Spatialities of shabaab: exploring the intersections of lifestage, space and mobility amongst refugee young people in urban Jordan

Linn, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2974-0152, Ghanem, Hala and Sami Abolouz, Abdallah (2024) Spatialities of shabaab: exploring the intersections of lifestage, space and mobility amongst refugee young people in urban Jordan. Children's Geographies. pp. 1-15. ISSN 1473-3285

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Abstract

Refugee young people in countries of first asylum navigate daily life through a set of deeply challenging, and often traumatic, structures, circumstances, and expectations. Attending to the complex interaction and relationship between identities, structures of legality, space and place facilitates an important critical lens to examine and understand refugee young people’s experiences, including their sense of belonging, hopes for the future and their conceptualisation of life stages of murahik (adolescence) and shabaab (youth) in shifting transnational spaces. Based upon participatory and exploratory research conducted in 2022 with Syrian & Iraqi refugee shabaab, this paper uses a socio-spatial justice framework which centres young people’s voices and explores the everyday places and spaces that these young people access, inhabit, frequent and avoid within the cities of Amman and Zarqa, the urban and economic heartland of Jordan.Using an approach which is sensitive to the role of identity, policy and structural constraint ensures plural insights into the spatial and mobile lives of young people and illustrates the diversity of their experiences, particularly highlighting the role of gendered identities and diverging refugee policies in impacting these diverse experiences, contributing to the growing research field on refugee youth and spatiality.