Saab, Cyrine; (2025) The Everyday Practices of Street Children in Beirut: Learning Trajectories, Entrepreneurship and Belonging. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Street work in Beirut – which includes selling small goods and picking up waste – has been on the rise with the increasing number of refugees, particularly in the aftermath of the Syrian war in 2011. This thesis examines how these children carve out their roles through street work. Moving beyond passive framings that cast them as either victims or outlaws, the thesis foregrounds the ways in which these children learn to be agentic and adapt within conditions of forced displacement and urban informality. To explore these dynamics, the thesis proposes the notion of learning trajectories as a possible way to capture how they negotiate entry into street work and strengthen their positions. This conceptualisation draws on insights from childhood studies, refugee and migration studies, postcolonial studies on informal urbanism, and practice-based socio-cultural learning studies. The research is based on eight months of practice-based ethnographically inspired fieldwork. Data was generated in two phases between 2021 and 2023 across three neighbourhoods in Beirut. It engaged 16 children and members of their surroundings through walking interviews, participant observations, and informal conversations. The findings show that children carved out their roles in street work through diverse learning processes of entrepreneurial expertise and belonging. These processes were shaped by intersecting factors, including gender, age, geography, family circumstances, legal conditions, and personal aspirations. To capture the diverging and converging themes across these experiences, the thesis draws on a notion - learning trajectories – to develop the Learning Trajectories Framework as its key outcome. Within this framework, I identified three distinct learning trajectories – accomplished, episodic, and terminated – differentiated by the ways in which the children learned to develop their agency. The framework provides a nuanced analysis of how street children in Beirut carve out their roles, while also offering a heuristic for future research with refugee and migrant children and youth negotiating other informal settings.

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