Beyond Vulnerability: Agency, Activism, and the Rights of Disabled Youth

Dear Colleagues,

Within this Special Issue, we wish to problematise current policy, practice and often academic framing concerning deeply held societal beliefs about an inherent vulnerability situated within disabled youth. Whilst we cannot deny that disabled youth face some unique risks to their health, safety and well-being, these are often linked to discrimination, inequality and a lack of support to meet often basic human rights – this can create vulnerability and dependence on others. However, the concept of vulnerability characterises much of the debate about the lives of disabled youth to the frequent exclusion of other issues. This can infantilise, medicalise or psychiatrise disabled youth, positioning them as powerless, dependent, passive, and non-agentic, placing an overfocus on their support needs or needs for protection.

Alongside this, there is repeated invisibility of agency within disabled youths’ own lives. Agency as a group and as active agents in decision-making processes; this also extends to within research processes. Current debates often position disabled youth as different, separate, and even as ‘challenging’, without addressing wider social, emotional, and aspirational rights and intersectional identities. This reinforces notions of vulnerability and amplifies the invisibility of disabled youth across the world even where and when they are enacting their rights to agency, advocacy and activism. Disabled youth are rights-holders and are active agents in their own lives and increasingly are advocates, activists and co-researchers on local, national and international stages. Within the scope of Youth, this disabled youth movement needs to be platformed, celebrated and discussed.

Despite these developments which recognise the rights and agency of disabled youth and the increasing visibility of disabled youth in positions of power within advocacy, activism and research, such work is not without its challenges. Much still needs to be learnt about processes to break down barriers (social, structural, attitudinal). Alongside a more balanced, nuanced understanding and discussion of the need to still protect individual and collective disabled youth activism and ethically support this movement, in a world where intersectional discrimination, exclusion, inequality and harm are ever present and which by its very nature can create vulnerability.

This Special Issue aims to advance interdisciplinary scholarship on Beyond Vulnerability: Agency, Activism, and the Rights of Disabled Youth by focussing on evidence-based research, theoretical development, contextual understanding, and implications for research, policy and practice. Submissions that foreground disabled youth ‘voices’ (in all forms), equity, intersectionality, and strengths-based approaches are particularly encouraged. The Special Issue aligns with Youth’s mission to publish high-quality, open-access research that advances knowledge on youth development, well-being, and social inclusion across diverse global contexts. 

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The problematising of dominant framings of disabled youth as ‘vulnerable’.
• Discussions of disabled youth as rights-holders.
• Examples of platforms where disabled youth have undertaken/led advocacy and activism, either with a specific disability focus or in inclusive ways with non-disabled peers on wider issues of concern for youth.
• Online and physical spaces for agency/activism/advocacy for disabled youth and different methods of engagement which have facilitated change for individuals and/or groups.
• Issues of intersectionality within disabled youth rights, agency, activism and advocacy.
• The interplay of issues of inequality, cumulative adversity and structural determinants.
• Wider debates concerning the interplay with family, peers, schools, and community within the contexts of disabled youth rights, activism and agency.
• Capturing evidence of the impact of agency and activism and outcomes for individual disabled youth or disabled youth as a group.
• Balancing of risk and vulnerability versus empowerment of disabled youth.
• Tensions between rights to protection and rights to agency, empowerment and participation in decision-making.
• Methodological considerations including ethical, attitudinal, structural and process barriers and facilitators.
• Policy implications and system-level responses to disabled youth rights, agency and activism.

This Special Issue welcomes original research articles, systematic and scoping reviews, and conceptual or methodological papers. Contributions from sociology, youth studies, social work, critical disability studies, critical autism studies, psychology, public health, education, criminology, human rights and related disciplines are encouraged, particularly those that emphasise interdisciplinary and youth-centred, disability-rights perspectives. By bringing together interdisciplinary and youth-centred scholarship, this Special Issue seeks to deepen understanding of disabled youth rights, agency and activism. We wish to increase debate and inform evidence-based practices and policies that promote disabled youth into positions of power in ethical and safe ways within their own lives and within and across diverse sociocultural and global contexts. We wish to problematise and counter dominant notions of passivity and vulnerability in disabled youth. We particularly welcome joint-authored papers written with/alongside disabled youth.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Anita Franklin
Prof. Dr. Geraldine Brady
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• disability
• agency
• ‘voice’
• rights
• participation
• protection
• activism
• inclusion
• social justice
• co-researchers
• policy and practice development