Category Archives: Events

Events, Training/Education

MSc Childhood Studies University of Edinburgh – online information session

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Dear Colleagues

We are hoping to recruit excellent postgraduate students, for our MSc in Childhood Studies in 2016-17. We are trying out an online information session on Monday 29th February 2016 at 3.30-4.30 p.m. GMT. Interested people can sign up at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-info-session-msc-childhood-studies-tickets-20920705393

Would you be able to pass this email on to potential applicants? We have been running for over 10 years, brining together childhood theory, policy and research interests for an intensive interactive 1 year degree. Further information about the degree can be found at http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/pgtcs

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours sincerely

Kay Tisdall

************************

See the MSc in Childhood Studies website at http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/pgtcs

Events

Seminar Series: Children as Agents of Social Change

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School of Social Work, Care and Community
Seminar Series: ‘Children as Agents of Social Change’

Wednesday 10 February 2016
4-5.30pm Brook Building room 142A

‘Being heard and influencing decisions in Lancashire: the long and windy road’.
Perspectives from the local authority, the voluntary sector and from young people.

Kate Baggaley from Barnardo’s Participation Service, Hannah Peake from Lancashire County Council and young people from Lancashire’s participation groups including LINX, POWAR and CSI

Kate Baggaley from Barnardo’s Participation Service, Hannah Peake from Lancashire County Council and young people from Lancashire’s participation groups including LINX, POWAR and CSI want to take the opportunity to share our journey with you. This will include our own personal journeys in terms of participation and will focus, crucially, on the young people’s experiences. We will highlight our highs (and lows) and we will also take the opportunity to share our organisational journeys and the impact participation has had in Lancashire and beyond. This is effectively a verbal version of our annual report and will be a very personal, practical, experienced based session and we hope it will give you an insight into participation for all those involved. We will finish with our plans for the year ahead.

Hannah Peake got enticed into participation as a young person and has been working in this field ever since and she currently works as Strategy Lead for Participation in Lancashire. Lancashire commissions a participation service from Barnardo’s. Kate Baggaley manages this service after previously working in a young carers’ service and her team facilitate the children in care council, LINX and POWAR, the special educational needs and disability council. The young people from LINX, POWAR and CSI (Childrens Service Investigation team) are all fantastic, enthusiastic and committed to experiencing new things and to making a difference in Lancashire and beyond.

This seminar is part of our new series for 2015-16, ‘Children as Agents of Social Change’. For further details see www.uclan.ac.uk/cypp

Our seminars are free, including refreshments. Please reserve your place via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-centre-seminar-being-heard-and-influencing-decisions-in-lancashire-tickets-20473046433 This assists us with ordering refreshments and notifying last-minute changes.

Events

Seminar at UCL- Childhood and the Postcolonial: An Ethnographic Exploration

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Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University)

Discussant: Kirrily Pells (UCL Institute of Education)

Monday, 18th January 2016, 12.30-14.00
Room 736, UCL IOE, 20 Bedford Way, London
A lunchtime seminar hosted by the Childhood and Gender Stream, Social Science Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education 

Normative constructions of ‘childhood’ often tend to rehash well-known debates on modernity – a majority of childhoods in the global South are usually found to be ‘lacking’/lagging and all solutions/transformations are a re-enactment of shifts that have already taken place in children’s lives in the modern west.  In contrast to this reading, Balagopalan’s book Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India employed a ‘postcolonial’ lens to critically rethink the ‘difference’ that laboring children signify.  In this talk, she will draw upon her ethnography with street children in Kolkata, India, to discuss two separate, though interconnected, ways in which a postcolonial lens opens up our current understandings of marginal children’s lives.  The first is by locating these contemporary lives within a longer history of colonial modernity and postcolonial development, and thereby re-reading the ‘child’ as a critical and productive site in the working out of a different modernity.  The second is through using postcolonial theory to critically discuss the circulation of liberal categories – like rights, protection, agency – which are increasingly deployed around these categories of children.  By focusing on the postcolony as a conceptual, rather than a descriptive, lens through which to read the lives of children, Balagopalan hopes to discuss the potential in theorizing childhoods ethnographically. 

Sarada Balagopalan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA. Her book Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

Kirrily Pells is a Lecturer in Childhood at UCL Institute of Education. Her research focuses on the social study of childhoods globally especially in relation to poverty, rights and violence.

Attendance is free. All welcome, no need to book. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis. For further information about the seminar, contact r.rosen@ioe.ac.uk.

Calls for Papers: Conferences, Events

CFP – Activism on the edge of age

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Call for papers

Workshop organised by the ERC Connectors Study & hosted the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QQ

June 2 & 3, 2016

The workshop brings together researchers and activists concerned with the lived experiences of activism across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on earlier and later life experiences. We are interested in the spaces, places and times – historical and contemporary – where activism and age intersect in everyday lives and social imaginaries.

Activism and youth remain closely intertwined in everyday life and research.  Activist demographics suggest that ‘youth’ and ‘young adulthood’ is a prime time for participation in social movements, and the link between youth and social, cultural and political change has long held a fascination for academic researchers and the public at large. But what happens on the edges of age? Does an interest in public life, issues of common concern and collective action only emerge during ‘youth’ and dissipate after ‘young adulthood’? What metaphors link narratives of ‘growing up’ with social change stories (e.g. independence), and is breaking away always a renewal? Where do ‘younger children’ and ‘older adults’ fit in with discourses and practices of social and political change? And why is it that the vocabulary used to describe activism is replete with kinship terms (sisterhood, brotherhood, family resemblances)?

The workshop is organised around these and related questions and aims to explore the spaces and vocabularies created by putting activism in conversation with the edges of age, biography, the lifespan, and the relationships in which activists and activist imaginaries are embedded in everyday life. We are open to the scope and type of activity or politics being investigated, preferring instead a phenomenological definition of activism that foregrounds people’s relationships of concern and the individual and collective social action arising from those concerns.

We encourage applications from across the social sciences, arts and humanities, and activists who are interested to engage in a conceptual and reflective space. The workshop is free to attend but spaces are limited. Priority will be given to contributions that: address either or both edges of the lifespan; are original, creative and playful in rethinking activism and age; are cross-culturally sensitive either empirically or theoretically; and take a long-view of activism and age be that through longitudinal, historical or generational research or traditions of storytelling.

Contributions can be original research reports, case studies, theoretical articles, review articles, reflective pieces, or commentaries. Please submit a long abstract of 1000 words, together with a two-page CV, to C.J.Prater@sussex.ac.uk by February 19, 2016. Please use the email subject line: ‘Activism on the edge of age’. There will be a small number of bursaries available to enable those without their own funding to participate in the workshop. If you would like to be considered for a bursary please make a case for it in your application.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome in early March. Successful applicants will be asked to write a short paper (4000 words) developing their contribution and to submit these papers ahead of the workshop meeting in June (paper deadline: May 20, 2016) so that all attending get a chance to read papers in advance. We are in the process of scoping opportunities for a special issue (or other suitable output format) and, following peer review, a selection of papers from the workshop will be considered for publication.

Timeline:

  • Abstract submission: February 19, 2016
  • Response: early March, 2016
  •  Paper submission: May 20, 2016
  • Workshop: June 2 & 3, 2016

The workshop is organised and funded by the ERC Connectors Study & hosted by CIRCY under its Childhood Publics theme. For more information about either please contact Dr Sevasti-Melissa Nolas: S.Nolas@sussex.ac.uk

Events

Seminar: The Value of Transcultural Family/System Therapy in Child and Youth Care

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Upcoming EASA Anthropology of Children and Youth Seminar: Friday 15 January 10.30-12.00 (location: to be confirmed):

The Value of Transcultural Family/System Therapy in Child and Youth Care

Dirck van Bekkum & Judith Limahelu (see below for professional bio)

Abstract

Rarely anthropology and family therapy met but when they do research, educational and clinical innovation can be achieved. In their interactive presentation, Van Bekkum and Limahelu will discuss three of these innovations in co-educating transcultural family therapists. They concern: (1) Transgenerational Cultural Diversity and Intersectionality; (2) A transitional model in multicultural settings; (3) Systemic reflexivity in research, activism and clinical practices. Children and youth (including their generational networks) are at the core of these approaches. After short ‘vignette’ presentations of these three innovations, the presenters will answer questions and exchange views with the audience.

If you are interested in presenting at one of our seminars yourself, please contact the Network chair: Dr Sandra J.T.M. Evers, s.j.t.m.evers@vu.nl

Feel free to communicate information of this seminar to other people who might be interested.

Could you confirm your participation in the 15 January seminar to us? childrenseminar@hotmail.com

We are looking forward to an inspiring meeting!

We wish you all the best for 2016.

Events

Seminar – Childhood and the Postcolonial: An Ethnographic Exploration

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Please join us for a lunchtime seminar hosted by the Childhood and Gender Stream, Social Science Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education:

Childhood and the Postcolonial: An Ethnographic Exploration

Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University)

Discussant: Kirrily Pells (UCL Institute of Education)

Monday, 18th January 2016, 12.30-14.00
Room 736, UCL IOE, 20 Bedford Way, London

Normative constructions of ‘childhood’ often tend to rehash well-known debates on modernity – a majority of childhoods in the global South are usually found to be ‘lacking’/lagging and all solutions/transformations are a re-enactment of shifts that have already taken place in children’s lives in the modern west.  In contrast to this reading, my book Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India employed a ‘postcolonial’ lens to critically rethink the ‘difference’ that laboring children signify.  In my talk I will draw upon this ethnography with street children in Kolkata, India to discuss two separate, though interconnected, ways in which a postcolonial lens opens up our current understandings of marginal children’s lives.  The first is by locating these contemporary lives within a longer history of colonial modernity and postcolonial development, and thereby re-reading the ‘child’ as a critical and productive site in the working out of a different modernity.  The second is through using postcolonial theory to critically discuss the circulation of liberal categories – like rights, protection, agency – which are increasingly deployed around these categories of children.  By focusing on the postcolony as a conceptual, rather than a descriptive, lens through which to read the lives of children, I hope to discuss the potential in theorizing childhoods ethnographically.

Sarada Balagopalan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA. Her book Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

Kirrily Pells is a Lecturer in Childhood at UCL Institute of Education. Her research focuses on the social study of childhoods globally especially in relation to poverty, rights and violence.

For further information about the seminar, contact r.rosen@ioe.ac.uk.

Calls for Papers: Conferences, Events

CFP – the VII Conference on Childhood Studies, 6-8 June 2016, Turku

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unnamed-2‘Childhood in Everyday Life’

6-8 June 2016 Turku, Finland

The international conference on childhood studies (http://www.childhood2016.fi) is a multidisciplinary forum for research on children and childhood. The event is organized by the Finnish Society for Childhood Studies and the Child and Youth Research Institute CYRI on 6th– 8th June 2016 in the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University, Finland. The theme of the seventh conference is Childhood in Everyday Life.

The keynote speakers are:

– Professor Emeritus Jonathan Bradshaw (University of York, UK)

– Professor Anja Huizink (VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

– Professor Simo Vehmas (University of Helsinki, Finland)

– Associate Professor Patrick Ryan (King’s College, Western University, Canada)

The conference offers possibilities for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for researchers who work with children or child related issues. We welcome papers that relate to the main theme Childhood in Everyday Life from different viewpoints. These abstract topics include but are not limited to:

  1. equality and inequality
  2. well-being and health
  3. food and eating
  4. play, sports and leisure time
  5. social relations
  6. consumption and market economy
  7. upbringing and education
  8. protection and safety
  9. mobility and segregation
  10. class, ethnicity and culture
  11. change and continuity
  12. history and future
  13. technology
  14. media
  15. disability
  16. diversity
  17. special childhoods or special needs
  18. some other viewpoint

A proposal can be submitted for individual paper presentation, poster presentation, self-organised symposium or workshop.

Deadline for submission of abstracts is 31st January 2016.

For more information and detailed guidelines, please see http://www.childhood2016.fi/

We warmly welcome you to Turku!

Scientific Committee and Organizing Committee

For further information, see: www.childhood2016.fi/
Inquiries: child2016@utu.fi
Find us also in twitter: www.twitter.com/childhood2016

Calls for Papers: Conferences, Events

CFP – Ethnographic Encounters with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults in Educational Contexts

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IV INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
Ethnographic Encounters with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults in Educational Contexts
&
I INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
of Qualitative Research with the Participation of Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults

UNIOESTE – Campus de Foz do Iguaçu
Brazil
April 28 and 29, 2016

ACADEMIC COMMITTEE

Regina Coeli Machado e Silva – Brasil – UNIOESTE – Campus de Foz do Iguaçu

Ángeles Clemente – México – Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca

Maria Dantas-Whitney – USA – Western Oregon University

Alba-Lucy Guerrero – Colombia –  Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá

Diana Milstein – Argentina – FACE/Universidad Nacional del Comahue y CIS-COMICET/Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social

BACKGROUND

The IV International Symposium “Ethnographic Encounters with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults in Educational Contexts” intends to strengthen the research threads developed in the three previous symposia about ethnography with children and youth that took place in November 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in October 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia, and in November 2013 in Oaxaca, Mexico.

In Buenos Aires, the symposium opened a space for discussions on the role of children and adolescents in the production of social knowledge. In Bogotá, the event featured ethnographic investigations on how children, adolescents, and youth become involved in social, educational, political and cultural dynamics, and how these actors exercise their agency to propose alternative possibilities for the transformation of their identities and everyday lives. In Oaxaca, the presentations focused on the dynamic involvement, agency, and commitment of all participants in ethnographic research: investigators, children, adolescents, young adults, and other actors.

A selection of papers from the 2009 symposium was published in 2011 by Miño y Dávila; and a second selection of papers from the 2011 symposium is in the process of publication by Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá. A publication of selected papers from the third symposium is in its planning stages.

For this forth symposium, we have expanded the call for papers to include all forms of qualitative research. We hope to foster dialog among investigators employing different methods for advancing knowledge about educational processes with the participation of children, adolescents, and youth.

OBJECTIVES

  • To bring together results of ethnographic research studies (completed or in process of completion) which examine and problematize political and cultural processes in educational contexts.
  • To develop epistemological, theoretical and methodological discussions about the involvement of children, adolescents and youth as collaborators in social qualitative research in general, and in ethnographic research in particular.

THEMATIC THREADS AND OPEN QUESTIONS

We invite papers that explore and problematize issues related to educational processes in diverse sociocultural and geographic contexts through collaborative research with children, adolescents, and youth. Relevant topics include:

  • Spaces, times, and everyday life
  • Bodies and ways of knowing
  • Cultural construction of identities/subjectivities
  • Political praxis and citizen formation in educational contexts
  • Language and cultural processes
  • Mediated and virtual contexts of socialization
  • Educational experiences in rural and urban contexts
  • Ethnographic praxis
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Social class, nationality and religion
  • Age and generation
  • Violence, resistance, and peaceful resolution

We hope to engage in discussions centered on the following questions:

  • How do we understand intercultural interaction in schools and in other spaces of socialization?
  • How can or do children, adolescents, and youth participate in the process of social research?
  • How are ethnographic/qualitative reflexive processes integrated with the children’s, adolescents’, and youth’s ideas, works, dreams and actions?
  • What is the benefit of ethnographic/qualitative research in the construction of subjectivity among children, adolescents, and youth?
  • What are possibilities of adult research with children, adolescents, and youth for transforming educational and cultural processes?

FORMAT OF THE SYMPOSIUM

Papers may be summited in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. The complete papers will be available in advance for all symposium participants. In that way, sessions can be devoted entirely to discussions on issues, and approaches of the papers. The number of papers will be limited (40 papers maximum) in order to maintain a high level of interaction during the two days of the symposium. It is important that abstracts provide clear evidence of their theoretical and methodological contributions to the themes of the symposium. Members of the Academic Committee will work during 2017 on the compilation of a book containing selected studies from the symposium.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 2, 2016

Deadline for notification of acceptance of abstracts: February 12, 2016

Deadline for submission of full papers: April 10, 2016

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

The abstract must be attached as a Word file not exceeding 500 words. It must state the title of the paper, authors’ names, and institution affiliation, as well as:

  • Topic and issues being addressed
  • Purpose of the investigation
  • Theoretical and methodological references, with particular mention of the collaborative aspects of the research
  • References to field work and preliminary analysis
  • Relevance of the study

Please send your abstract via email to encuentrosetnograficos@gmail.com. Only one proposal per each presenter will be accepted. Notification of accepted papers will be made on February 12, 2016 via email.

SUBMISSION OF COMPLETE PAPERS

If your abstract is accepted, please submit your complete paper as a pdf file on April 10, 2016 via email to encuentrosetnograficos@gmail.com. Complete papers should not exceed 8,000 words; and they should include an abstract, which can include minor changes from the original abstract previously submitted. For the complete paper, please include: (1) introduction, where objectives and theoretical framework are stated; (2) specific methodological aspects highlighting collaborative work with children, adolescents and/or youth; (3) description of field work, data, and analysis; (4) discussion and exploration of results and implications; (5) conclusions, which must be brief and clear; and (6) reference list, including only the cited documents within the paper.

LOGISTICS OF PRESENTATIONS

Presentations will be done in sessions lasting 30 minutes each. Only one paper will be presented and discussed in each session. The authors will have 10 minutes to present their paper orally; and the remaining 20 minutes will be used to ask questions and exchange ideas about the papers. Chairs for each presentation will be chosen among the symposium participants. The role of the chairs is to manage time and facilitate discussion.

PARTICIPANTS MUST READ THE PAPERS BEFORE THE PRESENTATIONS. Therefore, the papers will be made available as of April 15, 2016.

Workshop
Collaborative research with children, adolescences and youth: Possibilities and limitations

A workshop will be offered to all participants from both symposia to engage in discussions about ethnographic/qualitative research in collaboration with children, adolescents and youth.

ROUNDTABLES

Two roundtables will be conducted at the end of each working day. They will be open to the public. Topics and participants will be organized according to the accepted papers.