Kate Pahl’s research while affiliated with Manchester Metropolitan University and other places

Young people, under the age of 30, living in informal settlements in Kenya face complex and challenging socio-cultural and economic environments. These increasingly include forced displacement, migration, unstable families, violence and mental health problems. Inequities, including those linked to poverty and gender, shape all aspects of adolescent health and wellbeing and these have been exacerbated by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Young people, as experts in their own lives, are uniquely positioned to provide solutions to their challenges; yet they often remain on the periphery of Kenya’s social, economic and political affairs. They are rarely included in community programming or their role is tokenised, which limits their potential. This chapter contends that a paradigm shift is required, to enable young people to design, implement and evaluate their own programmes. Using the example of a youth organisation in Kenya – Nzumari Africa – the chapter focuses on how youth leadership can create systemic shifts: mobilising young people to challenge the status quo as well as addressing the barriers to their wider participation.

This chapter explores how tokenism often features in community development work with and for young people. We explore how Nzumari Africa focus on youth leadership to create systemic shifts in Kenya. They mobilise young people to challenge the status quo and address the barriers to their wider participation. We focus on Yvonne Ochieng's personal journey from high school graduate to programme manager, to position the very real barriers to youth participation that she and her peers have experienced and how they have pushed forward their agenda to be heard as a community. As we discuss Nzumari Africa's approach to radical democracy, we reflect on shared practice, drawing parallels with Su Lyn Corcoran and Kate Pahl's research experience with young people in the United Kingdom, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Almost three-quarters of the population of Kenya is under the age of 30 (World Population Review, nd). Across the country, 46 per cent of the urban population live in informal settlements (World Bank, 2018) and this number is greater when only considering Nairobi where over 60 per cent of the population reside informally on 6 per cent of the city's available land (Onyango and Tostensen, 2015). Congested standards of living, and associated problems facing young people in informal settlements, result in complex and challenging socio-cultural and economic environments. Such conditions are further exacerbated for those also experiencing forced displacement, migration, unstable families, violence and mental health problems. Inequities, including those linked to poverty and gender, shape all aspects of adolescent health and wellbeing (World Health Organization, nd). Despite young people making up a majority of the population, they predominantly remain on the periphery of Kenya's social, economic and political affairs. There is competition for a limited number of statemaintained school places (for example, Dixon and Tooley, 2012) and young people who are disadvantaged by being out of school are also relatively disadvantaged in socio-economic outcomes and lack sufficient economic empowerment (Ministry of Public Service, Kenya, 2018). Given predicted levels of population growth and associated urbanisation, there is an increasing need for social services related to education and other social amenities that improve skills generation, employment and health-related outcomes (Mahabir et al, 2016).

This article is an exploration of the zine as a form of practice that is radical and disruptive. It takes the form of six sections and has its own zine armature. It describes a zine workshop held in Kampala, Uganda, during lockdown, and constitutes a record of that event. The authors argue that zine-making is itself a form that can offer a queering of the status quo and can make authors of us all. It invites the reader into the space of the zine as a form that is both materially grounded and epistemologically challenging.

The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution‐focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co‐opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures.