This book is about how children and young people communicate about matters of importance or difficulty, how they decide what to tell adults and what not to tell them, how they organise themselves and their lives and how they deal with conflict in their own relationships and in the world around them. It is also about how adults can interact effectively with children and young people, on both an individual and a societal level, in ways that are sensitive to their feelings and empowering and supportive of their attempts to be autonomous. All contributors start with two assumptions: that children are not only developing competence for the future, but are also actors in the world today; and that they have things to teach us, both about their own lives and about society.

The contributors are all social scientists of one kind or another. Between them they bring perspectives from disciplines as diverse as psychology, geography, anthropology, sociology, social work, linguistics, political theory and development studies. They are pursuing research, and in some cases are engaged in policy debates, in three areas that at first sight may appear distinct: children and young people's participation, children and young people as refugees, and children and young people's use of language.

The contributors were originally brought together in a series of three extended seminars, which were explicitly intended to explore the common ground between these areas. This was the result of a perception that there was work going on in the analysis of children and young people's participation, and in the study of migration and displacement, that deserved to be brought together; and further, of what was little more than an intuition, that social research into children's use of language and communication might be relevant to both of these areas. What was remarkable in the experience of the seminars was how strongly the same themes and issues recurred across the series. In particular, all the contributors found themselves reflecting on the ways in which children and young people manage under difficult circumstances, and how they take responsibility for their own present and future lives. The chapters that follow have in the main developed from the work presented in those seminars.