The NYRIS2026 conference seeks to advance theoretical, methodological, and ethical debates within youth studies through dialogue. To foreground the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that characterize contemporary research practices, the conference features six keynote speakers who will participate in three paired dialogues focused on knowledge production about young people. Each dialogue brings together two scholars to engage in a conversation around one of three themes:
- the theoretical perspectives that have shaped, or have the potential to challenge, the field;
- the methodologies used to study young people’s experiences and everyday lives; and
- the ethical considerations involved in conducting research with young people.
Rethinking theory in Youth Studies
Jessica Ringrose
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at Instutute of Education, University College London, and a leading international scholar in feminist approaches to youth studies. Her research explores young people's digital cultures, sexualities, inequalities, and affective practices, most recently in her book Teens, Social Media, and Image Based Abuse (Ringrose & Regehr 2025). She is widely recognized for her innovative theoretical contributions, particularly in developing and advancing feminist new materialisms and posthumanist theory. Her extensive body of work has significantly reshaped contemporary debates in youth research, influencing how scholars conceptualize power, embodiment, and subjectivity in young people's lives. Through collaborations with diverse international stakeholders, she has co-produced educational interventions that have reached hundreds of thousands of young people on issues of gender and sexual inequity.
Professor Jessica Ringrose
Majsa Allelin
Majsa Allelin is Senior Lecturer at Halmstad University. Her work engages closely with young people’s school lives (Allelin 2019), approaching the issue by examining societal structures related to class and racialization/ethnicity, making processes of segregation a recurring theme in her research. Allelin has moreover contributed significantly to theoretical debates on ideology, materialism and social change, emphasizing the political stakes involved in selecting theoretical frameworks for youth studies (Allelin 2022; 2023; 2024). Her research spans over political sociology, to youth marginalization, and critical theory, focusing particularly on how social class, race, and power relations shape young people’s lives. Through this focus, she provides an important contribution to theories of economic policy, particularly within the Marxist research tradition.
Senior Lecturer Majsa Allelin
Whose voices, which methods, for what? Methodologies in Youth Studies
Hedi Viterbo
Hedi Viterbo is Reader in Law at Queen Mary University of London. He has published extensively on the role of legal and political discourses and practices in shaping the lives and representations of young people across a wide range of contexts. His research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examining these dynamics, including in relation to young people living under colonial rule, youth in conflict with the law, young refugees, and youth activists. The author of two award-winning books (Viterbo 2018, 2021), Viterbo’s recent work makes a significant conceptual contribution to the study of youthwashing (Viterbo 2025) - a practice in which states, corporations, and other actors co-opt the voices and alleged interests of young people to advance their own agendas. His research demonstrates how principles such as the “right of children and young people to be heard” are often instrumentalized in the service of youthwashing, particularly in cases affecting marginalized youth.
Dr Hedi Viterbo
Anna Gradin Franzén
Anna Gradin Franzén is an Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on young people’s identity formation, participation and everyday experiences of marginalization, mainly in Swedish youth detention homes (Franzén 2014). Drawing on video ethnography, she conducts detailed interaction analyses to explore how young people, in their interactions with staff, negotiate everyday life and navigate the micro-dynamics of social encounters. In doing so, she seeks participants’ voices in the fine-grained details of their communicative practices (Franzén & Jonsson 2024). Franzén has contributed methodologically to demonstrating how research can carefully capture participants’ perspectives through discourse analysis and analysis of social interaction, without a priori imposing the researcher’s agenda or theoretical frameworks on those voices.
Associate Professor Anna Grandin Franzén
Ethics, power and responsibility in research on young people
Agnieszka Paseika
Agnieszka Pasieka is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on youth, migration, religious pluralism and ethnic diversity, activism and far-right movements. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork with young people navigating stigmatization, norm-breaking behaviors and socially contested identities. Pasieka’s work offers critical insights into the ethical complexities of researching vulnerable and politically contentious youth populations, particularly with regard to issues of trust, representation and researcher responsibility. In Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (2024), she examines militant youth activism in Italy, Poland and Hungary, demonstrating how far-right networks foster tightly bonded communities while linking local and transnational agendas. Her analysis highlights how such movements provide young people with a sense of agency, belonging and moral purpose within broader political projects, while also raising ethical dilemmas for researchers studying extremist milieus.
Mag. Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka
Linda Arnell
Linda Arnell is an Associate Professor at the Department of social work, Umeå University. She is specializing in young people’s life situations, with an emphasis on gender, violence, and social inequalities. Arnell has published widely on ethical dilemmas, care, and researcher–participant relationships in youth research. Her research focuses on young people in precarious or marginalized positions and the emotional, relational, and ethical challenges that arise when studying sensitive topics. Arnell has studied children in domestic violence (eg. Arnell & Thunberg 2023; 2025) and girls violence (eg. 2017; 2019; Larsson, Arnell & Moberg 2024) as well as girls in criminal gangs – a group that has largely been absent in Swedish research despite increasing attention in broader discussions of violence and crime (Arnell, Moberg Stephenson & Vogel (2024). Her ongoing work challenges taken-for-granted ideas of youth, gender and criminality, providing a deeper understanding of girls who are or have been victimized or involved in criminal contexts where criminal activities occur.
Associate professor Linda Arnell
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