What is this project about? The project, organised by researchers at University College London (UCL), is about young people in coastal towns. We’re asking young people aged 15-20 what it’s like to grow up in your town today, and people aged 60+ what it was like growing up here in the past. Some of the topics we are interested in are: What do you think about your town? What kinds of opportunities does your town offer young people? What are the challenges? What would you change about your town for young people?

Using the answers you provide, we will consider whether growing up in a coastal town can impact on young people’s life chances; that is, their likelihood of having good outcomes in adulthood in terms of education, work, housing, and health and wellbeing.

Who is funding this project? This project is funded by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This project has been approved by the UCL Institute of Education Ethics Committee (REC 1553).

How can I take part in the project? If you agree to take part in the study, we will arrange a date/time for you to take part in a group workshop and/or an interview. We will also invite you to share a photo with us that represents what it’s like to grow up in a coastal town. The interviews will last about 30 – 45 minutes and the group workshop will be 2 hours long. If you agree, we would like to record our conversation (audio only for interviews, video for group discussions). These recordings are only used to make sure that we have an accurate account of what you told us; they will not be seen by anyone outside of the research team.

Your participation is voluntary: this means you do not have to take part in this project if you don’t want to and you can stop participating in the project at any time. You don’t have to answer any questions or take part in any activities that make you uncomfortable; if you don’t like the question or the activity, we can move on or stop the interview. If you later want to stop participating in the project, you can withdraw at any time by contacting Sam Whewall (s.whewall@ucl.ac.uk) or Avril Keating (a.keating@ucl.ac.uk).

If I agree to take part, what will happen to the information I give you? The information you give us will be used for research purposes only. This means we will share the information with our UCL project colleagues and our project partners, the Museum of Youth Culture and the LivingMaps Network. The information you give us will then be combined with information we get from other people we speak to for this project, and then used to write reports, blogs, journal articles, books or create photo exhibitions about growing up in coastal towns. These publications will be available to the public and to policymakers.

All data will be stored securely on UCL servers, and your personal information will be stored separately. Any data we collect from you (e.g. photos or maps) will be kept for a maximum of 10 years and deleted by 31st December 2035 at the latest.

Is the information I give confidential? All the personal information you provide is treated confidentially in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act 2018. There is more information on the next page about what this means and how we keep this promise. In short, this means that we will not share your personal information with anyone outside of the project team. We will make sure that your answers will be stored securely on a computer and kept separate from any personal details you give us. The only exception to this is if you share information that raises concerns about your safety or someone else’s safety. If this happens, we will have to pass this on to an appropriate adult (e.g. a teacher at your school or a youth worker at your youth club).

Is the information I give you anonymous? Your name real will not be used in any publications (e.g. books or blogs), and we will do our very best to remove any personal details so that no one will be able to identify you. However, if you share any photos with us, we would like to include these photos in creative exhibitions that will take place online (on the Museum of Youth Culture website) and in your local community. If you agree, we would like include your name, your age, and the name of your town alongside the photos you give us.

How do I stay informed about the project? We will post regular updates about this project on this Blog site and on Twitter (@uclglobalyouth). In addition, when we meet you we will ask you if you would like us to send you updates about the project findings via email. If you agree, we will send you updates once a year.

More questions? If you have any questions about the project, contact Sam Whewall (s.whewall@ucl.ac.uk) or the Project Leader, Avril Keating (a.keating@ucl.ac.uk) at University College London.

If you have any concerns about how your data is being used, you can contact the UCL Institute of Education Research Ethics Committee on ioe.researchethics@ucl.ac.uk or +44 (0)20 7911 5449.  Alternatively, you can contact UCL by emailing dataprotection@ucl.ac.uk, telephoning 020 7679 2000 or by writing to: University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. The data protection registration number for this project is: Z6364106/2021/09/62.

By Rachel Benchekroun, Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) UCL Social Research Institute

Whilst living on the coast may offer certain advantages, research shows that young people in coastal communities face poorer outcomes in education, employment and health than their peers in non-coastal towns (CMO 2021, HOL 2019, Agarwal et al. 2018, Wenham 2020). But how do young people feel about their coastal towns and their futures?

Image 1: Beach in NE Lincolnshire

We worked with young people from Grimsby and Cleethorpes to research this further. Six Young Researchers co-designed the research, interviewed residents, and helped analyse the data. Throughout the process, the Young Researchers were also supported by Pippa Curtin (the Voice and Influence Co-ordinator, North East Lincolnshire Council) and local lead for Young Advisors. Together we’ve been discovering how young people feel about their towns, their views on the opportunities available to them, and their aspirations for themselves and their towns.

Across two linked projects in 2021 and 2022, we carried out interviews and focus groups with a total of 39 young people aged 16 to 25. We also interviewed 30 older people aged over 60 to compare their experiences of growing up in the local area in earlier decades. We used participatory methods such as mapping, photo elicitation, life maps and a community walk.

Here is what we found out about young people’s perceptions and aspirations.

Move, return or stay?

Most of the 16- to 18-year-olds we interviewed felt they needed to move away to a larger town or city to access higher education, develop specialized knowledge and skills, and find a well-paid job: ‘The jobs that we want to do, we can’t really do here.’

This was especially important to young people considering professions – such as law, medicine or academic research – as well as roles in the creative sector. We refer to this group as ‘movers’.

For young people like 17-year-old Alex, the lack of local opportunities for certain kinds of career, and the relative geographical isolation of Grimsby and Cleethorpes, meant they would need to move to a bigger town or city:

‘You’ve got to go into the city, specifically London, to be able to participate in [specialised] jobs. And that is something we are lacking as a coastal town, kind of on the edge of everything. We are too far away from London – which I think is such a disadvantage.’

Image 2: ‘Future life map’ created by Katy, aged 17

Many young people saw moving to a city as the only way to achieve their personal and professional goals. Some even planned to move abroad to develop their careers. This can be seen in the ‘future life map’ created by Katy, aged 17 (see Image 2).

Several young people were clear that once they moved away, they would not return to their coastal town: (‘I can confidently say that I don’t wanna come back.’). For a small number, however, moving away was necessary only to develop skills that they intended to bring back for the benefit of the community, for example in the role of youth worker or teacher. This group, whom we refer to as ‘returners’, seemed to be motivated by values of social justice. For example, Kayla (18), told us:

‘I just want to help the youth of Grimsby and to show that no matter where you’re from or no matter what background, you can always make something of your life and do amazing things. […] We shouldn’t have less opportunities just because we’re at this end of the country or just because we’re in this postcode, do you know what I mean? We all deserve the same opportunities, not just the bigger cities.’

A third group of young participants (‘stayers’) were those who did not plan to move away, whether temporarily or permanently. Several, like Lisa (18), had actively decided to stay:

‘I think I like living here, and I just don’t think I really want to move away and be that far away from my family. I feel like there’s what I need here to like progress with my life rather than moving away.’

For these young people, maintaining regular contact with their family and other support networks was important, and they felt they could achieve their education and career plans locally.

Other young people were vague about their future plans – perhaps because of uncertainty about whether to continue with post-compulsory education, what kind of job or career they hoped to do, or what the pathway to achieving this looked like.

Our research has shown that experiences of growing up in Grimsby and Cleethorpes have changed significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. When older residents were teenagers, there had been plenty of local well-paid work for school-leavers, so the majority of young people stayed in the local area – and felt a strong sense of belonging. But changes to the local economy in recent decades mean that local jobs for young people nowadays are more likely to be precarious and low paid. The marginal location of coastal towns, limited transport networks and the availability of resources, including support networks, intersect with the realities of the local economy to shape young people’s decisions about whether to move away, return, or stay put. This has implications both for the futures of young people and the future of their coastal communities.

This research was funded by UCL IOE Seed Funding, UCL Grand Challenges and the Pro-Vice Provost (UK). These findings are taken from our forthcoming Emerging Findings report, which will be published next week.

We are pleased to announce that we have received funding from the ESRC to expand our research on young people living in coastal towns. Starting in January 2023, our Director (Avril Keating) will work together with Professor Claire Cameron, Dr Stephen Jivraj and Dr Emily Murray to conduct a 3 year, mixed method study of young lives in coastal towns.

What is the new study about?    This larger project examines the ways in which growing up in a coastal town can impact on young people’s life chances; that is, their likelihood of having good outcomes in adulthood in terms of education, work, housing, and health and wellbeing. We focus on coastal towns as some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK are now in coastal areas. Coastal towns have attracted a lot of attention in recent UK policy debates, and these discussions often raise concerns about the future of young people in these towns, largely because of the limited educational and employment opportunities. Despite this, there is very little research on the impact of growing up in a coastal town on young people’s experiences, attitudes, or life chances. This project will address this gap by looking at the spatial inequalities in life chances experienced by contemporary coastal youth, as well as change over the life course (as these young people get older) and change over time (ie: intergenerational differences in experiences and outcomes).

Our research questions:   More specifically, this project will address four key questions:

1. (a) Does growing up in coastal towns, compared to similarly deprived areas in England and Wales, impact on the life chances of young people? (b) Do these inequalities in life chances persist over the life course or narrow in later age?
2. What are the environmental mechanisms linking growing up in a coastal town to adverse life chances in adulthood?
3. What personal attributes or experiences can help mitigate the initial drawback of growing up in a coastal town (e.g. parental support, residential mobility, or aspiration)?
4. What interventions could improve the life chances of young people in coastal communities, based (a) on the results of quasi-experimental quantitative methods and (b) on coastal residents’ own views?

Our research methods:   We will address these questions using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative analysis draws on longitudinal survey data from three different generations that allow us to compare the outcomes of adolescents from the 1970s, the 1980s and the 2000s. These cohort studies enable us to consider: change over the life course (as respondents grow up and move into later adulthood); change over time (inter-generational differences); and changes in geography (intra-generational differences between coastal and non-coastal youth). We can also use these data to test potential policy solutions by applying quasi-experimental quantitative methods.

The project also includes a qualitative strand that will produce original data with current residents of coastal towns. In 6 coastal towns in England and Wales we will talk to younger and older residents about their experiences of growing up in coastal towns and their views about the opportunities and aspirations for young people in the town. Residents will also be asked for their views of what their town needs to do to improve the life chances of young people. Change over time will be further examined by comparing youth aspirations from today with those compiled in the NCDS 1969 archive of student essays.

Part of this strand will be completed using co-production methods that involve recruiting, training, and supporting young people to become Young Researchers in their community. We will also use arts-and place-based methods such as postcard-making, walking interviews, life maps and ethnocartographic methods. For these activities, we will partner with Young Advisors and LivingMaps Network.

Planned impact and outputs:   The findings from these analyses will bring new insights to academic debates as well as new policy proposals for public discussions about place-based disparities in health, wellbeing, employment, and education. Our findings will thus contribute to recent discussions about Levelling Up and addressing regional inequalities (HM Govt, 2022) as well as longer-standing discussions about equal opportunities to life chances (Field, 2010) and health inequalities (CMO, 2021). While various reports have identified the areas of concern, few advanced analyses or youth-focused solutions have been offered, and we expect that this project can contribute to filling these gaps. Local policymakers and practitioners will also benefit from a deeper understanding of how their younger and older residents view their town currently, and how they wish their town to develop in the future.

Find out more about our pilot projects: This new project builds on two pilot projects that we conducted in 2021 (funded by IOE SIB Seed Funding) and 2022 (funded by UCL Grand Challenges). To find out more about these pilots, check out our previous blog posts:

• Intergenerational perspectives on growing up in coastal towns: a new project on coastal youth experiences
• Growing up in coastal towns: exploring the impact of place on young people’s life chances
• Researching with young people in coastal towns: What have we learned about co-production with young people?

By Rachel Benchekroun (Research Assistant, TCRU/CGY) and Pippa Curtin (Voice and influence co-ordinator, North East Lincolnshire Council)

Living in a coastal town in the UK offers unique opportunities, but research shows there are increased risks of poor outcomes in health, education and employment (CMO 2021, HOL 2019, Agarwal et al. 2018). Geographical isolation, limited transport networks and the decline of fishing and heavy industries since the 1970s have been key factors.

Our new project builds on earlier work led by Dr Avril Keating (Centre for Global Youth) with young people in Grimsby and Cleethorpes, and asks about growing up in coastal towns today compared with earlier, more prosperous, eras. We are co-producing the new study with young people and community groups, bringing together residents of different generations to explore their experiences of growing up in North East Lincolnshire. How has life changed in their coastal towns since the postwar ‘boom’ years, and how has this shaped young people’s experiences of growing up? What do residents of different generations see as the challenges for young people in coastal towns, and how might these be overcome?

Co-producing knowledge

We will also explore how co-production methodologies can facilitate intergenerational dialogue on these issues, and we’ll seek to develop shared understandings. UCL researchers, national organisation Young Advisors and NE Lincolnshire Council are excited to develop our collaborative work. This month, we’re training a group of young people as young researchers. Through a series of workshops, we’re working together to design and carry out research with young and older residents.

As a team, we’re developing innovative participatory methods, including community events to host group discussions, in-depth one-to-one interviews using potographic and mapping methods, and walking tours of Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Walking tours will offer opportunities not only for learning about local heritage, but also for finding out about future developments and sharing visions and aspirations. We aim to capture participants’ stories, reflections and ideas by recording conversations and taking photographs during our walks.

We’ll bring participants together to discuss and debate the challenges young people face growing up in coastal towns, and to share ideas for how these should be tackled. Together, we’ll make a plan to share our findings with local and regional stakeholders, such as the Greater Grimsby Board (responsible for overseeing the Grimsby Masterplan), decision-makers from NE Lincs Children’s Services and Adults’ Services, and the Coastal Communities Alliance. Our young researchers will play a key role in sharing findings from this research project. We want to ensure that policymakers are taking account of young people’s views in shaping the future of their towns.

Project partners and funders

Thomas Coram Research Unit, part of UCL Social Research Institute, is delighted to have been awarded funding for this project by UCL Grand Challenges Special Initiatives (under the ‘Intergenerational Dynamics’ theme), as well as additional funding from the Office of the Pro-Vice-Provost (UK). The funding will enable us to build relationships with a range of partners, including researchers at the University of Lincoln. Led by Prof Claire Cameron, and supported by Niccola Hutchinson-Pascal of the Co-Production Collective, we’ve started sharing ideas about co-production with Dr Anna Tarrant and Debbie Taylor of the Grimsby Dads Collective, participatory heritage projects with Prof Carenza Lewis, and heath inequalities in rural areas with Prof Mark Gussy. We’re keen to build on existing partnerships and look forward to developing new partnerships with local and national arts, heritage and community organisations and employers interested in our research topic, including Onside (currently developing Grimsby’s new Horizon Youth Zone centre) and Associated British Ports. This project will run from March – 31 October 2022.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

The second webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 20th October from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the inter-related issues of race, class, youth and city.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Presentation 1: Blasted Places – Smog, Steel and Stigma in a Post-industrial Region

Professor Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University

In 2015 the death knell tolled on Redcar steelworks in Teesside, North East England, ending 170-year-old history of steelmaking in the region.  The nearest major urban agglomeration, Middlesbrough, was literally brought-into-being with the discovery of iron ore, the rise of heavy engineering and later developments in petro-chemical manufacture.  Steel-manufacture, engineering and industry provided a stable future for generations of young people in the region.  But what happens when an area, spawned from the material elements of the Anthropocene, is no longer regarded as profitable?  When the iron core of its very constitution implodes, leaving it depicted as a redundant, polluted and blasted place?  This paper explores this transition and how Middlesbrough has come to be stigmatized as a ‘sulpherous zone’ (Wacquant, 2007), tarnished by chemical pollutants, high rates of unemployment, drugs and longstanding early teenage pregnancy.  It investigates the heavy weight of stigma in Teesside, how it comes to be attached to bodies, neighbourhoods, the natural environment and social life more generally.  However, contrary to the work of Wacquant (Wacquant, 2007; Wacquant et al. 2014) and other urban sociologists writing on territorial stigma, the study explores forms of local resistance and collective attempts by residents to reclaim, rework and re-script the supposedly stigmatized places they reside in.

Author Biography: Anoop Nayak is a Professor of Social & Cultural Geography at Newcastle University. His research interests are in: race and ethnic studies; youth, culture and social Class; and gender, masculinities and social Change. Anoop has published widely in these areas and is author of Race, Place and Globalization:  Youth Cultures in a Changing World (2003 Oxford: Berg).  He is co-author with Mary Jane Kehily of a joint monograph Gender, Youth and Culture:  Global Masculinities and Femininities (2013 2^nd Ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan), and has published a social theory book on spatial relations of power with Alex Jeffrey entitled Geographical Thought (Routledge, 2013).  Anoop is currently leading a funded project exploring ‘Young People, Diversity and Belonging in a Post-Brexit Age’ (REA) and an ESRC co-production award exploring masculinities and care, ‘Boys to Men:  Developing New Templates for Masculinities in Primary Schools’.

Presentation 2: The Creative Underclass

Dr Tyler Denmead, University of Cambridge

In his book The Creative Underclass, Denmead critically examines his paradoxical role as the founder of an American-based arts studio for youth. Some young people have credited the studio with providing transformative educational experiences, while, at the same time, acting as a gentrifying force in their neighbourhoods. Denmead will discuss how the concept of the creative underclass is useful in understanding this paradoxical dispossession-through-inclusion and the ways in which young people trouble the racial logics of creative-led urban transformation.

Author Biography: Tyler Denmead teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and at Queens’ College.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

The fourth webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 17th November from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the theme of youth voice, and will feature research from London and Athens.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

The practical ethics of doing urban planning research with young people

Hannah Sender, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL

In this presentation, we’ll talk about what makes co-producing research with young people possible, and a positive experience. We’ll touch on different matters to do with practical ethics, including project management and design, mental health support, and payment. Whilst we’ll draw on our own experiences of working with/as young researchers in London, we aim to tease out some lessons we’ve learned which can be relevant for others working in different contexts.

Author Biography: Hannah Sender is a PhD student and Research Fellow at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. She is interested in how changes in urban areas affect adolescents’ everyday lives, subjectivities and futures. Hannah works with young people of different genders, nationalities, ethnicities and with different abilities, in Lebanon and the UK. She develops creative and collaborative methodologies which support young people to be researchers of their own lives and neighbourhoods.

Youth voice in the city – involving young people in research and planning and decision-making

Dr. Tom Western, UCL Department of Geography

This talk details a set of collaborative methods for creative activism. It centres on Athens, and the ways that people build autonomous spaces of research, knowledge, and cultural production – both as techniques of voice and mobilisation, and as means of remapping and remaking the city. I will narrate these methods through a project called the Active Citizens Sound Archive, which I run with my colleagues in the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF). The archive is a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, and community mobilising. It sings relational and collective geographies. It foregrounds imagination as a tool of social and political transformation, required to think things otherwise: to unmake borders, to form counterpublics, to assert presence and belonging, to open the city. The talk aims to share these methods of collaboration, relation, and imagination – detailing how academic and activist knowledges combine, and how vocal politics carry into research, planning, and decision-making.

Author Biography: Tom Western is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL. His teaching and research centre on movements and migrations, cities and citizenships, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms. Tom works primarily in Athens, Greece, where he studies and contributes to migratory activisms and creative citizenship movements. Based on this work, Tom is currently writing a book titled Circular Movements: Migratory Citizenships in Athens. The book hears how people in Athens creatively contest the logics of borders and citizenship regimes, reimagining questions of being and belonging in the city, and remaking citizenships against citizenship.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

The first webinar in our Youth and the City webinar series takes places on Wednesday, 20th October from 12 noon – 1pm (UK time). This webinar will focus on the theme of precarity, and will feature research from London and Nairobi.

To register for this event and receive a Zoom link for the webinar, visit our Eventbrite page. The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on the CGY YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Presentation 1: ‘Press-ganged’ Generation Rent: Youth homelessness, precarity and poverty in East London

Paul Watt, Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London.

This paper examines youth homelessness, precarity and poverty via a critical account of ‘Generation Rent’ – that young people are living in the private rental sector (PRS) in perpetuity having been locked out of both homeownership and social renting. The post-2008 crash period has witnessed a profound transformation in young people’s tenure expectations and experiences such that homeownership has become an impossible dream for most, while social renting has also become increasingly out-of-reach for working-class youth due to four decades of neoliberalisation and the last decade of austerity welfare cutbacks. Rather than being a transitional tenure for young people embarking on their housing careers, the PRS has become their de facto tenure of destination, hence giving rise to the influential notion of ‘Generation Rent’. This paper examines precarity and the notion of Generation Rent by focussing on employment (non-standard contracts) and housing (insecurity and evictions) with reference to in-depth interviews undertaken with 55 young people aged 18-30. This multi-ethnic group of low-income, working-class youth were living in temporary accommodation either in East London or in South East England having been displaced there from London. The paper illustrates the interlinkages between employment and housing precarity. However, despite the young people’s well-founded antipathy towards the PRS, they were being steered towards this tenure by housing officials – not renting from the PRS was no longer an option. Therefore, if the PRS is becoming a ‘tenure of destination’ for young people, this represents a case of coerced, ‘press-ganged’ Generation Rent for Black, Asian and white working-class youth.

Author Biography: Paul Watt is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published widely on social housing, urban regeneration, homelessness, gentrification, suburbanisation, and the 2012 Olympic Games. His most recent book is Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2021):

Presentation 2: Hustling recentred – thinking with Nairobi to understand young working lives in the post-wage economy.

Dr Tatiana Thieme, UCL Geography

This presentation draws on ethnographic research in one of Nairobi’s oldest and largest informal settlements, Mathare, where young people mobilise the notion of ‘hustle’ to express narratives of struggle, day to day income opportunities, and solidarities in under-served neighbourhoods. In this context, everyday young lives navigate constant economic, social and political insecurity, caught in a state of suspension (or ‘waithood’) while shaping local practices of provisioning in the absence of formal structures of support. The presentation will reflect on the temporalities and terrains of the hustle economy in Mathare, which include the emerging tensions and solidarities between different generations of youth, and between youth who stay and those who leave ‘the hood’. Finally, the presentation will pan out to reflect on how ‘hustling’ is situated within wider debates around the future of work for youth. Here I reflect on hustling as an increasingly globalised vernacular, that simultaneously presents an affirmative narrative of work outside normative conventions of the wage, while also echoing on-going expressions of racial capitalism and marginalisation.

Author Biography: Dr Tatiana Thieme is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at UCL Geography. Her research interests engage with different aspects of entrepreneurial and makeshift urbanism, and recent research has focused on alternative cultural and economic geographies related to the politics of urban poverty, informal work, and everyday coping strategies in contexts of precarious urban environments. The three sub-themes of her research are: Urban political ecology of sanitation and waste; Youth geographies and “hustle” economies; social enterprise and development.

About the Youth and the City webinar series

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

The Centre for Global Youth (CGY) is hosting a series of webinars to explore questions of youth and cities. Over 5 weeks during October to November 2021, these 1-hour seminars will bring together a range of guest speakers to share new research and engage in dialogue about how young people use, relate to, challenge and remake urban spaces. Spanning research in cities from the Global North and South, session topics will include precarity, race, social class, activism, music, and youth voice. Contributors will draw on theories from sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and beyond. Overall, the aim of the program is to overcome silos of urban sociology, youth studies and allied fields, and encourage further conversations at critical intersections of youth and cities.

When? The webinars will take place on Wednesday from 12-1 on the following dates:

• Week 1: Precarity, youth and the city – 20^th October
• Week 2: Race, class, youth and the city – 27^th October
• Week 3: Youth activism in the city  – 3^rd November
• Week 4: Youth voice in the city – involving young people in research and planning and decision-making – 17^th November.
• Week 5: Youth and music in the city – 24th November

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr Tatiana Thieme, UCL Department of Geography
• Professor Paul Watt, Birkbeck University
• Professor Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University
• Dr Tyler Denmead, University of Cambridge
• Dr Sarah Pickard, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
• Dena Arya, Nottingham Trent University
• Dr. Joseph Egwurube, University of La Rochelle
• Hannah Sender, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL
• Tom Western, UCL Department of Geography
• Dr Gabriel Dattatreyan, Goldsmiths

The webinars will also be recorded and later posted on our YouTube channel for those who cannot attend during the live session.

Organisational details: The series is co-ordinated by Avril Keating, Caroline Oliver, and Brett Lashua. To book your ticket and receive a link for the webinar, please visit our Eventbrite page.

Privacy: For information about UCL’s privacy practices and how UCL uses your data, please see the UCL General Privacy Notice.

Coastal towns have come to the fore in recent UK policy debates, as some of the most deprived neighbourhoods are now in coastal areas. These debates often raise concerns about the future of young people in these towns, largely because of the limited educational and employment opportunities in these communities. Despite this, there is almost no research on the impact of growing up in coastal communities on young people and their future prospects. The core aim of this project, therefore, is to consider: in what ways does growing up in a coastal town impact on young people’s experiences, aspirations, and life chances?

The project is particularly interested in the impact of place-based inequalities as coastal towns tend to have distinct characteristics because of:

• Location and infrastructure (e.g. geographical isolation and poor transport links)
• Local labour market (e.g. limited opportunities for stable, year-round employment).
• Educational opportunities: (e.g. few post-16 institutions and difficulties recruiting teachers)
• Demography: (e.g. high levels of youth out-migration and residents on low incomes)
• Public and health services: (g. difficulties recruiting GPs; cuts to youth services)
• Environment: (e.g. less polluted, but environmental degradation because of funding cuts and concentration of deprivation).

Our first task is to examine whether these characteristics create place-based inequalities that mean coastal towns are distinct from other deprived communities in the UK. If so, do these inequalities have a unique impact on the life chances of young people who grow up in coastal towns?

The second aim is to ask young people about their experiences of growing up in coastal communities and asking them if these experiences have shaped their aspirations for the future. At the same time, we will also ask them: what are the solutions they would propose to improve their coastal communities? What do they feel these communities need in order to provide a environment for young people where they can flourish?

This will be a mixed-method project that will combine secondary data analysis with more exploratory qualitative data collection activities that combine arts-based methods with co-production and collaborative activities with young people living in coastal towns. The project builds on previous work undertaken in Margate.

For further information, contact: Avril Keating.

Project team:

• Avril Keating, Director of the Centre for Global Youth
• Prof Claire Cameron, Professor of Social Pedagogy, Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), and UCL-Institute of Education
• Dr Michela Franceshelli, Associate Professor of Sociology, TCRU and UCL-Institute of Education
• Dr Emily Murray, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
• Dr Stephen Jivraj, Associate Professor in Quantitative Social Science based in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
• Rachel Benchekroun (Research Assistant)
• Francesca McCarthy (Research Assistant)

Start date: 1 June 2021

End date: 28^th Feb 2022

To view a recording of this webinar, visit our Youtube channel.

On Tuesday 1st June, 2021, 12 noon UK time. Register for this event on Eventbrite.

The fifth and final webinar in this series focuses on the distinct mobility experiences of young unaccompanied asylum seekers and the challenges they face after they arrive in the UK.

Dr Elaine Chase and Dr Rachel Rosen seek to understand youth mobilities (and immobilities) within the context of violent and discriminatory immigration systems and structures which also shape largely restrictive welfare regimes.  They argue that the most urgent issues we need to understand are not the factors driving young people to move/stay, but rather their experiences of and interactions with immigration and welfare systems and structures once they arrive in the UK/Europe. COVID-19 has added another layer of complexity to all this (impacting on access to asylum procedures/ justice/rights etc).  In such contexts, aspirations frequently become collective endeavours to reshape the immigration/welfare landscape through collective voice and forms of advocacy.

Presentation 1: Lives on Hold our Stories Told (LOHST): Unaccompanied migrant young people’s perspectives on the impact of COVID-19 on their lives and wellbeing

Dr Elaine Chase, UCL Institute of Education

Previous work has shown how the wellbeing outcomes of unaccompanied migrant young people arriving in the UK, particularly as they make the transition to institutional ‘adulthood’ at 18, are structured by complex immigration, social care and related policies.  Hence, vulnerabilities in the context of mobility and migration are fundamentally politically-induced (Chase and Allsopp 2020).  COVID- 19 has added another layer of complexity to the lives of young people seeking the right to remain in the UK and build their futures here.  This presentation will capture the approach and early findings from a peer-research study into the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s access to legal and social support and on their lives more generally- LOHST. It illustrates how contexts of ‘crisis’ can be generative of endeavours to reshape the immigration/ welfare landscape through collective voice and advocacy.

About the author: Elaine Chase is an Associate Professor in Education, Health Promotion and International Development at UCL Institute of Education. Elaine’s teaching and research focus on the sociological dimensions of health, wellbeing and rights of individuals and communities, particularly those most likely to experience marginalisation and exclusion. Elaine is particularly interested in the interface between policy, practice and context. Current research focuses on the wellbeing outcomes of children, young people and families subject to immigration control and on educational wellbeing in contexts of mass displacement.

Presentation 2: ‘Between waithood and alternative futures: children and young people on the move’

Dr Rachel Rosen, UCL Social Research Institute

Accounts of children and young people young people who have come to the UK on their own through precarious migration routes have aptly demonstrated that their futures are held hostage by a restrictive migration regime. Prolonged periods of uncertain waithood for regularised status, combined with anti-migrant sentiments in the UK’s hostile environment, can foreclose imaginaries of the future in what anthropologist Nicolas De Genova refers to as an ‘enforced presentism’.

In this paper, I do not dispute the detrimental effects of restrictive migration regimes on the futures of separated child migrants. Instead, in thinking with research data from Children Caring on the Move (CCoM), I seek to complicate such understandings. Heeding recent warnings not to collapse migrants into the temporality of waithood or futureless lives where regularised status in a national order is the route to a stable future, I attend to young migrants’ care for and about others while they wait. Doing so, I argue, provides insights not only into waithood and its afterlife, but reorients conceptualisations of young people’s future to the uneven possibilities and practices for imagining and constructing alternative futures.

About the author: Rachel Rosen is an Associate Professor at the UCL Social Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersections of unequal childhoods, social reproduction, and migration in neoliberal border regimes. She co-leads the ESRC-funded Children Caring on the Move project.

This series is hosted by the UCL Centre for Global Youth and co-organised by Dr. Avril Keating (Director of the Centre), Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University of Cambridge) and Rachel Benchekroun (UCL-IOE). The series is funded by IOE International.