This seminar explores how displacement and mobility shape children’s wellbeing, drawing on research with Syrian Armenian children and families who moved to Armenia following the Syrian war. It highlights the value of child-centred, participatory and intersectional approaches in humanitarian contexts and offers insights for inclusive policy and practice in the fields of child and social protection and migration.
This seminar presents key findings from a research project exploring the wellbeing of Syrian Armenian children, young people, and their families who moved to Armenia following the Syrian war. Roughly 100 years after the Armenian genocide, the move of roughly 22000 Syrian Armenians to Armenia has been framed both as homecoming and as renewed diaspora.
Grounded in child-centred, participatory, and ethnographic research methods—including play, draw-and-tell activities, and photovoice—the study explores how children experience and shape wellbeing in contexts of mobility and integration. Applying an intersectional lens, it investigates how children’s strategies for wellbeing are influenced by their mobility histories, legal status, and everyday interactions across home, community, and institutional settings.
While wellbeing frameworks have become more multidimensional in recent years, dominant approaches continue to emphasise externally defined, individual outcomes. This seminar challenges such paradigms by conceptualising wellbeing as a relational, processual, and locally constituted experience—especially pertinent in the context mobilities. It highlights how children navigate intergenerational expectations, negotiate their identities as migrants or ‘refugees,’ and make sense of social norms around what it means to be ‘doing well’ or being a ‘good child’—all while responding to institutional systems such as child welfare, school, and migration services.
The seminar gives particular attention to how gender and age intersect to shape children’s sense of agency, access to opportunities, and inclusion or exclusion. It also reflects on the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting research with children in post-conflict and humanitarian contexts, offering insights into participatory practice and knowledge production with marginalised groups.
This seminar will be of particular interest to researchers working in the fields of childhood and youth studies, wellbeing, migration and mobility, social protection, and inclusive child welfare. It offers both theoretical and practical contributions to current debates on how to conceptually combine wellbeing and mobility, how to meaningfully centre children’s perspectives in research and policy, and concludes with reflections on the implications of the findings for designing contextually grounded, inclusive, and empowering services for children and families in situations of mobility.
Speaker
- Rosie Willi, IDS PhD graduate
Chairs
- Dr. Dorte Thorsen (Research fellow, IDS)
- Prof. Charles Watters (Sussex University)
How to watch
You can attend in person or register to watch online.
Accessibility
This event will take place in the IDS Convening space which is on the 1st floor of the IDS Building. If you need to use a lift then press floor 1A.
If you have any accessibility issues then contact [email protected]
Key contacts
