The REACT project is an international research initiative exploring youth participation, activism, and social change in five Global South cities through a mix of academic and creative methods, centered on lived experience and collaboration. Keep reading to learn more
REACT explores how young people across five cities in the Global South engage with activism, participation and social change.
Across Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Cape Town, Hyderabad and Guadalajara, the project brings together researchers, young people and creative methods to understand how participation is lived, negotiated and imagined in everyday life.
The REACT project is a multi-country grounded research project that focuses on exploring and understanding everyday youth participation in social change across cities in the Global South through an interdisciplinary approach.Â
In a time of increasing economic uncertainty and socio-economic inequalities on a global scale, the REACT project seeks to connect with urban youth to better understand their lived experiences and how they engage with the processes of social change by tracing their trajectories of participation. The aim is to explore young people’s everyday practices of civic engagement to generate insights about communication practices, forms of urban engagement, and participatory citizenship in a rapidly changing world.
The five-year REACT project involves fieldwork in 5 cities of the Global South: Bogota (Columbia), Durban (South Africa), Guadalajara (Mexico), Hyderabad (India), and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). In addition, a large-scale survey of youth will be undertaken across 20 cities in the Global South.
Embedded in communication for social change, and drawing on a range of social science disciplines, REACT aims to break new ground in order to correct historic imbalances in knowledge production about youth, communication, and social change.
The project creates space for reflection, conversation and creative exploration across different contexts in the Global South.
The project explores questions around:
Youth Participation
Activism & Social Change
Communication & Media
Identity & Belonging
inequality & exclusion
Everyday Political Life
Creative Expression & Voice
REACT is interested in how these experiences evolve across different places and moments.
REACT combines research with creative and participatory methods.
Alongside interviews and focus groups, the project will involve workshops, visual methods, storytelling and collaborative reflection.
The website itself is intended to become part of this evolving process: a space for field notes, conversations, creative outputs and emerging ideas across the life of the project.
REACT runs from 2026–2031.
The project is supported by: an International Advisory Board, and a Global Youth Advisory Board
These groups help shape the direction, critical questions and ongoing development of the project across its different phases