Elizabeth Ngutuku is a Researcher at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and the Centre for Public Authority and International Development. She has over 20 years of experience working on multidisciplinary issues on children and youth development in eastern Africa. Her practice involves critical interdisciplinary research on voice and lived experience at the complex interstices of representations in policies and practice. 

Can you please give us an introduction to your work and tell us why you wanted to study in this field?

My work is on childhood and youth, broadly defined. I am a researcher of voice. I look at children and young people's voices in education, in programmes that support them, in sexual and reproductive health and on issues of poverty. I am also interested in the erasures of people's ways of knowing and how these are connected to diverse aspects of the well-being of children, young people, and women.

I trained as an anthropologist and then got my first volunteer job as a social worker in a children's home. While there, I started keeping a diary around how children were defining their needs and the discrepancies between the support we were providing and their felt needs. In my second job, I worked with children of teenage mothers. I was uncomfortable with the discourse of 'children having children'. I decided to unsettle this programme from within through my first significant research during my post-graduate studies in Gender Studies in the Netherlands. This path of working with children and research started unfolding before me, and I have never looked back.

In the last few years, my research and work have been influenced by new feminist materialistic approaches and the work of Gilles Deleuze. I am not a Deleuzean scholar but turned to Deleuze for inspiration, stimulation, and provocation. I am inspired by the rhizome notions of non-linearity, multiplicities and the vital relationalities that guide his thinking. His works and concepts open dynamics and relations which cannot be addressed using what we know. Ubuntu and the indigenous paradigms that guide my scholarship blend well with the rhizome thinking, which emphasises relationality, diversity, and multiplicity.

Could you please tell us about your contribution to knowledge throughout your career?

I have done a lot of work on issues of early childhood development and education (ECDE) in Africa. I have been part of a movement agitating for locally embedded notions of ECDE. For several years, my work, scholarship, practice, and activism have been around challenging the dominant discourse of ECDE, which has excluded views from the majority world, especially from Africa.

In 2009, I led the East African Early Childhood Education, Care and Development (ECD) delegation to the high-level International Conference on ECD in Dakar, Senegal, supported by UNESCO. More recently, in 2023, I was one of the 30 researchers and thinkers invited by the UNESCO Chair for ECD at the University of Victoria to reflect on the history and progress of ECD in Africa. These were published as a chapter in the UNESCO book Sankofa: appreciating the past in planning the future of early childhood education, care and development in Africa.

After working with poor and vulnerable children for several years, I have started rethinking notions of child poverty and vulnerability by placing these in contexts. I am experimenting with non-linear methods in understanding lived experience. This is how I am designing most of my research. The vistas opened by such theorising and research are what will ultimately define the contribution of my research.

Can you tell us about your work on how the imperial gaze affected adolescent girls in Kenya?

My collaborator, Professor Auma Okwany, and I researched adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity that interacted with colonialism in Kenya. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya.

Our research revealed messy entanglements between colonialism and other power structures like patriarchal, generational power, tradition, and young people's agency in the processes of coming of age. In contradictory ways, Imperialism influenced the processes of growing up through the introduction of schooling for example, and by doing away with the traditional spaces and places of adolescence like dancing and initiation ceremonies.

The imperial gaze also ignored traditional gender relations where senior women held power over young women, girls, and some men. Acknowledging women and girls as having agency was frightening to a colonial power that positioned itself as the protector of women against patriarchy. The gaze of Christian colonialism also did not have a place for a female sexual agency. Girls were therefore ignored in sexual decision-making. Consequently, there was an overemphasis on the permissive sexuality of young men, something that was countered by the narratives of women in our research.

An important argument we make in our work is that while colonialism engendered specific experiences, there were other nodes like beliefs such as in witchcraft, class differences, and gendered relations that shaped the lived experience of being and becoming an adolescent. By giving women who grew up during this period a platform to share their experiences, our research engaged the empirical male-dominated project knowledge production on indigenous knowledge in Africa. What was written about coming of age during this period were the views of (older) men seen as gatekeepers of tradition. 

One of your recent projects looked at the role of grassroots actors in tackling gender-based violence. What did you learn from that project?

I carried out this research in Uganda and Kenya. I explored how grassroots actors interact with others, including non-government organisations, as they handle issues of sexual and gender-based violence and violence against children in their communities. I explored the nuances of their lived experience while drawing on their identity as grassroots actors, but at the same time, working with other state and non-state actors. I was specifically interested in how these actors disrupt, reinvent, and redirect power relations with different actors up the chain of violence prevention and actions and their interactions with the communities. The research engaged the romantic notion of grassroots actors who are genuinely seeking to serve their people by revealing how diverse their motivations are.

A key finding is how the diverse strategies these actors use to gain legitimacy in their work with the government, the NGOs and the communities influence their work. The strategies they use to gain acceptance enable them to enlarge their space for negotiation, but sometimes in ways that entrench the inequitable relations in addressing violence.

They have, for example, worked with several organisations in the past, and so they use such a portfolio to gain acceptance. To gain legitimacy, they also draw on their embeddedness in the community and their indigenous knowledge and strategies for addressing violence since this is something that the NGOs do not have. On the other side of the coin, to gain acceptance in the community, they use police-like language and activities like putting abusers on notice and punishing offenders. In many instances, they also behave like brokers and patrons by showcasing their connections with the NGOs, the police, and the judges. To endear themselves by presenting a façade of working with children, some actors bypass the government processes of child protection, such as the use of child protection hotlines.

I propose we move beyond ideas about whether these legitimating practices are good or bad. Instead, we should focus on the context of their work, including the broader power relations with the larger actors like the NGOs and the challenges they face in their work.

Can you tell us about your upcoming work on the diaspora's sexual and reproductive health in London?

There are some clinical studies exploring the experience of specific categories, but this research often pays more attention to the larger Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority Category (BAME) rather than disaggregated identities. Inadequate attention has been paid to factors influencing the sexual and reproductive health experience of young people of African origin in England.

This project will explore the mechanisms of interactions between diverse issues like cultural norms, challenges in the health system, discourses about ethnic minority groups, context-specific factors, and agency by young people.

Another of your upcoming projects will look at the voice of children in the discourse about sustainability. Why did you think this was important to study academically?

We have seen young people in the global North on the front lines of discussions about sustainability. This has not been the case for Africa. In the region with the youngest global population, the voice and place of young people in environmental governance is ignored.

Drawing on my long-term work with children and young people, I am proposing an agenda to recover and resurface young people's perspectives. My previous work on young people's perceptions of healthy relationships with nature in Tanzania revealed that they were happier when spending time with their animals, such as birds in the gardens, near the beach, playing fields, and nearby bushes. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the then president John Magufuli, used nature to caricature science, young people used the metaphors of 'a sick environment' that affected their outdoor interactions. 

What knowledge or insights have you gained from your research that you wish had known when you started?

I can provide many examples, but I do not regret my lack of awareness of these in the past. The world is a stage where we must do things in new ways as we encounter new realities. And our research is the same, too.

I started on the premise of protecting the rights of disadvantaged children. Drawing from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, I thought about rights in a linear, universal way. Over time I saw a need to approach rights from alternative ontological perspectives. Children's rights and UNCRC are still fundamental. However, I see rights as living, relational, and located in specific contexts. They are vitalized differently by different people.

In my work on NGOs and child protection, I focussed more on the discourse in these programmes and how they influence the well-being of children. Through my research and encounters with others like new feminist materialists and Bruno Latour, I have learned that critique has lost its steam, and we need to critique with care and to do so more creatively. Creativity is what creates space for something new. My emerging views on non-linearity have been beneficial in this regard.

As a researcher of voice, I mainly focussed on what children say, the spoken voice, with little regard for how voice happens. More recently, I have devised a methodological approach of 'listening softly'. This approach and sensibility go beyond what children say and focus on voice as a multiplicity. The silence, absence, and processing of silencing guides my research. 

What about your area of study do you wish more people knew?

In the era of overspecialisation and expertise, some people think I am confusing people with my work by approaching childhood and youthhood from these many angles.

I don't want to sound apologetic. But what I would like people to know is that I don't look at the work with children through silos. I place children and youth in diverse contexts. We cannot think about children and youth without putting them in relational, dynamic contexts of politics, history, indigenous knowledge, economy, migration, etc. So next time you see me thinking about youth and AI that I know nothing about, don't be surprised because, with research on the voice of children, it does not take long before I become comfortable in many areas where you find children.

How has your background and ethnicity influenced your work?

I was born and bred in Kenya, and identity is vital in my work, theorising, and knowledge activism. I work on children to engage the dominant discourses about children of Africa. I was influenced by bell hooks, who turned to theory because she was hurting, and found healing in theory. As an African scholar, I wanted different answers and am glad I can seek out these answers through my research.

The personal is also very important and political for me. I am a child of my mother, and I have never kept quiet about this. My mother's story as a child of a blind, young, single mother has inspired my work on agency by children, work on young single motherhood, and work on outsider children. It also influenced my work on the role of ableist discourses when working with young people. Her stories, and those of her mother and her grandmother, taught me about growing up in the past and inspired my work on adolescence in the colonial period. It also influenced my work on the role of the stories we tell about ourselves and our children in Africa. Stories that un-tell the tales of the powerful on notions of children and young people's agency are profoundly personal but also philosophical.

If you had infinite time and resources, what understudied area would you want to research and why?

This takes me to my young self. This young girl of about six would stop by the river, watch the sky, and ask herself ‘Who am I?’ I think I have been interested in issues of personhood from an early age. I have worked in different cultural contexts and researched personhood and selfhood a bit. I have drawn from Ubuntu's notions of personhood. I have read the works of Bame on Human ontogenesis and from John Mbiti, my neighbour. I have also engaged with Ifeanyi Menkiti's notions of African personhood. I still think I need to do a lot of research in this area. It is not about what I don't know about personhood but what I want to know differently. And I feel there is something about it that I haven't yet cracked. This would be a good starting point if I had infinite resources and time. 

Which African thinkers and books by African authors would you recommend people read?

The late Professor Bame Nzasenang, one of Africa's formidable intellectuals and great psychologists, comes to mind. He was an inspiration to me, an activist and scholar. He wrote and talked about the need to acknowledge the perspectives of people from the majority of the world (i.e. the Global South) on Early Childhood Care and Development issues.

Professor Sylvia Tamale, professor Emeritus of Makerere University is also inspiring. She is multidisciplinary like me and her work on law and human rights is vast. Her book on African Sexualities and When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda is inspiring. I like her brand of feminism and scholarship, which is not hindered by her religion, quite like me in some ways. Tamale talks about the need to record women's stories in history, which I am trying to do.

I like the works of the late Micere Mugo, the indefatigable African scholar who sadly passed away last year. Her poem, Where Are Those Songs? inspired me as an African daughter. This is also the poem that was read to me as part of my Laudatio during my PhD defence. She remains central to the celebration of my scholarship and mentorship. African Daughters must sing without being apologetic or feeling intimidated.

I am now re-reading- Ngugi wa Thiong'o to explore the author's views on gender and childhood during colonial encounters.

I am also listening to the oral stories about my great-grandmother and the stories of other women in my community that have been told to me for years around the fireplace. My great-grandmother was a great feminist of her time. Her brand of feminism predates colonialism. As a senior and older woman, she stood up to the ableist patriarchy of her time and resisted colonial lifestyles, choosing that which only worked for her, like schooling for her grandchildren. Stories like those of my great-grandmother are not in libraries, but they are alive in the stories we are told and stories we tell each other in Africa. As we read others, we must not forget our oral stories.