Abstract
Studying ‘youth’ confronts researchers with a critical predicament. How to study a social category that is constantly unfolding anew and that means such varied things in different places? This article addresses these methodological challenges based on qualitative research about youth and political contestation in Conakry, Guinea and Kampala, Uganda. Situating this comparative work within youth scholarship in African studies, the author describes his failure to come to terms with the differences between the two cases, especially because it remained unclear whether these differences emerged from the cases themselves or from his ethnographic access. Drawing on AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of the “surrounds” (2022), the article suggests approaching youth as an elusive category that is not to be exclusively defined and captured, but that also stands for new ways of navigating the world that may elude present modes of detection. The meanings attached to youth in academic research are thus conceptualized as relational and contingent on who is researching whom under what conditions and in what contexts.
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