The last few decades have significantly changed international research collaborations in the social sciences. Projects now span multiple countries, employ diverse methodologies, and involve various actors, producing varied data for dissemination across scholarship, practice, and policy domains. Such complexity poses not only research challenges but also considerable legislative concerns, particularly regarding privacy protection and the evolving landscape of data gathering and usage. Navigating the increasingly flexible and intricate nature of contemporary research, alongside constantly changing legislation, has become a new hurdle for delivering robust comparative projects. Employing a case study approach, we examine the ethical approval process experienced by the project team members, including postdoctoral and doctoral students, project advisory board members, and the PI. The project under investigation encompassed several potential challenges: a range of qualitative research methods, sensitive topics, multi-site data collection, participants under 18, and the use of social media data. We traced this process across multiple international sites, demonstrating how these challenges collectively contributed to the overall complexity of ethical and data governance issues. Our findings illustrate the difficulties presented by ethical approval processes, the changes these processes imposed on the study design, and inconsistencies within the ethical clearance process across funding entities, countries, and institutions. We underscore three disjunctures inherent in ethical approval processes. By mapping the ethical route across multiple sites, we offer insights for researchers planning international projects, as well as for Research Ethics Committees, institutions, and other stakeholders within higher education seeking to support research endeavours.

This article examines the evolution of Russian school-level education policy from 1992 to 2025 through the lens of cosmopolitan nationalism. Drawing on documentary analysis and expert interviews, we demonstrate how Russia’s engagement with international educational frameworks and standards has transformed across four distinct periods. Using the cosmopolitan nationalism framework, we trace Russia’s journey from post-Soviet integration into the global educational space to its current ‘sovereign education’ model. Our findings reveal that Russia demonstrated unprecedented mobility across all cosmopolitan nationalism quadrants, from post-Soviet integration into global educational space to current ‘sovereign education’. The analysis identifies four distinct periods: ambiguous reforms (1992–2003), educational leadership ambitions (2003–2012), the establishment of ‘sovereign education’ (2012–2022), and patriotic recalibration (2022 onwards). Russia’s education policy evolution illustrates that states can rapidly shift between nationalist and cosmopolitan orientations in response to political transformation. This study contributes to understanding how nations can simultaneously pursue nationalist objectives utilising global educational frameworks, even during periods of international isolation.

This review outlines the scholarship landscape and uncovers the nature and key characteristics of activism related to migrant school-aged youth. Employing PICOT and PRISMA protocols, 126 relevant articles published in peer-reviewed journals from 2007 to 2023 were identified. We employed a three-layered, mixed-methods analytical framework to map the scholarship and to decipher the nature of agency and the voice of activism. The review revealed that migrant youth engage in diverse forms of activism, primarily driven by their anchoring to society and a desire to secure their rights. Furthermore, we found activism concerning school-aged migrants is often initiated and led by their allies (e.g., NGOs, schools) and consequently studied from the latter’s perspectives. Our findings highlight an overrepresentation of investigations focusing on issues surrounding activism rather than migrants’ lived experiences of activism. This analysis lays the groundwork for a further conceptualization of the field of migrant school-aged youth.

Purpose This study examines how political and ideological shifts shape citizenship education by analysing how school curricula reflect broader political agendas and influence young people’s civic engagement and activism. Method We conduct a content analysis comparing two Polish curricula: Historia i Teraźniejszość (HiT), introduced by a right-wing government in 2022, and Edukacja Obywatelska (EO), introduced by a centre-left government in 2025. Findings HiT promotes nationalist and conservative values through a fixed-knowledge model that restricts pupil agency. By contrast, EO emphasises participatory, transparent and activist-oriented approaches. However, its optional status and uneven implementation limit its effectiveness, particularly in politically polarised regions. Implications Situating these reforms within broader socio-political and educational contexts, this study demonstrates that curriculum change is not ideologically neutral but deeply embedded in political struggles over the role of youth in democracy.

In this study, we shed light on the extent to which intersectional action is a feature of youth activism in the UK. We employed a longitudinal thematic analysis, examining both text and visual components of young activists’ social media postings, and used an intersectional solidarity framework to interpret data. Our findings show that youth activists often adopt frame-bridging engagement strategies that broadly move toward intersectional forms of activism, depending on the activism issue and current events in international and local politics. For the study’s UK context, we found that the intersectional mobilizations of social media make possible the creation of a ‘common sphere of action’, in which youth activists connect, familiarize, interact, and support each other across different activism domains. These findings advance current understandings of youth activism by demonstrating how social media cultivates intersectional activism through enabling frame bridging and cross-movement solidarity, highlighting the potential for intersectional strategies to enhance collaboration among youth movements adapting to evolving political landscapes.

The socioeconomic status (SES) of youths is known to have a significant bearing on their political subjectivities, including their motivations, approaches, and strategies around engaging in political activities. This makes high-SES youth activism a unique subfield of inquiry within the broader field of youth social movement. To document the state of the art, considering both the dominant theoretical and methodological approaches as well as topical issues in the field, we undertook a structured review of relevant extant literature. The results show, though the field is underpinned by a wide array of theories and methods, that there are still few theoretical or methodological innovations that exist to address the specificities of high-SES youth activism. The review also uncovers a growing research interest in understanding the pedagogical implications of the participation of high-SES youth in social and political action aimed at effectively addressing social inequities more widely and examining class reproduction in such activism.

Through a thematic analysis of policy documents from state and federal education authorities, we explore how institutional structures and governance dynamics shape opportunities for youth engagement in Washington, DC. By examining how youth activism is framed and operationalized in policy, we ask: What does youth activism entail, and how is it defined and understood in the DC educational policy context? Our findings reveal that while references to youth activism are frequent, policy attention tends to center on global issues such as climate change, often overlooking local activism and the specific needs of communities. These patterns reflect a fragmented and shifting approach to youth participation across different levels of the education system, which can both enable and constrain meaningful involvement. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and possibilities for youth activism, emphasizing how institutional priorities and power dynamics influence the roles young people are invited or permitted to play in shaping public education.

This literature review examines 84 peer-reviewed studies of Black youth activism in the United States, published from 2012 to 2023. Data were extracted from EBSCO, ERIC, and Web of Science using search terms related to “Black”, “youth”, and “activism”. The review identifies the disciplines where studies were published, publication trends, major theories used, types and scopes of activism studied, and the anticipated roles of Black youth in these activism efforts, as well as the intersectionality of the activism. It highlights the dispersed nature of the field, the local focus of most activism studied, and the notable prominence of youth-led initiatives. Many studies described youth or youth with adults as the primary initiators of activism, with Black youth participating both through existing frameworks or by leading efforts themselves. The findings underscore the need for more research specifically on youth-led initiatives to fully understand the scope and impact of Black youth activism.

In the past decade, youth activism has gained visibility in European public discourse. It has also been integrated into the UN's Sustainable Development Goals under the Global Citizenship Education framework. Nonetheless, we have only a limited understanding of young people's own perceptions of activism and its manifestations. We investigate perceptions of activism among German secondary school students, employing thematic analysis to analyze data from 25 discussion groups, each composed of 4 to 8 students aged 14-20 from various educational institutions across Germany (n = 141), identifying three predominant themes: (a) A normative perception of activism whereby students distinguish themselves from “the other” peers in countries deprived of adequate education and the conditions necessary for activism. (b) A narrow view of global citizenship – students note stark differences between themselves and populations outside the Global North, rather than embracing a shared global identity. (c) An uncritical acceptance of conventional conceptions of activism, in both actions undertaken and causes deemed worthy of activism. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, we offer insights to support further implementation of Global Citizenship Education.