On-the-spots
K Reporters focuses on analysing children's democratic discourse and practices to understand how they build well-being in adverse social situations in Europe and other countries where child-related issues are promoted by children's practices, such as in Latin America, East and North Africa.
We recognise that conflicts and post-conflict situations influence our everyday lives in the territories involved in the project.
Countries and (Post)conflict Zones
We conduct fieldwork in different territories to explore how children engage with community-based organisations and social interventions, with the aim of developing children's agency.
Countries
Belgium, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Italy, Morocco, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands, Ukraine
Zones
Bordering territories, Poorest districts, Militarized zones, Refugee camps, Migratory settlements, Nomadic landscapes, Vulnerable spaces, Rural areas
Explore Map of project locations
Tematic group 1
Transitioning through conflict with unaccompanied minors and young migrants
Examining and reconsidering the concept of childhood, which establishes subjectivity in a specific time and space, leads to questioning the way in which migrant childhoods are considered, which do not conform to spatial and temporal ideals in their identity formation processes (Rajan, 2020). To this end, we question this permanent state of searching for belonging those migrant children experience, to focus on the idea of `social becoming` as a way of re-establishing relationships that are characterised more by relational fluidity and impermanence than by relational fixity in conventional spaces (Leifsen, 2013). From this perspective, we will address the tensions and conflicts of childhoods with `mobile¿ (López, 2022) and `mutant` (Hadj Handri, 2009) identities, considering this capacity to establish alliances and new modes of kinship to challenge dominant narratives about migrant childhoods and make new ones visible.
Tematic group 2
Intersectional vulnerability: precarious lives and wellbeing/violence in childhood
Understanding intersectional vulnerabilities in conflict and post-conflict contexts, shaped by the adult-centric, capitalist, colonial, and cisheteropatriarchal matrix of oppression, requires recognizing the specific experiences of violence and precariousness in children's communities. The consideration of these children discourses within an adult-centric context needs understanding a distinct childhood ontology. Here, intersections of gender, class, and race among multiple intersections reveal children's strategies for self-defence, agency, and wellbeing in conflict environments (Konstantoni and Emejulu, 2016). Therefore, pursuing this children ontology, an intersectional ethnography examines the symbolic and material distributions in children's communities in conjunction with their productions and the re-appropriations of gender capital (Foradada-Villar, 2024; 2021) in socio-educational contexts.
Tematic group 3
Children's acts of revolution in anti-extractivist and anti-colonial struggles
In the Global South, affected by the variant of extractive practices of the modern capitalist-colonialist system, communal struggles produce alternatives to the world "as we know it" by challenging neo-extractivism or the national exploitation of resources, which "are neither transformative nor emancipatory" (Hargreaves, 2019, 64). In a pluriversal gesture that transcends the geopolitical borders, territories are redrawn by and nourish interdependencies and relationalities (Latour, 2023), and reveal new possibilities for children to be, live and act. Aligned with anti-extractivist struggles, the anti-colonial responses to the current polycrisis are multiple: anti-racism, environmentalism, feminism, decolonization, anti-capitalism, among others. In this context, an ethnography of the acts of children's revolution, inspired by the 3Rs: resilience, reelaboration and resistance (Catz, 2004), focuses on anti-extractive and anti-colonial narratives co-created by/with children and young people.
