My Research

Just as my academic training crosses disciplinary boundaries, so too does my research. I am an interdisciplinary scholar working on various themes in the broad area of children’s geographies and their bearing on social justice and child protection. My community-based participatory research program is anchored in interpretivism and draws on the idea of the social construction of childhood and youthhood with a focus on children and youth living and working in marginal spaces. My scholarship has tended to focus on how the knowledge and agency of children and youth are overlooked and how children and youth negotiate marginality and exclusion. The central premise of child rights violation that my program interrogates is underpinned by the pervasion of age-based power and/or adult privilege in decision making about matters concerning children and youth. My scholarship demonstrates the various injustices faced by children and youth, how they negotiate them, as well as their gendered nature. I prioritize the perception of young people as agents whose voices should count in research and practice. Hence, the fundamental tenet that underlies my scholarship is the centrality of children’s life experiences in their socio-political and geographical contexts and those of their families and communities. I interrogate the entrenchment of decontextualized child and youth policy and practice that is rooted in oppressive social norms and Euro-Western values and ways of knowing.