RN23 - Sexuality

RN24 - Science and Technology

RN25 - Social Movements

RN26 - Sociology of Social Policy and Social Welfare

RN27 - Regional Network Southern European Societies

RN28 - Society and Sports

RN29 - Social Theory

RN30 - Youth & Generation

RN31 - Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism

RN32 - Political Sociology

RN33 - Women’s and Gender Studies

RN34 - Sociology of Religion

RN35 - Sociology of Migration

RN36 - Sociology of Transformations: East and West

RN37 - Urban Sociology

All Research Networks Close

RN04 - Sociology of Children and Childhood

Developing critical research on children’s lives and positions in societies and on childhood as a social phenomenon

From a modest start in the 1980s, through increasing empirical and theoretical activity in the 1990s, the sociology of childhood research has become well established internationally. This field of study has developed critical alternatives to mainstream research on children and has generated significant contributions to understanding childhood as a social phenomenon and children’s lives and positions in societies. The importance of children and childhood(s) as topics for sociological study is reflected in a growing community of scholars engaged in theoretical and empirical work in this area across Europe. This includes work looking at children living in times of political change and transition, engagements with understanding childhood as a structural space in societies, and explorations of children’s everyday lives from their own perspective. These areas, together with issues of theorising childhood and methodological developments, will form important foci for the Research Network.

If you would like to be a member of our RN, please follow the link or email the network coordinators.

Phil Mizen, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. P.Mizen[at] Aston.ac.uk
Vicky Johnson, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. Vicky.Johnson.ic[at] uhi.ac.uk
Aleksandra Zalewska-Królak, University of Warsaw, Poland. zalewska.krolak[at] gmail.com

2021_2023

Coordinators

Phil Mizen (Aston University, p.mizen[at] aston.ac.uk)

Vicky Johnson (University of Highland and Island, vicky.johnson.ic[at] uhi.ac.uk )

Aleksandra Zalewska-Królak (University of Warsaw, aleksandra.zalewska[at] uw.edu.pl)

Board Members

Claudio Baraldi(University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

Debora Crook (University of Central Lancashire)

Lucía del Moral-Espín (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain)

Florian Esser (University of Osnabrueck, Germany)

Pascale Garnier (University de Paris 13, France)

Turkan Firini Orman (Baskent University, Turkey)

Vicky Johnson (University of Highland and Island, UK)

Cath Larkins (University of Central Lancashire, UK)

Phil Mizen (Aston University, UK)

Marta Ortega Gaspar (University of Málaga, Spain)

David Oswell (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

Anzhela Popyk (Poland)

Daniel Stoecklin (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

Hanne Warming (Roskilde University, Denmark)

Aleksandra Zalewska-Królak (University of Warsaw, Poland)

CHILDHOOD IN (CLIMATE) CHANGE

12th to 14th July 2022

Mid-Session Meeting

University of Highlands and Islands, Scotland

Details to be confirmed

Information

Childhood in (Climate) Change

Virtual Mid-term Symposium

European Sociological Association RN04 Sociology of Children and Childhood

Sion (Switzerland) 9-11th September 2020

Please find herewith the latest information about our Mid-term Symposium (update 20 July):

The conference will be fully online as the technical and health challenges of a hybrid approach cannot feasibly be put in place in time. Besides, immigration in Switzerland is accompanied by quarantine measures for a number of countries.

If this virtual format represents a new challenge for us, it is also an opportunity to find new ways to connect and share your knowledge with each other. We have therefore imagined vibrant alternatives to conventional presentations and we are planning some social aspects - some small discussion spaces at the start of the first two days and to close; a music evening.

First of all, we would like to ask you if you are willing to submit a video or podcast to present your research. Your video/podcast will be made available for all the participants to watch/listen to in their own time before the conference. The participants will then have the opportunity to discuss and share their comments regarding the presentation during a live Zoom session. Of course, you may also present live. In any case, your presentation should not exceed 20 minutes.

Please let us know which one of the two options described above - live presentation or a video/podcast presentation - you would like to select for the conference no later than 10th August 2020.

We will also like to have an open space to share other resources related to the Sociology of children and childhood, so if there is any video or any other kind of visual or written material you would like to share during the conference, please contact us.

Online registration is open from 22 July to 15 August. To confirm your participation, please register on the Eventbrite event’s page : https://rn04childreninclimatechange2020.eventbrite.com

Upon registration, you will be sent a confirmation of your inscription. Please note that the link to the Zoom conference will be communicated later, by e-mail. We will also contact you to give you the possibility to make a test (checking the audio/video, sharing your screen for your PPT presentation) some days prior to the conference.

Finally, as it is an online conference, we are waiving the registration fee (which applied only to non-members of ESA RN04. We hope this will encourage wide participation.

If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact us at the following address : RN04SION [at] unige.ch

Best wishes and kind regards,

The coordinators of RN04:

Daniel Stoecklin

Cath Larkins

Lucia del Moral Espin

1By addressing Childhood in (Climate) Change, this 5th mid-term symposium builds on the former mid-term events of the ESA Research Network 04 (Sociology of Children and Childhood) that took place in Jyväskylä (Finland), Modena (Italy), Ghent (Belgium) and Lisbon (Portugal), as well as the exchanges within this network during the bi-annual conferences of the European Sociological Association. It will confront a major issue underpinning these discussions, namely how social theories can account for continuities and change in childhood.

Researching childhood requires not only addressing biological, developmental, cultural, and legal perspectives in critical ways, but mainly analysing their intersectionalities in the constitution of the social ordering of children’s experiences. Hence, childhood cannot be reduced to one of these perspectives: it cannot be understood solely in terms of bodily characteristics, nor in terms of cognitive developments, nor in terms of cultural or legal treatment in specific contexts. It is, rather, an outcome of the encounters of all these factors: childhood encompasses sets of experiences that stem from and engender configurations of biological, psychological, social, cultural, legal and economic contexts.

Theoretically, childhood studies have strong roots in the « social construction of childhood » (Alanen 2015) and (still) rest on foundational critiques that led to a logic of replacing perspectives rather than integrating them in a broader framework. Sociologists of childhood have subsequently, however, contributed further insights by learning from « forms of experience » they observe in, with and within children and extending into wider areas of social theory. These highlight how and why childhood encompasses specific forms of experience in different contexts but also how different childhoods can be constructed and experienced in similar contexts. There is a need for stronger theoretically grounding to our understanding of forms of experience, contexts and interactions and how they contribute to shape and are shaped by life courses.

We know that not only do social configurations constrain and enable specific trajectories, they also induce major changes in the overall environment. Climate change (becoming a climate emergency) is a visible and sensitive outcome of human institutions including their social constructions of childhood. The climate crisis also puts forward new forms of relation between human/non-human animal, materials and emotions. Children are co-constructors of these interactions, which can challenge established categories (adults/children, nature/culture) and also frontiers between them". How children make sense of the challenges of global warming, how they react to this worldwide threat or how their everyday life is affected by it, is of course also enabled and constrained by the structures of power in human institutions. But climates are not only meteorological, the word climate can also refer to the prevailing trends of public opinion or economic (in)equalities, and any another ongoing aspect of social life.

With the aim of not only understanding but also transforming prevailing trends, the topic Childhood in (Climate) Change is of pressing current relevance. We anticipate that it may enable contributors and participants to identify and understand how theoretical accounts of continuity and change in childhood might be communicated to and by our academic peers and the children we work with and for. The potential political impact of such an integration is a crucial question in the face of the many casualties of social, cultural, economic and environmental inequalities.

The 5th Mid-Term Symposium of Research Network 04 (Sociology of Children and Childhood) of the European Sociological Association, will be organised in September 9-11th 2020 at the Centre for Children’s Rights Studies of the University of Geneva, located in Sion (Switzerland), at 2-hours train distance from Geneva airport. It will address the issue of Childhood in (Climate) Change by inviting scholars to submit theoretically and empirically informed papers on the following sub-topics (the same topic from different angles) :

Children and…

Changing climates
Changing childhoods
Changing identities
Changing societies
Changing economies

You may consider adding the topic of the Coronacrisis and its impact in terms of social change. The exploratory nature of the papers that would be dedicated to this topic will be taken into consideration.

The number of delegates will be restricted to 30 to enable discussion. The mid-term symposium will be organised around short papers or provocations, with extensive space for open discussion.

ESA Conference 2019 in Manchester / UK

We invite papers from diverse countries and contexts, building on our network’s core interests and the conference themes: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging. Papers may address children’s experiences, the structuring, construction or transformation of boundaries between adults and children, between adulthoods and childhoods, and between children and social and political spaces. This may include, for example, exploration of refugee experiences, migration policy or borders related to nation, age and other statuses.

Papers may reflect on barriers. How do children (and adults) experience the notion of barriers? What is a barrier? What are children barred from? Can barriers be enabling? What barriers should be removed? This may include explorations of the absence or presence of barriers for children in a symbolic and/or material sense. Papers may engage with children’s experience of and aspirations for belonging. What sense of affiliation, disaffiliation and recognition do children experience in what circumstances? How do symbolic/material worlds, similarities and differentiations, conflicts, boundaries and barriers act upon children? How do children interact with or create these?

Papers may also develop topics previously addressed within our network: Theorising childhood; methodologies; childhood and gender, sexuality, disability, race, ethnicity or religion; children’s rights, citizenship and participation; intergenerational and peer relations in children’s everyday lives; discourses and social constructions of children and childhood; children and migration; children and violence, poverty or (in)justice; children’s work.

We also invite reflection on Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging within our own discipline, in connection to other aspects of sociology and theoretical and empirical engagement with other disciplines.

Joint Session JS_RN04_RN13: “‘In the child’s best interests?’: Global perspectives on parenting culture, family policy and child well-being” (Joint session with RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives)

More information: https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2019

Mid Term Symposium 2019 Sociology of Childhood: Theorising Childhood Engaging with Citizenship, Culture and Context

24-25 May 2018

Instituto de Ciências Sociais - Universidade de Lisboa / University of Lisboa, Portugal

Information: : https://esachildren2018.wordpress.com/

The ESA Research Network RN04, Sociology of Children and Childhood hereby announces a mid-term symposium which will take place in Lisbon (Portugal) from 23rd to 25th May, 2018. This symposium is organized in conjunction with the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa and the Institute of Education of University of Minho. The symposium continues and articulates the ideas developed during the symposia in Jyväskylä (2012), Modena (2014) and Ghent (2016).

The objective of this symposium is to enhance theoretical understanding of childhood drawing on classical and new directions in sociological theory.

Contributions are invited that take forward the themes of previous symposia: citizenship, rights, responsibilities, participation, status, membership, identity and vulnerability. Contributions are also sought that provide theoretical approaches to understanding children’s engagement with and through cultural processes and cultural products in different contexts (e.g. social, economic, political, organizational, interpersonal, and educational). This includes, for example, theoretical understandings of the economic and cultural mechanisms through which children access or are excluded from, the arts, sports, sciences, education or other aspects of daily life in the current economic and political contexts. It also includes theoretical exploration of how children’s self-expression through, for example, the arts or technology, may enable their participation in public and political life; and, how children’s engagement with cultural products and processes may enable them to transgress the borders of generation, class, gender, ethnicity, age and other axes of inequality.

To strengthen our capacity to theorise within childhood studies the symposium will explore the tensions and synergies between childhood sociology and other theoretical traditions presented, related to, for example, culture and arts, politics and economics, science and sport, architecture and urbanism. We will consider how interdisciplinary connections within sociology and with sociological, cultural, political and economic theory can facilitate a broader sociological understanding of children, childhoods and how childhood studies can contribute a broader understanding of sociology and our social worlds.

Prior to the RN04 symposium a public event will be held to showcase the findings of international research (CUIDAR) that has worked with children to develop a child-centred disaster management framework for Europe and sociological theoretical developments in understanding of cultures of resilience http://cuidarfinale.ics.ulisboa.pt. Participants in the RN04 symposium are welcome to join this event at any time and are encouraged to attend on the evening of May 22nd, when the keynote will be given by Professor Lori Peek of the University of Colorado www.colorado.edu/sociology/lori-peek - details of this event will follow in the New Year.

The two day symposium itself (24-25 May) will be dedicated to paper sessions.

There will be no conference fee for either event.

We therefore invite abstracts from experienced as well as young and precariously employed researchers concerned with the sociology of children and childhood and those from disciplines sensitive to the sociology of childhood. Although presentations and discussions will mainly revolve around theorizing childhood, participants are welcome to discuss theoretical implications of work on childhood for theorizing other streams of sociology.

Presentations can be related to the following areas:

1. Classical sociological theories and new directions in sociological theories of childhood
2. Theoretical concepts of temporality and spatiality in theorising the socio-economic and political contexts childhood
3. Theorisations of cultural processes and citizenship practices (concerned with, for example the arts, sports, sciences, education, food or other aspects of daily life) in current economic and political contexts

4. Theories of rights, inequalities and injustices in childhood
5. Theories of children’s participation in institutional and informal contexts and the role of cultural products and processes.
6. Theorisations around intersections of gender, ethnicity, disability, class, nationality and age applied to children
7. The role of theory in interdisciplinary work on childhood

The number of delegates will be restricted to 30 to enable discussion. The papers will be selected according to relevance to the areas of the symposium.

The symposium will be organised around short papers or provocations, with extensive space for open discussion, focused on different aspects of the relationship between

The venue is ICS-ULisboa (www.ics.ul), one of the Portugal’s leading Social Sciences research units. Located in the ULisboa Campus, ICS has108 qualified researchers, allocated to 7 Research Groups and hosts 9 PhD Programmes (most of them in consortia). ICS cutting-edge methodological approaches bridge a wide range of qualitative and quantitative social sciences methods and promote interdisciplinary cross-fertilization through innovative research design. With the support of this broad community of researchers, this research philosophy informs postgraduate teaching, advanced studies courses, young researchers training and outreach activities.

RN04 Biennial Report for 2 020-2021
RN04 Biennial Report for 2019-2021
RN04 Biennial Report for 2017-2019
RN04 Biennial Report for 2015-2017