“The Girl Should Just Clean Up the Mess”

Abstract

In this article, I seek to disrupt the idea of the meaningful engagement of young people in policy-making by raising questions about what it means to engage policy makers meaningfully in responding to the work of young people. Paradoxically, we have extensive work on how young people might become engaged in social research particularly through participatory visual methodologies and, increasingly work on how young people themselves voice their concerns about social issues through vlogs and other do-it-yourself social media platforms, and yet relatively little on how their productions can have an impact either directly or indirectly on the policy-making process. Participatory work with young people is often dismissed as being tokenistic or romanticized, and the term “from the ground up” policy-making runs the risk of being overused and undertheorized. To illuminate the issues, I draw on work with a group of policy makers responding to the photo images produced by young people, all students in Agricultural Technical Vocational Educational Training Colleges in Ethiopia. Critically their responses, ones like “the girl should just clean up the mess,” highlight the implications of audience and especially the notion of how adults/policy makers view young people in youth-focused projects.