This ground-breaking book weaves together insights from the children and youth studies literature and critical development studies. Debunking the idea of childhood and youth as self-evident social categories, the author unravels how these generational constructs are (re)constituted and experienced in relational terms in development contexts spanning both the Global South and the Global North.

Running through these chapters is a fundamental concern with age, gender and generation as key principles of social differentiation. This is developed in Part 1 at a theoretical level, and applied to everyday contexts, including school, work, migration and the street in Part 2. Part 3 zooms in on the generational dynamics of development by exploring how prominent development interventions (conditional cash transfers, schooling) problems (gender discrimination) and questions (the generational question of farming) shape the (gendered) experience of being young and growing up.

1. 'Generationing' Development: An introduction.

Roy Huijsmans

PART I: Theorising Age and Generation in Young Lives

2. Locating Young Refugees Historically: Attending to age position in humanitarianism

Jason Hart

3. Bodies, Brains and Age: Unpacking the age question in the Dutch sex work debate

Sara Vida Coumans

4. The Impact of 'Age-Class' on Becoming a Young Farmer in an Industrialised Agricultural Sector: Insights from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Elyse N. Mills

5. Mainstreaming Social Age in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Progress, pitfalls and prospects

Christina Clark-Kazak

PART II: Everyday Relationalities: School, work and belonging

6. 'Generationing' School Bullying: Age-based power relations, the hidden curriculum and bullying in northern Vietnamese schools

Paul Horton

7. 'Being Small is Good': A relational understanding of dignity and vulnerability among young male shoe-shiners and lottery vendors on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

8. 'We Don't Even Use Our Older Children': Young children accompanying blind adult beggars in Tamale, Ghana

9. Travelling Identities: Gendered experiences while doing research with young allochtoon Dutch Muslims

Mahardhika Sjamsoeoed Sadjad

Part III: Negotiating Development

10. Subjects of Development: Teachers, parents and youth negotiating education in rural North India

Karuna Morarji

11. Little People, Big Words: 'Generationing' conditional cash transfers in urban Ecuador

María Gabriela Palacio

12. Growing Up Unwanted: Girls' experiences of gender discrimination and violence in Tamil Nadu, India

Sharada Srinivasan

13. Youth, Farming and Precarity in Rural Burundi

Lidewyde H. Berckmoes and Ben White

Commentary

14. Age and Generation in the Service of Development?

Nicola Ansell

Roy Huijsmans is Senior Lecturer in Children & Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague, the Netherlands (part of Erasmus University Rotterdam). He has written on childhood, youth and migration, the generational dynamics of multi-local householding, and on nationalism, youth and mobile telephony.