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Objectives Ensuring youth participation in policymaking that affects their health and well-being is increasingly recognized as a strategy to improve young people’s reproductive health. This paper aimed to describe the policy context and analyze underlying factors that influence youth participation in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) policymaking in Malawi. Methods This critical, focused ethnographic study is informed by postcolonial feminism and difference-centered citizenship theory, based on data collected from October 2017 to May 2018. Multiple research methods were employed: document analysis, focus group discussions, and “moderate” participant observation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants and youth, supplemented by open-ended drawing exercises with youth. Results Progressive policies and the presence of youth in some policymaking structures indicate substantial headway in Malawi. However, underlying structural and societal factors circumscribe young people’s lived experiences of participation. Conclusions Despite recent progress in involving young people in SRH policymaking, notable gaps remain between policy and practice. Recognizing and integrating young people in all stages of SRH policymaking is critical to catalyzing the social and political changes necessary to ensure their reproductive health and well-being. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00038-020-01357-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Schools are important spaces for mental health promotion, prevention and early intervention. This chapter describes a study that used mural art created by young people to translate knowledge about first episode psychosis and pathways to mental healthcare. Our interest was in gauging reactions to the mural by using forms of expression via a ‘graffiti wall’ medium. A number of ‘graffiti walls’, blank scrolls of paper positioned near the mural, were created for secondary students to record their reactions to the mural. Cognitive and affective reactions to viewing and engaging with the mural installation were collected. Over 600 textual and visual responses were recorded on the walls across multiple school settings. Our analysis was inspired by new materialism theory, which helped us to explicate the role played by the graffiti walls as non-human actors within mural-wall-respondent assemblages. We used an interpretive thematic analysis, attending to the relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities generated within mural-wall-respondent assemblages. The graffiti wall afforded diverse agential capacities both inwards, in the form of affective forces and proliferating interpretations of the work, and outwards, in the form of creating relational connections between the artists and the students, and among the students themselves. Implications for youth-centred education and mental health awareness are discussed.

Although claims to “give voice” to children through qualitative inquiry seem morally just and have been largely framed by good intentions, critical scholarship has called for reflexive reconsiderations of such claims. Re/presentations of voice permeate published accounts of qualitative research with children; similarly, voice is a term invoked frequently in qualitative research with informants of all ages. In this article, we follow Spyrou’s notion of “troubling” to review, critique, and synthesize key works by critical child-focused scholars who have reflexively queried and worked with the epistemological and methodological limits of “giving voice” to children through qualitative inquiry. Building on the reviewed literature, as well as poststructural approaches to framing voice in research more generally, we briefly discuss how we have built on these critiques in our own research. In so doing, we join ongoing dialogues aimed at generating alternative approaches to theorizing and re/presenting children’s perspectives in qualitative inquiry more justly.

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Hiring and promotion of qualitative researchers in the health sciences, in Canada and internationally, is impacted by the prestige of quantification as the ultimate measure of scientific quality in current academic and health-care settings. This is further exacerbated by neoliberal notions of productivity, which offer very limited forms of assessment for different ways of producing knowledge or doing science differently. While qualitative researchers share the effects of the politics of productivity and corporate university policies with other academics, we argue that they are disadvantaged by the combination of the latent biomedical conservatism that characterizes the health sciences in Canada with the lack of frameworks to acknowledge and properly assess alternative forms of interdisciplinary scholarship. In our experience, it is challenging for qualitative researchers to advance in Canadian health sciences faculties. In light of this, we propose a framework for evaluating their scholarly work. We have structured this article in three sections: (a) to characterize the academic landscape in which qualitative health scholars find themselves when housed in Canadian faculties of medicine and their schools of health sciences, (b) to report on an organizational scan we undertook in order to understand current practices of evaluating scholarly productivity at these institutions, and (c) to propose a set of criteria that could more appropriately evaluate the contributions made by qualitative researchers working in the health sciences.

Using the Canadian context as a case study, the research reported here focuses on in-depth qualitative interviews with 36 researchers, artists and trainees engaged in ‘doing’ arts-based health research (ABHR). We begin to address the gap in ABHR knowledge by engaging in a critical inquiry regarding the issues, challenges and benefits of ABHR methodologies. Specifically, this paper focuses on the tensions experienced regarding academic legitimacy and the use of the arts in producing and disseminating research. Four central areas of tension associated with academic legitimacy are described: balancing structure versus openness and flexibility; academic obligations of truth and accuracy; resisting typical notions of what counts in academia; and expectations vis-à-vis measuring the impact of ABHR. We argue for the need to reconsider what counts as knowledge and to reconceptualize notions of evaluation and rigor in order to effectively support the effective production and dissemination of ABHR.

Involving children in participatory health research (PHR) provides exciting opportunities to gain insights into their perspectives and capacities and encourages them to make a meaningful contribution to issues affecting their lives. It is underpinned by a rights-based approach, where children’s evolving expertise is valued. In PHR, children are not just research participants – they are co-researchers. This raises challenges and ethical issues on several levels, including the nature of child engagement, the role of adults, and methods to promote child agency, while also ensuring their safety is not compromised. This chapter uses real international exemplars to illuminate the complexity and debate on theory and practice in relation to PHR with children. These examples reflect the flexibility inherent in the approach to accommodate culture and context. They also highlight the need to avoid tokenism, which might undermine children’s agency, and encourage first attempts, reflexive practice, and progressive improvements in PHR competence. Children’s right to subvert or deny the participatory process is recognized as a challenge to the adults involved but is also a way to realize impacts and outcomes that are more relevant for those children. Finally, Kids in Action is presented as an international network of PHR projects involving children to promote best practice, develop and share resources, link similar projects to maximize impacts, and provide a platform for children’s voices in relation to global issues.

In this chapter, we explore some of the affinities that can be developed between new information and communication technologies and what has become known as aboriginal ways of knowing. This work documents some of these affinities via the collaborative development of an online project entitled “Nitsitapiisini—Stories and Spaces: Exploring Kainai Plants and Culture,” conducted with teachers, students, and elders of the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta. The pedagogy of this collaboration is then linked to rethinking the disciplines ofknowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools as living disciplines that make demands on the possibilities inherent in new technologies. This particular orientation tubs against instructionist practices found in many classrooms yet, once awakened, spawns curiosity and creativity.

Children who live with a mentally ill parent are viewed primarily as being 'at risk' of developing a mental illness themselves and those who remain well are considered extraordinarily resilient. This particular risk/resilience discourse is embedded within larger contemporary discourses about risk and childhood. Childhood is seen as a critical period of development during which children need protection due to their physical and psychological vulnerabilities. In this paper, the implications of this dominant casting of children are explored and it is argued that the conceptual repertoire about those living with a mentally ill parent should be expanded. A critique of the literature that established the risk/resilience discourse is followed by a discussion of research about parenting with a mental illness within which children are surprisingly absent. Recent thinking about children arising out of the 'new' social studies of childhood is summarized to illustrate its resistance to the hegemonic image of children as passive, developing, 'unfinished' persons. A recasting of children as complex young persons who have competencies as well as vulnerabilities linked to their developmental stages, would lead to different lines of inquiry about children's experiences of mental illness in a parent.