Tatek Abebe

Tatek Abebe is a social geographer interested in and teaching and researching about children, youth and the structural transformation of their local environments in Africa. He is Programme Leader of MPhil in Childhood Studies, teaching courses on Children and Development in the Global South (BARN 3300), Methods and Ethics in Childhood Studies (BARN 3201).
Tatek's research focuses on the generational implications of development on young people’s lives, i.e. labor, rights, rites, entitlements, learning, and social transitions. His current work intersects youth studies and development studies looking at the ways in which political economic processes transform and are transformed by the livelihood practices of young people. In 2016, he undertook a fieldwork supported by The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture on labour, mobility and material realities of post-socialist youth, complementing his decade long research with children and families found on the margins of society and political economy in Ethiopia.
Tatek is Director of Council for Development of Social Science Research in Africa’s (CODESRIA) 2017 Child and Youth Institute that engages with the theme of African Futures and the Futures of Childhood in Africa. He also leads Nordic Network of African Children and Youth Research funded by NordForsk. His current project (2017-2019), financed by Nordic Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, involves a series of international seminars to theorize Children’s Migration in Historical and Cross-cultural Perspectives.
Tatek is on the editorial boards of Children’s Geographies, Childhood, and Fennia: International Journal of Geography.