What is Youth Flourishing?
There is no existing universal definition of youth flourishing, but it’s a concept rooted in the ability of youth to live healthy, purposeful and meaningful lives. What that means to youth differs across the world. To some it’s playing football or being with friends, to others, it’s growing nourishing crops, and to 18-year-old Sompa Rani Roy from Bangladesh, it’s “a fearless mind and a bright future.”
Adolescent Flourishing in Context
This project aims to understand adolescent experiences of human flourishing through a gender (+) lens and examine adolescent coping and change strategies to address the ‘multiplier effects’ of climate change, insecurity and the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this undertaking is the transformation of exclusionary health and knowledge systems that impede adolescent flourishing through social healing and justice as facets of adolescent flourishing.
Theoretical Approaches
Human Flourishing
Within the context of the research, we define human flourishing as the dimensions of life integral to achieving wellbeing in a given environment, be it social, cultural, educational, spiritual or other aspects of life entirely. Flourishing will vary greatly dependent on external factors such as governance and landscape as well as the diverse backgrounds and characteristics of the individual or group, such as ethnicity, gender, age, or citizenship status, to name a few. This project builds on the six core domains outlined in the human flourishing framework: 1) happiness and life satisfaction, 2) mental and physical health, 3) meaning and purpose, 4) character and virtue, 5) social relationships, and 6) financial and material stability (VanderWeele, 2017). Despite the vast variances in the human experience, these six factors have been found to contribute significantly to well-being across cultures and backgrounds.
Gender (+) Lens
This project is a first-of-its-kind study to comprehensively, collaboratively and cross-nationally examine adolescent flourishing through a gender(+) transformative lens across the six human flourishing domains. The gender(+) lens draws on GBA+ strategies to consider the intersecting factors of difference across a range of life experiences and identities for youth (including gender, LGBTQ2S+, age, mental and physical health, (dis)ability, marital status, etc.) and to inform comprehensive strategies for adolescent flourishing. In this way, we are able to analyze dimensions of environment, need, belief, ethnicity, class and other intersectional domains through gender+, feminist, Indigenous, and Global South lenses.
