SfD for a renewed environmental politics, namely by showcasing how augmenting traditional SfD programs with aspects of outdoor education can lead to more ‘transformative’ forms of social learning and development. In more detail, the findings of the study were threefold. First, we found that providing urban youth with access to the outdoors facilitated a new appreciation of the natural world. Previously, many of the young people in the study had an aversion to spending time in ‘the outdoors.’ These negative preconceptions about outdoor leisure highlight how barriers to environmental access emerge not only from restrictive structural forces—i.e., exclusion through class or race—but also from culturally enabling memes that lead youth to consciously avoid seeking available opportunities. Providing youth with opportunities to break through these intersecting barriers was therefore a critical first step to any potential benefits they may garner from access to the outdoors. By bridging structural and cultural barriers to the Canadian outdoors, it enabled youth to form new appreciations for how to live with and alongside the natural world. Second, we found that the trip supported youth’s sense of wellness. We found that the trip afforded and provided youth the time they needed to gain some perspective on their life stressors and the space to undergo forms of self-reflection/introspection. This often occurred through ‘holistic’ natural experiences, which allowed them to find transcendental forms of meaning that are known to support emotional wellness and facilitate personal growth. Third, the study highlights how the trip fostered what we refer to as a form of ‘ecological thought’ in youth. By this, we mean that in forming a deeper connections with the natural world and with each other, their experience at Hart House Farm expanded their political worldviews around matters of environmental justice and sustainability. The context in which it occurred clearly demonstrates how non-formal learning environments are well-suited to promote feelings of social responsibility in young people, which formal educational environments often fail to impart on them (Breunig and Rylander 2016). In this case, we found support for preliminary investigations into how programming in the outdoors can foster an awareness of issues around environmental justice (e.g., Maria-Jose Ramirex et al. 2020). These findings speak simultaneously to two calls from within the SfD field. Namely, the results address the need to establish deeper connections between SfD and issues of environmental justice (Darnell 2019; Giulianotti et al. 2019; Millington and Darnell 2020), and to generate more ‘socially transformative visions’ for sport-based youth programming (Coakley 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk 2011). Augmenting a traditional sport-for-development program with non-formal outdoor education and recreation generated unique program effects that are unlikely to occur in traditional sport spaces (Coakley 2011), or even in classroom environments (Breunig and Rylander 2016). The initiative described here not only supported youth’s wellness and provided a platform for personal growth, but also extended beyond the individual level to include socio-political development. Integrating non-formal outdoor education into sport- plus -development program models (Coalter 2013) may therefore be an important resource for SfD to make meaningful contributions to the environmental movement. Indeed, while other studies have highlighted the potential role of SfD programs in teaching social responsibility on communal levels (Kope and Arellano 2017; Wright 2016), we extend this finding to include the actual acquisition of socio-environmental justice perspectives. These findings also align with core themes of this year’s conference, namely regarding the relationship between diversity and racialization with sustainable futures. Indeed, given the diverse backgrounds of the youth involved in this study, we must also appreciate these findings in light of the growing criticisms of the environmental movement and outdoor education as being comprised of predominantly ‘white,’ middle-class individuals (Curnow 2017; Gauthier, Joseph and Fusco 2021; Gibson-wood and Wakefield 2013). Our study has shown that when programs provide access to, and opportunities for diverse youth to connect with the natural world, concerns over environmental justice may positively respond to the limiting categories of race, culture, and class. Providing equitable access to natural environments should therefore be regarded as a social right of citizenship that all young people should be afforded in Canada— not only for the benefit of those youth, but also for society at large.
Non-presenting author: Simon Darnell, University of Toronto
Kathleen Manion, Royal Roads University
In Uganda, Covid-19 resulted in a “shadow pandemic” of teenage pregnancies and young mothers. Now these girls face a myriad of issues, notably systemic and individual discrimination and exclusion from school, family, and community, as they traverse complex experiences of still being children and yet at the same time parents. Most of these young mothers do not receive any support, financial or otherwise, from the fathers of their children. In fact, many young mothers became pregnant as a result of sexual assault or exploitation/coercion; yet, the male perpetrators typically face no legal, financial, or other repercussions for violating the rights of these girls, and are free to carry on with their lives, whilst the young mothers are forced to navigate precarious new realities whilst living in a state of intense and multidimensional vulnerability. Young mothers often face discrimination, marginalization, and abuse from their communities where they are considered to be “spoiled” or “useless” and are humiliated by verbal, and even physical, assaults to the extent that they do not want to leave their homes. Furthermore, parents and other family members often disown teenage mothers and force them to leave home to fend for themselves. Without money, jobs, skills, or support of any kind, young mothers and their babies frequently move from one place to the next, seeking shelter, food and possibilities for earning money to survive; yet, their options are limited and most find themselves in desperate straits. With motherhood, education also tends to be inaccessible to young mothers and girls generally have to forfeit their childhood life goals and dreams. While Uganda legislation now no longer allows schools to expel students who are pregnant or parenting, without additional support young mothers are often still unable to continue schooling, which limits their possibilities for future employment as well as critical social, emotional, and intellectual development. Although there is awareness at the national government level that the welfare of hundreds of thousands of young mothers in Uganda need urgent support to meet their socioemotional, financial, and educational needs, as stated in policies and initiatives specifically targeting this demographic, little has been done to learn from the young mothers themselves what is most needed to support them and enable them and their children to thrive. In response, this paper reports on an ongoing, SSHRC/NFRF-funded 2- year Feminist Participatory Action Research project in rural, southwest Uganda, involving 11 young mothers and their 13 children. The project focuses on working closely with the young mothers to learn about their needs and future hopes and co-create an environment that strives to best support them achieve these. We have developed a residential vocational environment which includes a communal home, nutritious food, health checks, psychosocial support, child care, vocational training (either hairdressing or tailoring), as well as other educational and personal development workshops, as requested by the young mothers (e.g., goal-setting, career advice, learning from women who were themselves, teenage mothers). Data collection includes individual interviews, focus group discussions with, and writing, photography, and arts-based artifacts by the young mothers as well as interviews and focus group discussions with stakeholders such as health and psychosocial care providers, community members, and NGO and government representatives. In looking at creating a more inclusive shared future, this research directly offers critical insight from the young mothers themselves about their realities and ideas for meeting their goals. A comprehensive data bank will enable us to inform policy and programming to better support these and other young Ugandan mothers who are struggling for their rights, equality, and opportunities for their and their children’s best futures.
Non-presenting author: Tracey Smith-Carrier, Royal Roads University; Shelley Jones, Royal Roads University
Rebecca Raby, Brock University; Luiza Mattos Jobim da Costa, Brock University
Homeless children and their families face many challenges, including precarity and stigma (Gaetz et al., 2021). These adversities and prejudices are particularly pronounced for those who are part of an already marginalized community (Blackstock et al. 2011; Gulliver-Garcia, 2016). Little scholarship examines the experiences of homeless children in Canada (Huot and Covell, 2019; Wiese and Brown, 2018), including those living in transitional housing. Our paper investigates the resonances and disconnections we have perceived between the harm and risk-based representations and experiences of homeless children, and positive observations from staff and in our participant-observation sessions. Significant scholarship has addressed children’s resilience in the face of adversity (Hart et al, 2016). However, a focus on resilience has also been criticized for individualizing responsibility and distracting from a focus on the unequal, structural contributors to adversity in children’s lives (Hart et al, 2016). Our interdisciplinary project follows such concerns to focus on contextual resilience (Ungar, 2004) within a social justice approach (Fairchild et al., 2017) that attends to children’s multidimensional lives within unequal structural contexts in need of change. We draw on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with seven staff members, alongside interactive, long-term participant-observation research with eleven children in temporary, after-school programming. In addition to recognizing that the children face a range of challenges, staff members raised their own and parents’ concerns about how to protect the from exposure to disturbing situations in transitional housing, including seeing drug paraphernalia and the presence of the police. Stigma surrounding homelessness (Fairchild et al., 2017) also led some of us, as researchers, to feel nervousness when beginning to conduct this research, a feeling that extended to our conversations with others about the research. Such stigma can divide groups of people and lead to presumptions about others’ capacities (Fairchild et al., 2017). Yet, as we engage in participant observation, stigma and related concerns about the children living in transitional housing often feel out of sync with more positive staff comments about the children’s interactions and our own observational note-taking about the rich, joyful, child-initiated activities that fill many of the after-school sessions. These findings underscore Fairchild et al.s (2017) arguments for a balanced representation of children that considers their strengths and capacities, not just their challenges and potential deficits. Additionally, we have been struck by the participants’ open and friendly interactions with staff and others that live within the facility, illustrating their emotional, social, and collaborative strengths, despite their challenging circumstances and awareness of potential dangers. Our paper explores these discrepancies between significant challenges in our participants’ lives and our day-to-day interactions with them by focusing on 1) how dangers were and are discussed by staff and children in the research space; 2) the concept of childhood innocence, how it is deployed in conversations about homeless children, and how it has shaped, informed, and complicated our research experiences; 3) how we are learning about and experiencing a breadth of engagements with the children, between the children, and between the children and others in the building, including many positive, fun, joyful, and often quite mundane interactions; 4) how we have thought about these interactions in terms of children’s relationality, resiliency, agency, coping, and playfulness; and 5): the importance of thinking about hardship and resiliency through a social justice lens. We observe that the participants recognize and are affected by the dangers the adults are concerned about, but that they are not consumed or singularly defined by them.
Non-presenting authors: Christine Tardif-Williams, Brock University; Erika Alegria, Brock University
Greg Yerashotis, Trent University
Kickin it in the Hood: Soccer and Social Inclusion in Global Toronto
This presentation will lay out the findings of my doctoral research that I completed while enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies. Using immersive ethnographic methods, my dissertation chronicled my involvement in sport-based youth development initiatives from 2014-2020. Here I took on the role of a community soccer coach to better investigate if, how and why sport programming was affecting the integration experiences of marginalized youth living in urban Toronto’s marquee immigrant reception site—the neighbourhood of St. James Town. Sitting at the literal and symbolic heart of Canada’s ‘global city,’ St. James Town is colloquially known as the world in a block due to its vast range of ethno-cultural diversity and extreme population density. It stands as the last remaining immigrant settlement site in a rapidly gentrifying urban core, with newly constructed ‘mega-towers’ of higher rental income units now dwarfing this once proud constellation of high-rise buildings. Using this avowedly intersectional community context as a background, the author tells the story of how local immigrant youth used sport in nuanced ways to construct unique senses of inclusion and forms of belonging in a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized world. The central questions the project seeks to answer are: Did sport participation affect the everyday integration experiences of these youth? If so, how, and why? And how were these experiences unique for different genders? Upon the answering of these questions, a theory of social inclusion through sport is put forth based on programming’s ability to engage and develop local youth, while also facilitating group bonding and eclectic forms of belonging in their lives. There are three pillars of this theory that will be explored in greater detail within this presentation. First, sport’s engagement capacity in the lives of marginalized immigrants. In the foreground of this argument are adolescent boys’ experiences of ‘sport-based urban belonging,’ that resulted from their ongoing involvement in ethno-culturally diverse recreational programs. Participants described in interviews how the program served as a space for ‘trans-cultural’ learning, which they believed aided in their acculturation because they saw these multi-cultural social relations as representative of the dynamics of the ‘global’ city of Toronto more generally. However, despite the global and domestic aspects of this process of ‘making home,’ the manner in which it was tied to the hyper-diversity of their locality meant that this kind of belonging was essentially urban . Second, in addition to the book’s focus on teenage boys, a standout feature of the research underpinning this proposal is its comparative analysis on gendered sporting relations in the community context. Here, the deep level of immersion achieved by the researcher into local neighbourhood life revealed intersectional barriers to sporting access faced by young women locally. Following the implementation of a girls-only soccer program by the author, however, local girls reported experiencing uniquely empowering affects from participation, which were found on both individual and collective levels. Third, following a detailed analysis of the separate sporting experiences of boys and girls, the author documents how soccer eventually bridged gendered divides, and facilitated a neighbourhood-based, cross-gendered, and multi-generational soccer community, termed the ‘Wellesley-Jarvis Soccer Tribe.’ Therefore, not only did access to, engagement with, and ongoing participation in this inter-sectoral program partnership positively influence youth on individual levels; but out of the collaboration grew a semi-autonomous network of soccer players whose bonds transcended the physical activity spaces where they were originally cultivated. There are clear linkages between conference themes and the focus of this research. Primarily, the expansion of the conference’s understanding of sustainability beyond just environmentalism, and to incorporate the idea of shared and global sustainable futures. This leaves space for research that highlights meaningful strategies to battle against structural forces of marginalization, and in this case, present strategies to better facilitate the inclusion of racialized groups in ‘global cities’ and multicultural societies like Toronto, Canada. I have recently submitted this research in the form of a book proposal in Palgrave Macmillan’s Sport and Global Culture series, and look forward to using this conference as a platform to further refine my findings for an academic audience.
Dustin Ciufo, Trent University Durham
In her seminal 2006 article, Children and international relations: A new site of knowledge? Alison M.S. Watson encourages International Relations (IR) scholars to focus on how global affairs shape young people and how young people shape global affairs. Since this time, whether through closer engagement with Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) (Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2013; Vandenhole et al., 2015) or heightened focus within the discipline of IR proper (Huynh et al., 2015; Beier, 2020), there is a growing academic appreciation for the place of children amid international issues. Arriving at this moment has required a re-conceptualization of the child because according to Brocklehurst, “almost all definitions and concepts of children are premised on a notion of childhood as an experience which has or should have little in common with the political” (2015, 33). Therefore, it may seem antithetical when IR scholars are tasked with analyzing the relationship between militarism; society’s acceptance of force to solve political issues (Shepherd, 2018) and childhood. However, it is precisely this lens that facilitates the agency of children to offer a more robust understanding for how children and youth encounter militarism. This article examines the ways in which militarism is both endured and resisted through transnational youth activism in humanitarian disarmament. It contributes to the transnational youth activism literature (Hanson, 2023; Holzscheiter, 2020) by understanding the specific role of youth in navigating militarism by providing resistance to it through addressing the issue of landmines around the world. It is important to note the significance of the international movement to ban landmines. In the post-Cold War era, the United Nations Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (also known as the Ottawa Treaty) is considered among the most successful global disarmament initiative. With 164 states parties having ratified this treaty, there has developed a valuable humanitarian norm against the use of these inhumane weapons of war. The convention recognizes that as landmines do not distinguish between a civilian or combatant, they violate the 4th Geneva Convention and should never be used in war (Geneva Convention, 1949). While much has been written on the movement (Alcade, 2014; Forster, 2019; McGoldrick, 2008), including how children and youth suffering has been invoked for the purposes of disarmament, there is very limited literature that has explored the participatory advocacy roles that youth have contributed to eliminating the use of landmines around the world. Having completed ten qualitative interviews with youth in mine action from both the minority and majority world at the 21st Meeting of States Parties on the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention at the Office of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland this past November 2023, this article wishes to contribute the voices of these youths to this important humanitarian disarmament initiative. In particular, this research has explored the varied experiences of margins and privilege that these youth have shared as they navigate militarization and campaign for a landmine free world. This approach can advance these youths’ voices to broaden the unfolding narrative of global mine action at both the transnational and national levels of analysis, to reveal how children and youth are indeed a critical site of knowledge in the field of IR broadly and CCS specifically.