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.

Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University)

Discussant: Kirrily Pells (UCL Institute of Education)

Monday, 18^th 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.

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.