Calls for Papers: Publishing

Call for Papers:  Sociological Studies of Children and Youth

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We are currently seeking submissions for Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Volume 22, Researching Kids and Teens: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations.  Problems and pitfalls often accompany researching children and youth, given sociologists’ increasingly limited access to populations deemed vulnerable.  In addition, navigation through Institutional Review Board requirements and gaining trust from key organizational and educational gatekeepers can be difficult.  As a result, researchers must come up with creative ways to negotiate processes of research approval, institutional support, site entry, and direct interaction with children.

There is a dearth of publications regarding the sociology of researching children and adolescents.  This volume will address concerns of research access, methodological procedure, and project completion.  We invite chapters utilizing alternative methods such as the study of children’s material culture, digital research/mining, and representational analysis (film, television, literature, etc.).  While all approaches are welcome, we are particularly interested in theoretical and ethical considerations, and research that includes archival processes and qualitative strategies including interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and other innovative methodologies with children and youth.

Manuscripts should use APA citation style; in addition, we welcome the use of endnotes for informative commentary given the topic of the volume.  Proposed manuscripts should not exceed 9,000 words including endnotes, bibliography, charts/tables, and appendices.  Submissions must be previously unpublished works.  Please see the following author guidelines for additional information: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/ebookseries/author_guidelines.htm

All proposed chapters will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion.

Submissions from early career as well as established researchers are welcome.

Submission deadline is April 15, 2016.

Please send completed manuscripts via attachment, preferably in MS Word format, to:
researchingkids@gmail.com

All questions regarding this volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth should be directed to the editors at:
researchingkids@gmail.com

Volume 22 will be guest edited by Ingrid E. Castro (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts), Melissa Swauger (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), and Brent Harger (Gettysburg College).  The guest editors are co-founding members of the Committee on Research and Ethics for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Children and Youth.

Other opportunities

Call for Nominations: 2016 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize

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Deadline for Submission: 15 March 2016

The Jacobs Foundation is seeking nominations for the 2016 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize. The prize awards outstanding scientific contributions of individuals from all scholarly disciplines aiming at improving the development and living conditions of children and youth or contributing to one of the Jacobs Foundation’s thematic priorities. This includes, but is not limited to, educational sciences, psychology, economics, sociology, family studies, media studies, political sciences, linguistics, neurosciences, and medical sciences.

The prize is endowed with 1 Mio. Swiss Francs, of which 900’000 Swiss Francs are for use in a research project and 100’000 Swiss Francs are for related costs, such as travel, networking, and dissemination. The prize has a global scope. It addresses scholars who have achieved major breakthroughs in understanding child and youth development and have the potential to advance the field by actively conducting research.Self-nominations cannot be accepted.

An international jury will choose the laureate from the pool of nominated candidates. The following individuals currently form the jury:

  • Professor Jürgen Baumert, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, Germany
  • Professor Dorret I. Boomsma, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Professor Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania, USA
  • Professor Francesco C. Billari, Oxford University, UK
  • Professor Uta Frith, University College London, UK
  • Professor Kathleen Kiernan, University of York, UK
  • Professor Terrie E. Moffitt, Duke University and King’s College London, USA and UK

All documents pertaining to the nomination should be submitted online by 15 March 2016. To begin the online submission process, please visit http://jacobsfoundation.org/kjj-research-prize.

Detailed information can be found at Jacobs Foundation Research Prize.

If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact the responsible program manager Gelgia Fetz (gelgia.fetz@jacobsfoundation.org).

ACYIG Updates, CRN_Lifecourse, Resources

New CRN: Lifecourse

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Dear Colleagues,

The Association for Anthropology and Gerontology working together with the Anthropology of Aging and the Life Course Interest Group (AALCIG) and ACYIG have now established a joint Collaborative Research Network (CRN) for those interested in exploring connections (e.g., physical, political, developmental, symbolic, etc.) between childhood/youth and adulthood/old age. Continue reading New CRN: Lifecourse →

Calls for Papers: Conferences

CFP – Adolescence, Youth and Gender: Building Knowledge for Change

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CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
 
8-9 September 2016, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
 
‘Adolescence’ has risen high on the global agenda, with a particular focus on girls. Researchers, policymakers and practitioners are increasingly interested in the second decade of life as a newly recognised ‘window of opportunity’ to reduce poverty and inequality and to prevent the transmission of poverty across generations.
 
Over the past few decades, the early years of childhood have been highlighted as a critical period for intervention, resulting in impressive achievements – a dramatic reduction in child mortality and the expansion of primary schooling. More recently, the international development community has extended its focus to ‘adolescence’ as a way to sustain and build upon these gains, funding numerous campaigns and programme initiatives, aimed particularly at the empowerment of adolescent girls, in low- and middle-income countries. Funnelling efforts to improve the life-chances of girls, it is argued, will result in greater individual and national prosperity and will promote gender equality, since it is during the second decade of childhood that gender differences widen, particularly for the poorest children. Decisions about education, work, marriage and fertility have critical impacts on long-term outcomes for girls, boys and families.
 
This two-day international conference, organised by Young Lives (www.younglives.org.uk), will promote dialogue and critical reflection on the latest evidence, current paradigms, concepts and approaches to adolescence, youth and gender in international development and consider the implications for policy and programming.
 
Conference questions
The conference will address key questions relating to adolescence, youth and gender in global contexts, for example:
·         When and how do gender inequalities emerge and manifest themselves during the first two decades of life, and what are the later consequences for both young men and women?
·         What is the interplay between gender norms, political-economic structures and individual behaviours?
·         How does gender relate to poverty and to other intersecting inequalities in adolescence and youth (age, ethnicity/race/caste, class, location, sexuality, disability, etc.)?
·         What does ‘empowerment’ look like for young people in different contexts, and is empowerment a solution to exclusion and discrimination?
·         ‘What works’ to reduce gender inequality, and how does reducing gender inequality in the first two decades of life have long-term effects over the life course?
 
The full Call for Papers and further information is available on the Young Lives website (http://www.younglives.org.uk/news/news/call-for-papers-adolescence-youth-and-gender)
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 February 2016.
Calls for Papers: Conferences

MESA 2016 CFP: Egyptian Childhood and Children

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We are seeking papers that interrogate questions relating to the experience of childhoods and/or ​being a child in Egypt in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specific topics are flexible, but could include colonialism, nationalism, socialism, child protection, children’s rights, revolution, modernity, education, or globalization.

Please send abstracts to: hmorrison@uwlax.edu and dianachiara3@gmail.com by January 25.

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.

New Books, Resources

Re-publication of Adventure in Play (1957)

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unnamed-2Common Threads Publications is pleased to announce the launch of their ‘Playwork Classics’ series – unavailable and neglected historical texts written by the adventure playground pioneers and those involved in the development of playwork profession.

The first Playwork Classic, John Barron May’s Adventure in Play, is now available. Originally published in 1957, Adventure in Play is a report on one of the first experimental adventure playgrounds in the UK. Adventure in Play provides an engaging and sometimes challenging account of how the radical new concept of ‘adventure playground’ was first put into practice. In doing so it raises important questions about the development of today’s adventure playgrounds and the modern-day playwork profession which grew out of them.

Adventure in Play is essential reading for childhood historians, playwork students, sociology scholars and anybody interested in the development of play services for children from a historical perspective.

More information can be found here http://www.commonthreads.org.uk/?page_id=216 . To be kept up-to-date about forthcoming titles in the Playwork Classics series, please email us at info@commonthreads.org.uk.

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.