This Expert Group will use video narratives to illuminate how young people experience rural-to-urban transitions.
The Group concentrates on villages with an agricultural tradition that undergo transformations. Video narratives are suggested to be useful for understanding of social change and social impacts of rural-urban transformations on the community members.
The project will particularly focus on younger adults and adolescent community members in Cameroon and Brazil at the local level, illuminating lived experiences of younger community members’ spaces vis-à-vis the issue of food.
The project is motivated by the issue of food security and food access resulting from transformations of rural spaces, with which also come socioeconomic challenges:
- Youths leave rural environs for more opportunities in the cities.
- While rural-urban transformation of, e.g., coastal villages attract tourists and rich people, this transformation often means higher prices, exclusion, and higher crime rates, to the extreme.
- Food prices increase, leading to food insecurity
- Rural-urban transformation may reduce poverty, but also can engender inequalities.
- A depopulated countryside may affect the resources devoted for such areas. ‘While a 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, policies and resources continue to be biased in favour of urban development with detrimental effects for both rural and urban populations.
The project will use spatial video narratives, produced by younger adult or adolescent community members to obtain and present knowledge about their lived experiences of rural-urban transformation and access to food. After that the members of the Group will evaluate spatial video narratives as a method. The outputs will be generated in the form of visual materials, like videos and infographic.