Children's Engagement and Communication with Everyday Hazards and Risks in Nairobi's Informal Settlements

Abstract

This thesis challenges dominant disaster studies that have long positioned children as inherently vulnerable and passive, reliant on adult protection. While some research now recognises children’s ability to perceive and communicate risk, prevailing models still frame vulnerability and agency as a binary, reducing risk communication to a top-down, one-way process. Drawing on fieldwork with 10 to 14 year olds in Nairobi’s informal settlements, I show that vulnerability and capacity are co-produced through children’s everyday relations with peers, adults and hazards. Mundane acts, such as rerouting to avoid snakes, jumping open sewage, or holding strategic silences, reveal a form of ‘tactical agency’ embedded in material, social and emotional landscapes. This reconceptualisation extends relational agency theories and disaster studies, reframing risk communication as entangled with power, fear and infrastructural gaps.
To capture the realities of children’s lived experiences of risk, I introduce forced micro-adaptation to describe covert, improvised acts of survival under chronic risk, where children act not to thrive but to survive. These adaptations, such as carrying water from home and avoiding school toilets, highlight a form of everyday resistance often missed by tokenistic child participation models. I extend and operationalise Macy and Johnstone’s (2022) concept of active hope for child-centred risk contexts. Children practice active hope through situated, low-cost fixes and covert individual actions. These include stepping stone footbridges, anonymous risk-reporting chains, discreet use of phones for risk advocacy, and peer patrols, which reshape unsafe spaces.
Methodologically, the study offers a replicable, relational creative-arts toolkit designed around a ‘trust arc’ of activities such as deep mapping, walking interviews, body mapping, and clay modelling, that centres children as co-researchers, surfaces micro-hazards and generates transferable risk solutions. Finally, child-centred risk communication dead zones are identified and safe loops proposed to move messages effectively. Overall, the thesis reframes vulnerability - agency as a material–relational continuum and proposes a grounded framework for genuine child-centred disaster risk reduction (CCDRR) rooted in everyday resistance, active hope and co-produced knowledge.

Date of Award	29 Oct 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Andrew Collins (Supervisor), Katie Oven (Supervisor) & John Clayton (Supervisor)