Between flood vulnerability and watery pedagogies: A critical review of children and young people’s voices and experiences

This critical review explores how child and youth voices have been largely overlooked or “submerged” within existing scholarly literature on floods and education. It considers whether children’s experiences might be recuperated or recovered by including intersectional, decolonial, place-based and child-centred approaches to understanding the confluence of education and climate-induced disasters. We engage a political ecology framework to review literature from a diverse range of fields, primarily disaster studies focusing on floods and education, and childhood/youth studies and education/pedagogy research focusing on children’s relationships with water. We find that modernist epistemologies operating in disaster studies provide important insights about risk, vulnerability, and disaster prevention but largely overlook children’s voices and experiences. Alternatively, in the childhood, youth, and pedagogical literatures, we find richly detailed studies of children and young people’s relations with water, but minimal engagement with the severe consequences of climate-intensified floods. In response to these findings, we propose a research agenda calling for scholarship that can adequately theorise children’s educational lives as unfolding amidst complex social, economic, cultural and political relations with floods and other catastrophic waters across local and global scales.